A woman has shared footage of the moment she found herself locked out of the house by her 4-year-old son.
Getting locked out of the house is a painful, but all too familiar reality for millions of people. According to a locksmith industry survey from ADS Security, around 16,000 people get locked out of their cars or homes every day in the U.S.
Not many are likely to have been locked out by their toddler though, and even fewer will have managed to document the entire saga to later share on social media.
However, that’s what happened to Dayana Alva and her 4-year-old son during what had started out as an ordinary day at their Oklahoma family home.
“I was building a swing chair and decided to finish building it outside because it’s patio furniture,” Alva told Newsweek. “He was coming in and out of the house. He loves opening and closing doors so when he was playing, it wasn’t out of the norm.”
Alva can still recall watching from the front yard as he went inside, closing the door behind him, and her thinking everything was fine. But when she went to follow him in, she quickly discovered it was not.
“He had locked it and was just inside watching me,” she said. Alva tried to explain to her young son how to open the door. “He’d never locked a door before, so I didn’t want to freak him out,” she said. “I was just trying to show him how to unlock it, but he just wasn’t understanding, or so I thought.”
Around 15 minutes passed with Alva trying everything she could think to get inside. “I definitely worried,” she said. “I called my fiance at work, but couldn’t reach him. I assumed my fiance would call back and I’d have him come let me in, but he didn’t so that’s when I started to worry more.”
Alva said what made the situation “ironic” was that she has always made a point of locking all the locks “so he won’t get out of the house.” Now those same locks were preventing her getting to him.
In the video Alva later posted to TikTok under the handle dyn_alva, she can be seen frantically waving in the direction of a security camera they have outside their home, hoping that her partner will see the alerts on his phone.
Dayana Alva trying to alert her boyfriend on their security camera that she had been locked out. She tried to explain to her 4-year-old son how to open the door to no avail.
@dyn_alva
It was around this point that she started filming what was going on. “Once I noticed my son was surprisingly calm, I started recording, to show my fiance,” Alva said.
Not all of the comments that have come since have been helpful.
“People in the comments said I could’ve climbed through a window, but everything was locked,” Alva said. “And although we have a pin pad at our front door, I normally lock it all so the pin pad wouldn’t have been any help.”
In the end, with a little awkward maneuvering, Alva was able to get into the backyard of the house and get the back door open.
That was when she discovered, to her understandable frustration that her son had, in fact, known how to unlock the door and had done so while she was contorting herself to get around to the back of the property.
As Alva put it in the caption accompanying the video, this discovery made her “want to scream.” She has taken some solace from the response online though.
“I was a little nervous to share the experience on this platform because you’re not always met with kindness, but the mom community was so nice and started sharing their experiences to show me I was not alone,” she said.
“I was actually shocked, I didn’t think so many people were going to comment saying the same thing happened to them.”
Alva has confirmed steps have been taken since then to ensure they avoid a repeat. “I’m just glad it was nothing serious and we could laugh about it,” she said. “We have keys available at all times now.”
