This dad’s reaction to learning babies don’t have kneecaps will make you cry laughing

There are a lot of things that are pretty darn amazing about the ways that babies develop and grow, and when you learn them for the first time, they can easily blow your mind. That’s what happened to one dad who, at the ripe age of 29 years old, learned that kids don’t fully develop their kneecaps until they’re around 10 years old—in fact, they spend their first five or six years without any kneecaps at all. And thank goodness for this dad’s partner, who was present and armed with a cell phone camera to capture his hilarious reaction to learning this news.

The video, posted to TikTok, starts with dad Dylan holding up their baby and asking, “Are you sure?!”

From behind the camera, mom Shelby assures him, “I’m positive,” and then hilarious zooms in on his shocked and utterly bewildered face. Eventually, he turns back to the baby and says, “Bro, you ain’t got no kneecaps!”

The camera cuts to a few moments later, and Dylan has clearly processed this information a little bit more, as he says, in a much calmer tone, “Well I’ll be. Kids don’t have kneecaps.”

Then, from offscreen, we hear the baby cry. In true dad fashion, without missing a beat, Dylan turns and shouts in that direction, “Don’t wine just because you ain’t got no kneecaps!”

From behind the camera, Shelby hilariously protests, “That’s not why he’s whining!”

The journey of Dylan’s discovery continues, as he tells his partner, “I got something on him now,” to which she responds from behind the camera, “Don’t be making fun of that boy just because he don’t have a kneecap.” Another excellent dad joke, courtesy of Dylan: “He don’t got a kneecap to stand on.”

At one point, Dylan muses, “I’ve been trying to figure out this whole time why he walks like that.”

“Walks like what?” Shelby asks from where she’s filming.

He responds, “Like he ain’t got no kneecaps!”

Another hilarious moment comes when Dylan wonders, without a kneecap, what exactly is in its place? 

“Nothing. It’s just open,” Shelby tells him, to which he responds, “It’s uncapped?!” It’s just an open knee?!”

Do babies really not have kneecaps?

The answer is, well, they do and they don’t. While they’re not just “open” without any protection, babies’ kneecaps aren’t like adult kneecaps. Baby kneecaps are made of cartilage that eventually turns into bone between the ages of two and six. This softer structure allows for more flexibility and growth.

Fun fact: because of their cartilaginous nature, babies’ kneecaps don’t show up on X-rays, which sometimes leads to the misconception that they don’t exist at all.

At the end of the video, Dylan thinks out loud, “Whenever I coach his little league team, does that mean it’d be disrespectful if I ask the children to take a knee? If I ask them to take a knee would they be like, ‘How?! Or what knee?!'”

Clearly, this kid is going to be just fine until his knees come in.