WATCH: A 2-year-old picks a lock to steal a unicorn

last updated 10 January 2015

YouTube

Parents deal with tough questions on how to raise their children just about every day. This might be a new one. "Would you rather your 2-year-old wake up in the middle of the night screaming for his sister's Pillow Pet (and water! and needing to go potty! etc.!)," asks The Huffington Post, "or would you prefer to be raising an expert lock-picker?"

Utah parents Joann and Mike Moser sort of split the difference. Their saga begins when 2-year-old son Kyle starts pilfering items from the bedroom of his 8-year-old sister, Andrea. When she complained, "I said, 'Well, lock your door. That will stop him,'" Joann Moser tells ABC News. It didn't. When Andrea told her parents that the locked door wasn't stopping Kyle's thieving ways, "we were pretty skeptical." So they set up a sting.

The video above, set to overly dramatic music ("In the Hall of Mountain King," by Edvard Grieg, if you're curious), and uploaded to YouTube, tells the rest of the story. But not the aftermath.

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After catching Kyle stealing his sister's unicorn pillow pet red-handed, Joann and Mike were more amused than angry. "We could not stop laughing afterward, and we let him sleep with the pillow pet that night," Joann tells The Huffington Post. They were even a little impressed. "Kyle has always been one to fiddle things and try to see how things works," she tells ABC News. Even Kyle's sister was cool with the heist, she adds. After giving her parents the obligatory "I told you so," Andrea "was pretty excited we had caught him in the video and she was pretty proud of her brother, actually."

But as parents, you can't exactly condone the art of breaking-and-entering. So the next morning, the Mosers sat their "bedtime bandit" down and had the talk. "He said, 'OK,' and went about his business," Joann Moser tells ABC News. "He hasn't done it since."

Peter has worked as a news and culture writer and editor at The Week since the site's launch in 2008. He covers politics, world affairs, religion and cultural currents. His journalism career began as a copy editor at a financial newswire and has included editorial positions at The New York Times Magazine, Facts on File, and Oregon State University.