A pretty dumb thing to do. A smart kid would have found a way to not hold the round in his hand while he torched it.
That said, kids do dumb stuff. I remember when my son was about 5 or 6. We heard him screaming and crying in the kitchen and holding his thumb and forefinger. Imprinted on each digit was the outline of the head of a bobby pin burned into the skin. He had spread the ends and poked it in a kitchen island electrical outlet that just happened to be right at his chest level. As he stood there crying I said, “I bet you won’t do that again, will you.” He stood there sobbing and shaking his head “no”.
Years later I asked him what in the heck possessed him to do that. He said he saw something in a Science Fiction movie that he wanted to recreate. It was a mad scientist’s “Jacob’s Ladder”.........well, he got what he went for, but it was just too fast for him to see it.
As long as it doesn’t kill or severely injure them experience is a great teacher.
Somehow, that combined with the following created a desire to bring them both together.
The width of my finger and chain-ring nicely bridged across those two terminals.
I wore the burn marks from that immediately heated chain for a long time. You could clearly see each individual link where it was touching my skin.
Seemed a good idea at the time. I don't know why. Maybe I thought it would be Green Lantern type of ring afterwards.
Your appropriate level of sympathy for him reminds me of how I treated my older dog about seven years ago. He’d spent too much time harassing the cat and one day turned up with a 3/4” long and 1/8” deep gash in his nose. I said, “Well, Ulysses, looks like you’ve just learned your kitty manners.” He did and never bothered the cat that way again. Seems your son got the same kind of lesson. Getting burned that way and getting no sympathy, while not being punished beyond the basic nasty experience, is a great way for dogs and kids to learn about the world. That’s why there’s no way I’ll declaw a cat that’s going to be living with big dogs. It’s bad for the dogs and the cat.
My four year old daughter did that with a pair of tweezers, no burns fortunately. A year later, her older brother who certainly remembered what his sister had done and knew a good deal about electricity and its dangers, pulled a plug out of an outlet just far enough to drop a penny on its prongs. He didn’t get shocked, just saw a really cool flash as the house went dark.