Father who threw his 7-year-old off a cliff responds after backlash to his parenting

An influencer who threw his son off a cliff in a viral video has responded after he got a backlash over his parenting style.

Garrett Gee is a family travel influencer who makes up one part of The Bucket List Family, and earlier this year he landed himself in some hot water with his audience after posting a video where he threw his son, Calihan, into the water from a rocky outcropping.

In his post, he captioned it by saying, 'this is NOT parental advice', and he didn't advise people to try it, explaining that his son wanted to jump off the small cliff 'but was not feeling confident', so he threw him.

The video had the text 'most people won't love how we teach our kids how to cliff jump' over it, and it seems as though Gee had accurately guessed there'd be some displeased viewers.

While his son was unharmed, the reaction was certainly mixed.

Some people said the cliff jumping looked 'fun', and praised Garrett's parenting style, while others said he had 'irresponsible, terrible parenting' and warned that even if the father didn't mean for anything bad to happen, there was always the chance it could go wrong.

Speaking to PEOPLE after the backlash, the influencer said he would agree with the criticism if that was the only one of his videos someone had seen.

Gee said he could understand how someone who hadn't seen his family videos might think 'Oh man, this looks terrible, and this father's pushing their child too much'.

However, he pushed against the backlash and suggested that they were being made by people who weren't 'pushed by their parents' and 'stayed within their comfort zone'.

"A small part of me felt sad when I would read the comments because you could tell how many people out there didn't have the opportunity to be pushed by their parents to try new things and stayed within their comfort zone,” Gee told PEOPLE. “That's not the best way to live life."

He went on: "When people were very upset or terrified by the video, those were the people whom I thought, ‘I would love to go on an adventure with you and help you try something new.’"

He insisted that anyone who watched more of their videos would see 'how thoughtful and cautious we are as parents'.

The influencer said the criticism didn't get to him since he 'understands the nature of the internet' and there's going to be criticism.

Gee sold a mobile scanning app to Snapchat for $54 million in 2014 and decided to travel the world with his family for a few years before moving to Hawaii.