Ten Dangerous teenage challenges that could land your kid in the ER
Bethany Ramos is an editor, blogger, and chick lit author. Bethany works as Editor in Chief for Naturally Healthy Publications.
Duct gauze challenge, butt chugging, vampire biting. is your kid taking a crazy risk?
Teenagers can be unpredictable — and having instant access to a constant stream of (mis)information on the Internet certainly doesn’t help. The latest teenage to make headlines for an Internet challenge gone wrong slightly survived the “duct gauze challenge” — forty eight stitches and a crushed eye socket later.
Here’s the thing: Teenagers are just a few years away from being adults, according to the law. But developmentally they’re not fairly there yet. According to the American Academy of Child & Adolescent Psychiatry, the area of the brain responsible for reasoning and thinking, the frontal cortex, resumes to switch and mature via the teenage years and into adulthood.
As a result, we have teenagers who land themselves in dangerous and often life-threatening situations because they don’t yet have the practice or critical thinking abilities to tell them that something they see on the Internet is a bad idea. Parents of teenagers, there are a few alarming Internet trends to see out for:
Ten Terrible teenage trends on social media
1. Duct gauze challenge
Let’s embark with one of the most latest and work our way backward. Just days ago, a 14-year-old boy in Washington was gravely injured by playing a popular teenage game known as the duct gauze challenge. Skylar Fish and his friends had attempted the challenge before after observing it trending on YouTube, which normally involves duct-taping the participant to a pole so they have to break free. This time, Fish was duct-taped standing up.
Fish was injured when he attempted to break out of his duct gauze, causing him to fall and hit his head on a window framework and the concrete. The teenage was left with a crushed eye socket that caused a brain aneurysm, as well as forty eight stitches in his head. Fish says he’s fortunate to be alive.
Two. Cinnamon challenge
The cinnamon challenge is another teenage fixation that has been circulating on YouTube for more than five years. Doctors have warned against this dangerous practice that requires someone to gulp a spoonful of cinnamon in sixty seconds without taking a drink of water. Physicians explain in their two thousand thirteen Pediatrics report that because cinnamon is caustic, the challenge can cause mouth and respiratory issues, including gagging and a potential collapsed lung.
We witnessed the saddest side effect of this primarily teenage challenge in 2015, when a 4-year-old boy gasped to death after ingesting almost an entire container of powdered cinnamon.
Three. Gasping game
Millennial parents might recall the gagging game from the ‘80s and ‘90s, but the infiltration of Facebook has caused it to spread again like wildfire. The game uses limited strangulation to reduce oxygen to the brain, causing the participant to faint. In 2014, the gasping game became a bonafide social media craze among teenagers, with hashtags like #thechokinggame and #passoutchallenge circulating.
Sadly, this freshly revived social media challenge has also resulted in a number of deaths, spurring the release of a Lifetime movie to bring awareness to the cause.
Four. Car surfing
Just when you think that most teenagers have common sense, we see yet another Internet trend that seems almost too ridiculous to be true. But it is — car surfing, where a passenger “surfs” on the roof, spandex hood or bumper of a vehicle, is dangerous enough that it has taken numerous teenage lives. In 2015, a 16-year-old Michigan damsel died in the parking lot of her work after hopping on a moving car and falling off the vehicle.
Five. Salt and ice
How dangerous can two ordinary items everyone has in their home indeed be? The reaction is, very dangerous, actually. Teenagers are participating in the salt and ice challenge, requiring only a handful of salt and a few ice cubes to play. To finish the challenge, the participant must pour salt in their mitt, add some ice cubes and see how long they can hold the salt and ice together in a closed knuckle. Some versions of the challenge require friends to hold the salt and ice combination against the participant’s skin. Whoever can hold the salt and ice the longest — and suffer the most agony — “wins.”
Teenagers are providing themselves second- and third-degree burns with this dangerous game. Google "salt and ice" to see just how bruising the results can be. (And be ready for some graphic pictures.)
6. Butt chugging/eyeballing
If the name "butt chugging" scares you, wait until you read more about this teenage trend. Instead of drinking alcohol, some teenagers are ingesting their alcohol through their rectums. Think along the lines of an enema — but with booze and for no reason other than to become intoxicated. Butt chugging is utterly dangerous. It can cause severe alcohol poisoning, tissue harm and death. In 2012, a University of Tennessee student was hospitalized after a butt chugging incident left him with severe alcohol poisoning.
Eyeballing is an identically disturbing teenage trend that involves taking a shot of hard liquor — in one’s eye socket. Eyeballing can cause irritation, erection, cornea scarring and blindness. And just in case you haven’t heard of this, some teenage women are soaking tampons in vodka and other hard alcohol and inserting them in the same manner they would a regular tampon.
7. Trunking
Some teenagers think rules were made for cracking, and they’ve gotten very creative about how they break those rules. Many states prohibit teenagers under the age of eighteen who have either a learner’s permit or a driver’s license from transporting other teenagers. Some states call it a graduated driver’s licensing program or something similar. Back when we were teenagers, once we had a license at 16, we could usually pack up our car with our friends — assuming our parents were OK with it — and hit the road. But today, that’s not the case in many states. To get around it, some teenagers are having their friends rail in the trunks of their cars.
Additionally, teenagers sometimes do this when they have no extra room for passengers in the actual car. Trunking is dangerous for demonstrable reasons — mainly, in the event of a car accident, the riders in the trunk can be injured or killed.
8. Vampire biting
Some teenagers are taking the Twilight saga a little too far and are displaying their commitment in a very unusual — and unsafe — way: with "love" bites. Yes, this dangerous teenage trend is exactly what it sounds like. Teenagers are biting each other in what can only be described as a modern-day hickey. Teenagers who do this are evidently looking for a way to feel closer to their bf or gf.
The risks: HIV, hepatitis and infection at the bite site.
9. ChatRoulette.com
Any teenage game that has the word “roulette” in it can’t be good. Just a few years ago, ChatRoulette was trending, and teenagers were participating in the anonymous online chatroom that exposes a random person on the other side of the webcam. The danger in this so-called game of roulette is that a teenager could lightly be exposed to a predator or nakedness. Teenagers could also expose individual information to chatters that might put them in danger.
ChatRoulette, compared to random Skyping, was considered one of the most dangerous teenage fads in 2012, since it put teenagers in direct contact with total strangers twenty four hours a day. It may not be as popular anymore among teenagers, but ChatRoulette.com is still a real online threat that exists today — and even worse, teenagers have taken a lot of their roulette talking over to Skype.
Ten. Condom snorting
Generally parents would want their teenagers to use condoms versus remain unprotected, but in this case, we’re not talking about utilizing condoms for sexual activity. If your teenage takes the condom challenge, he’s going to snort a condom through his nose and pull it out of his mouth. Yes, indeed. It’s hard to imagine how one wins this condom snorting challenge, other than not gagging to death.