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Reply to "Listen to teens"

We could go on and on, but it's apparent that even if you could stop school shooters you'd still have more than enough to worry about.

Teenagers can be unpredictable — and having instant access to a constant stream of (mis)information on the Internet certainly doesn't help. The latest teen to make headlines for an Internet challenge gone wrong barely survived the “duct tape challenge” — 48 stitches and a crushed eye socket later. A group of teens duct tape a friend, sometimes to a pole and sometimes simply standing up with their arms incapacitated. The taped teen will then try to break free. This challenge recently caused one teen to fall and hit his head on a window frame and concrete, crushing his eye socket and leading to a brain aneurysm.

Here’s the thing: Teenagers are just a few years away from being adults, according to the law. But developmentally they’re not quite there yet. According to the American Academy of Child & Adolescent Psychiatry, the area of the brain responsible for reasoning and thinking, the frontal cortex, continues to change and mature throughout the teenage years and into adulthood. As a result, we have teens who land themselves in dangerous and often life-threatening situations because they don’t yet have the experience or critical thinking skills to tell them that something they see on the Internet is a bad idea.

The "game," which involves teens choking each other to reduce oxygen to the brain until the teen faints, has been coming around again recently. There have been enough deaths that Lifetime released a movie to bring more awareness to the dangers.

This challenge has been circulating for a few years and requires the teen to swallow a spoonful or more of cinnamon without drinking any water. The challenge can cause respiratory and throat issues or even things like a collapsed lung and choking. There have been reported deaths from this challenge.


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