The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Calm down about the reported condom challenge, grown-ups
Teen fads getting more attention than deserved online.
I’m not saying you shouldn’t talk to your kid about the dangers of snorting a condom up your nose and pulling it through your throat.
If your child seems particularly suggestible and tends to take advice from YouTube stars, by all means. Have that talk.
But a little perspective, please, before we commence to wringing our hands over The Latest Teen Challenge.
“Condom Challenge” spent the weekend trending on Facebook and Twitter, thanks largely to a whole bunch of reports about parents and educators fretting over the existence of some YouTube videos. The videos showing teenagers inhaling condoms through their nostrils, only to pull them out through their mouths. For likes, naturally.
This is the sort of story we love to latch on to. The reactions on social media were nothing short of gleeful.
“Forget eating Tide pods. This is the insane way teens are fighting boredom.”
“But we need to listen to them about guns?”
“Just plain stupid kids, anything for fame right.”
And, my personal favorite, “I THINK IT IS TIME WE BRING BACK SHOCK THERAPY! UP THE VOLTAGE!!!”
Never mind that not a single story I read cited a statistic about the prevalence of the trend. Nary an instance of emergency room visits or poison control queries or pediatricians
receiving frantic calls from parents whose teens have prophylactics blocking their airways.
Forbes, to underline the danger of condom ingestion, had to cite a case from a 2004 issue of the Indian Journal of Chest Diseases and Allied Sciences, in which a 27-year-old woman accidentally swallowed a condom, resulting in pneumonia and the collapse of an upper lobe of her lung.
Maybe we could wait for a wee bit more evidence that teens are actually falling for these challenges in droves before we write off the whole lot of them as brainless crackpots on an insatiable quest for online affirmation.
There’s no question we live in a culture that gives far too much power to a tiny thumbs-up icon. A person’s number of followers has become more important than a person’s number of good ideas or deeds. Clicks rule.
But let’s stop pretending this is a teenage phenomenon.
Grown-ups are equally guilty, and we don’t even have the excuse of a still-developing prefrontal cortex.
If you’re genuinely worried that a teen in your life is likely to inhale a condom, I hope you’ll sit down with him or her and talk about why that’s not wise.
If you’re grasping for evidence that teenagers today are just the worst, I hope you’ll do a gut check.
They’re marinating in all the same juices we are, surrounded by a million messages that say fame is fortune. Celebrity is king.
To pretend they buy into those messages and we don’t is disingenuous at best and intentionally manipulative at worst — particularly if you’re using that line of thinking to dismiss their activism.
Today’s condom challenge will morph into tomorrow’s equally harebrained idea. Let’s all take a deep breath before we assume teenagers are buying it hook, line and sinker.