OT: Stupidity of kids and social media

[AngryScientist]

ugh. my son is in gradeschool now and his school just sent out some blast emails warning parents to watch out for some recent trends:

-the "forearm challenge" - this is one where a youngster puts his/her forearm on an electric stove cooktop and turns said stove on and sees how many seconds they can leave the arm there before pulling away

-the "tide pod challenge" - this one is where kids put tide laundry detergent pods in their mouth and see who can go the longest without puking.

several kids hospitalized recently due to these two...


i mean - i'm not claiming i was a rocket scientist in grade school/high school - but what the hell is wrong with these kids?

giving everyone/anyone an audience can be a dangerous thing.

[eBAUMANN]

darwin at work!
as always, all you can really do as a parent is make sure YOUR kids are smart enough to not get sucked into the stupidity around them.
that used to be a simple matter of "drugs R bad" and "dont drink and drive" but that sphere has seemingly grown far larger thanks to social media.

seems like a big part of it is boredom with a lack of REAL WORLD activity/interaction.
i feel like all the fun stuff we used to do as kids (and im only 31) doesnt really exist anymore, mostly due to the rise of the internet.

ive never been happier to be part of my generation (one that can remember life before the internet) - i cant even imagine what high school social dynamics must be like these days...

[MattTuck]

Another generation of Darwin award competitors.... :)

I say that in jest, of course, as these pressures can cause behaviors that have real long term harm. I would have serious reservations about letting my children use social media before they were in high school, and even then... I'm not sure it is a good idea.

[eBAUMANN]

Another generation of Darwin award competitors.... :)

I say that in jest, of course, as these pressures can cause behaviors that have real long term harm. I would have serious reservations about letting my children use social media before they were in high school, and even then... I'm not sure it is a good idea.

growing up, my mom didnt allow cable TV, video games or any gun-shaped objects in the house.
in high school, the internet was available until 8pm.
i "hated" her for this at the time, but looking back, i am so grateful she drew those lines.

if i ever have kids, i will probably home school them until 6th grade.
they will have a dumb phone for communication and a smart phone when they can afford to pay for it themselves.

this is actually a great illustration of my single biggest reservation about having kids...the world i would be bringing them into.

[chiasticon]

stupid food challenges are nothing new (https://www.buzzfeed.com/rachelysanders/insane-food-challenges?utm_term=.adajYYmjw#.fsPZ66LZJ). eating a chemical which you obviously shouldn't ingest isn't the smartest twist on it though. but... "kids these days" seem to want to take fun/mostly harmless things and just go "how can we make this absolutely idiotic and dangerous...?"

I think I've tried the saltine one before. and been there when a friend tried the flour one. also once witnessed someone trying to eat a huge spoonful of chinese hot pepper oil (not as gnarly as the ghost pepper challenge, but still not fun). these were dumb, mostly harmless, fun. mostly resulting in people drinking lots of water after. and at least they were done in the company of friends sharing time together; IRL, as the kids say... not alone with a phone, trying to impress "friends" on social media you may or may not ever meet, risking your life in the process.

[FlashUNC]

ugh. my son is in gradeschool now and his school just sent out some blast emails warning parents to watch out for some recent trends:

-the "forearm challenge" - this is one where a youngster puts his/her forearm on an electric stove cooktop and turns said stove on and sees how many seconds they can leave the arm there before pulling away

-the "tide pod challenge" - this one is where kids put tide laundry detergent pods in their mouth and see who can go the longest without puking.

several kids hospitalized recently due to these two...


i mean - i'm not claiming i was a rocket scientist in grade school/high school - but what the hell is wrong with these kids?

giving everyone/anyone an audience can be a dangerous thing.

Growing up in the rural South, my buddies and I did way, way dumber stuff. It ain't a "kids these days" thing. Its a "kids finally have something to show the world all the dumb stuff they've always been doing" thing.

[chiasticon]

this is actually a great illustration of my single biggest reservation about having kids...the world i would be bringing them into.amen to that.

[tuxbailey]

And I thought the Tide Pod challenging was just internet trolling/prank.

[chiasticon]

Growing up in the rural South, my buddies and I did way, way dumber stuff. It ain't a "kids these days" thing. Its a "kids finally have something to show the world all the dumb stuff they've always been doing" thing.this is also true. I once witnessed two dudes face off against one another, take ten paces, then repeatedly fire roman candles at one another. and this was when they were both eighteen, at one of their high school graduation parties.

[rst72]

i am more annoyed by adults on social media.

[eBAUMANN]

this is also true. I once witnessed two dudes face off against one another, take ten paces, then repeatedly fire roman candles at one another. and this was when they were both eighteen, at one of their high school graduation parties.

ha, i would totally do that, roman candles are harmless. just wear some glasses ;)

as teenagers we were all about fireworks and explosives...summers on an island in maine will do that to ya...paintball guns, bows/arrows, we even had a little black powder cannon that we sand cast lead cannon balls to shoot stuff with. it was great! ha

yea yea, all potentially dangerous stuff, but if you are educated with adult supervision, you can also learn a lot.

i am more annoyed by adults on social media.
agreed. the day twitter dies will become an annual holiday for me.

[saab2000]

i am more annoyed by adults on social media.

100% correct.

[d_douglas]

Legitimate query: is the Paceline considered social media?

[AngryScientist]

Growing up in the rural South, my buddies and I did way, way dumber stuff. It ain't a "kids these days" thing.

of course, but whenever my buddies and i were doing something really stupid - the impulse was to make sure we didnt get caught.

the "kids these days" comment is just as much about publishing evidence of the stupidity as anything else.

of course the pod challenge, etc is reasonably harmless compared to some of the stuff that has surfaced on social media, bullying, theft, vandalism, rape, etc - that these kids are dopey enough to put on their instagram feed.

[MattTuck]

growing up, my mom didnt allow cable TV, video games or any gun-shaped objects in the house.
in high school, the internet was available until 8pm.
i "hated" her for this at the time, but looking back, i am so grateful she drew those lines.

if i ever have kids, i will probably home school them until 6th grade.
they will have a dumb phone for communication and a smart phone when they can afford to pay for it themselves.

this is actually a great illustration of my single biggest reservation about having kids...the world i would be bringing them into.

Discussing hypothetical parenting styles.... I am not sure what the best approach is. I feel like part of parenting is providing children with the tools to navigate the world around them. Simply insulating them from various aspects of the world may help, but does it deprive them of the chance to develop the skill sets and coping mechanisms that would help them when they inevitably are exposed.

No easy answers.

[FlashUNC]

of course, but whenever my buddies and i were doing something really stupid - the impulse was to make sure we didnt get caught.

the "kids these days" comment is just as much about publishing evidence of the stupidity as anything else.

of course the pod challenge, etc is reasonably harmless compared to some of the stuff that has surfaced on social media, bullying, theft, vandalism, rape, etc - that these kids are dopey enough to put on their instagram feed.

Yeah, but you wanted all your friends to know about that cool thing, even if you didn't want everyone's parents to know. Social expedites that. I do agree I wouldn't want to be a kid these days. The social media responsibilities for those group dynamics just make everything way, way more complicated.

There was an NPR story recently where they interviewed a couple teenage girls from a high school about how they see/use Instagram, and its less a photo sharing platform than it is a real-time monitor of the power structures within various social cliques. Its unreal.

[ftf]

"The children now love luxury; they have bad manners, contempt for authority; they show disrespect for elders and love chatter in place of exercise. Children are now tyrants, not the servants of their households. They no longer rise when elders enter the room. They contradict their parents, chatter before company, gobble up dainties at the table, cross their legs, and tyrannize their teachers" - The Republic


Also they were reading BOOKS! The horror!

[Jaybee]

Discussing hypothetical parenting styles.... I am not sure what the best approach is. I feel like part of parenting is providing children with the tools to navigate the world around them. Simply insulating them from various aspects of the world may help, but does it deprive them of the chance to develop the skill sets and coping mechanisms that would help them when they inevitably are exposed.

No easy answers.


I've always felt that my first obligation to my children is to develop them into competent adults. That involves equal parts preventing them from serious harm and encouraging them to explore the world around them, including responding to negative and positive stresses and developing problem-solving skills.

Of course, paradigms have shifted. There are things I did as a kid (even as as simple as going to the park unsupervised) that are really uncommon now, if not flatly considered "bad parenting".

[azrider]

I always love hearing anecdotes from adults who have no kids of their own. I too was guilty of the "I'd never do this/that with MY kids".....once you have one you realize the difficulty in sticking to your loftiest of ideals....once you have two all that sh*t goes out the window and most days/nights you find yourself in battle mode.

YMMV :hello::p

[Luwabra]

when I was a kid we had to eat powdered tide out of a box.


saw this on IG this am can't take credit for it. but I laughed. mostly at how gd stupid it is that this stuff is even a thing. Man i hope I do right by my kids and steer them to see through this stupidity.

[GregL]

I can only speak to the mindset of teenage boys, but sometimes I am amazed I survived to adulthood. At 17, you think you're immortal. For example, you know that you can die in a car crash, but think that you are so skilled, it will never happen to you. I can remember playing "Dukes of Hazzard" with my buddies, racing our cars on the dirt roads in the hills surrounding my hometown. Only luck kept us on the road and let us avoid head-on collisions on blind corners. Over the course of the next few years, a few close calls and an accident woke me up to the risks. Marriage and subsequent fatherhood further dampened risk taking. My point? No matter how much you try to teach young people, they have to learn some lessons the hard way. Hopefully it's only hard enough to scare them and not have lifetime costs. You do your best as a parent and take the rest on faith.

Greg

[OtayBW]

Geez - why can't kids these days just stick to something more responsible like doing drugs and self-medicating like we did when I was coming up? ;)

[Mzilliox]

We can make fun of this but I think its exactly what is wrong with the world. People have stopped going outside and understanding their role in nature. It gets worse and more confusing every generation as we get outside less and less and stare at media more and more. Its got adults too, dont think this is a kid thing remember the ice bucket challenge?

Society is doing things all wrong and people are lashing out. We are hurting and this is a cry for help, but nobody will listen because Money, DOW, Racism, Guns, LBGT, blah blah blah blah. Catch phrase after catch phrase designed to numb us from anything real and meaningful. But thats just the take of one pessimistic philosopher.

[ptourkin]

Growing up in the rural South, my buddies and I did way, way dumber stuff. It ain't a "kids these days" thing. Its a "kids finally have something to show the world all the dumb stuff they've always been doing" thing.

This. The playing with fire and explosives that we got away with unscarred is definitely just as dumb. We just didn't have a way to document it and our elders never found out.

[jumphigher]

I agree with a lot of what has been posted here. IMO the big change social media and net in general have brought about is instant access to just about everything, good, bad, and in between. Maybe having instant access to everything isnt that great an idea, but it's here to stay now.

My wife and I dont have kids but I can sympathize with people that do. How can you raise kids to your own values, when they're constantly - and I do mean constantly - bombarded with opposing views? Constantly influenced by other kids & adults?

I remember what I was like as a teen (54 now), and if I'd had access to the net I would probably have gotten into some serious sh*t. And not the good kind, lol.

At the same time I think the social media has some very positive attributes, so it's a two way street. It's easy to see though how things can go terribly wrong on it as well.

[fiamme red]

This. The playing with fire and explosives that we got away with unscarred is definitely just as dumb. We just didn't have a way to document it and our elders never found out.At least playing with fire and explosives can be fun. What's the fun in ingesting poison?

[Kontact]

There is something to the idea that the ability to document and share your thoughts and actions to a wider audience makes poor behavior more attractive.

Whatever dumb stuff I did as a kid could only be 'admired' by the two other idiots that were aware of it.

[makoti]

Legitimate query: is the Paceline considered social media?

I would not group it in with what I think of as SM - FB, Snapchat, instagram, and the like

[pinkshogun]

i worked in the food service area of a juvenile prison a few years back when the cinnamon challenge was all the rage

[sg8357]

By all accounts kids have been going to hell in a hand basket since 1840.
That is the date of the first book about how education system is
failing our kids. Back then there were 11 local partisan newspapers savaging
the other party, now we have the internet. The improvement is now
stupidity is nationally disseminated, in the good old days you had localized
stupidity.

[Hakkalugi]

Some of us geezers had to learn how to be stupid from print because we only had 3 tv networks and Mad Magazine to teach us about the world. That being said, we managed to avoid eating detergent (although I got someone to eat a deer turd when I told him it was a peanut M&M).

With my own kid, I limit his screen time and we also discuss what he sees and interacts with. My hope is that he learns to think critically about what he sees and hears, so far it’s working fairly well. The challenge is what he learns on the school yard, but that issue goes back a few millennia.

[likebikes]

it all started with that darned rock and or roll music, that led to the world we're in today.

ban rock and roll and it would have all been fine. now that the cat's out of the bag...

ban books too while you're at it, more youth have been corrupted by the dangerous ideas in those things than by rock and roll, instagram, facebook, video games and cable tv combined!

[oliver1850]

this is also true. I once witnessed two dudes face off against one another, take ten paces, then repeatedly fire roman candles at one another. and this was when they were both eighteen, at one of their high school graduation parties.


My grandfather was born in 1906, and his brother in 1903 or 1904. They used to start at long range shooting each other in the back with 12 gauge shotguns. After each round, they would close the distance by a step or two and fire again until one of them gave up.

[oliver1850]

This. The playing with fire and explosives that we got away with unscarred is definitely just as dumb. We just didn't have a way to document it and our elders never found out.

One of my grade school buddies got a Ruger Blackhawk cap and ball revolver for Christmas or birthday, so had access to black powder. It didn't take long before we were making weapons out of water pipe, filling them full of nails to fire at trees in the timber.

[oliver1850]

Some of us geezers had to learn how to be stupid from print because we only had 3 tv networks and Mad Magazine to teach us about the world. That being said, we managed to avoid eating detergent (although I got someone to eat a deer turd when I told him it was a peanut M&M).



My brother once brought a baby pig into the house for some reason, and had it on my parents' bed. After he took it back to its mom, dad found what he mistook for a peanut laying on the bed. Uh, not a peanut dad.

[acorn_user]

"The children now love luxury; they have bad manners, contempt for authority; they show disrespect for elders and love chatter in place of exercise. Children are now tyrants, not the servants of their households. They no longer rise when elders enter the room. They contradict their parents, chatter before company, gobble up dainties at the table, cross their legs, and tyrannize their teachers" - The Republic


Also they were reading BOOKS! The horror!

I was wondering when someone was going to quote this :)

[peanutgallery]

This

I always love hearing anecdotes from adults who have no kids of their own. I too was guilty of the "I'd never do this/that with MY kids".....once you have one you realize the difficulty in sticking to your loftiest of ideals....once you have two all that sh*t goes out the window and most days/nights you find yourself in battle mode.

YMMV :hello::p

[jumphigher]

There is something to the idea that the ability to document and share your thoughts and actions to a wider audience makes poor behavior more attractive.

Whatever dumb stuff I did as a kid could only be 'admired' by the two other idiots that were aware of it.

I agree, that wider audience is what has changed things drastically.

[ripvanrando]

My grandfather was born in 1906, and his brother in 1903 or 1904. They used to start at long range shooting each other in the back with 12 gauge shotguns. After each round, they would close the distance by a step or two and fire again until one of them gave up.

Hurts a lot less than hail at 30 mph on a bike. I got sprayed pheasant hunting at the WMA and was surprised how "little" it hurt. Beyond 100 yards, birdshot is just falling out of the sky.

A buddy had lost a bet to his brother and the price was shooting him in the foot with a BB gun. The friend became an Ortho surgeon who operated on his brother's hand. Doc got even in adulthood. Cut the anaesthesia a bit short. At least that is the story both tell. Imagine an 8mm clip and modern HD of that on youtube.

[dogrange]

Kids and adults need challenges in life and some might say that the hygienic style of modern culture insulates kids too much from any element of danger or challenge to meet this need, hence random challenges arise that seem “stupid” but are actually aimed at satisfying a deep need.


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

[Mzilliox]

Kids and adults need challenges in life and some might say that the hygienic style of modern culture insulates kids too much from any element of danger or challenge to meet this need, hence random challenges arise that seem “stupid” but are actually aimed at satisfying a deep need.


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

this makes a lot of sense to me. Excuse my generalization for a moment, but Parents these days seem less engaged in active parenting, yet somehow more worried about nonsensical villains, including dirt, danger, and being alone.

In contrast to my parents who were quite engaging, and encouraged me to get lost on occasion. I think that was probably a healthy thing for them as well.:rolleyes:

[sparky33]

like most parents, I have no idea what I’m doing and more or less make it up as we go along. Even with what I hope is balanced child rearing, they still do impossibly dumb things sometimes. I am resigned to this reality because they are humans...maybe.

The kids + social media thing is disturbing, but there is no hiding from it.

[marciero]

Geez - why can't kids these days just stick to something more responsible like doing drugs and self-medicating like we did when I was coming up? ;)

They're doing that too, with the help of big pharma, and dying in much greater numbers than we did.

[Idris Icabod]

.

[oldpotatoe]

this makes a lot of sense to me. Excuse my generalization for a moment, but Parents these days seem less engaged in active parenting, yet somehow more worried about nonsensical villains, including dirt, danger, and being alone.

In contrast to my parents who were quite engaging, and encouraged me to get lost on occasion. I think that was probably a healthy thing for them as well.:rolleyes:

AS parents and now grand parents who nanny 3 days a week for a 6 and 4 year old...dirt is fine, but like it or don't, danger does exist, evil does exist and I will be a 'helicopter' grandparent in some ways..as in- no, the 6 year old doesn't walk to school by herself..strange times, these.....

[tedbarbeau]

Hearing about what kids are up to these days always terrifies me. I now have a 5-month old at home and I'm really worried about what social media is doing to developing brains. My goal is to get him out on his bike and into the woods as much as possible.

[bikinchris]

"The children now love luxury; they have bad manners, contempt for authority; they show disrespect for elders and love chatter in place of exercise. Children are now tyrants, not the servants of their households. They no longer rise when elders enter the room. They contradict their parents, chatter before company, gobble up dainties at the table, cross their legs, and tyrannize their teachers" - The Republic


Also they were reading BOOKS! The horror!
Often when I hear people complain about kids these days, I remind them that has been repeated since written history.

[GOTHBROOKS]

adults on social media are worse than most children who are the intended demographic.