If you thought kids eating Tide Pods meant we'd officially hit rock bottom as a species, think again. A recently resurrected social media challenge has kids snorting condoms up their noses for sh*ts and giggles (and Instagram likes), and it is just as risky and ridiculous as you're imagining it is.
The challenge involves kids inhaling unused condoms and then pulling them out of their mouths.
Yes, you read that correctly. And if your first thought was, "Wow, that sounds extraordinarily risky and unnecessary," you're right. Not only do kids risk choking on the condoms, but according to Forbes, the challenge also carries the risk of allergic reactions and infection.
Bruce Y. Lee, an associate professor at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health who wrote about the challenge for Forbes, cited two separate cases of women who accidentally ingested condoms. One suffered from pneumonia, while the other got a small piece of the condom lodged in her appendix and had to undergo surgery. This is a bad idea, kids.
The challenge has reportedly been around for a few years but recently went viral again after new videos surfaced on social media.
A quick search of "condom snorting challenge" on YouTube yields over 5,000 results dating all the way back to 2013, and the hashtag #condomchallenge on Instagram yields dozens of recent posts.
Unsurprisingly, this isn't the first kind of "condom challenge" to catch on with kids.
In 2015, kids were posting videos of themselves dropping water-filled condoms on each other's heads.
Needless to say, the grown-ups of the world are not impressed.
People were quick to point fingers at parents and talk about how humanity is doomed because kids do stupid things.
But not everyone was so certain that the condom challenge is the end of the world. Some just had a good laugh at the kids participating.
If the rebirth of the condom challenge teaches us anything, it's that there is nothing new under the sun.
Whether it's the Tide Pod challenge, the salt and ice challenge, or some other borderline insane social media "game" that has yet to be invented, tweens and teens can always be counted on to act like, well, tweens and teens. That means doing things that are stupid and, yes, even risky.
The most important thing we can do as parents is communicate with kids and keep an eye on their social media presence so we know when they're up to no good. Oh, and it never hurts to reiterate that condoms, of all things, don't belong up their noses.
