Over the years, we’ve seen a lot of dumb and dangerous TikTok challenges, like eating tide pods or staying overnight in restricted places. All of these challenges are just a way for young teens to get attention from their friends.
However, these teens don’t realize that they can ruin their health by blindly following these challenges. There have been many cases where kids almost got killed or hospitalized just to get some likes and followers on TikTok. So, you’ll need to be pretty cautious about what kind of content your child consumes on such applications.
What’s a dangerous TikTok challenge?
Even though the concept of the “dangerous TikTok challenge” is quite self-explanatory, parents still can’t understand why their child might do something so idiotic. Anyhow, if you’re still unsure about this concept, it is just a challenge where kids will do dumb things that can harm their health.
Now you might ask, WHY? Well, the only reason is to get attention from other kids. Sadly, teenagers feed off of the attention they get from others and always want to seem daring and brave. However, this attention comes at the cost of mental and physical health in most cases.
The worst part about dangerous TikTok challenges is that no one can regulate or stop them. Whenever teenagers band together on social media, they’ll keep fueling their dumb ideas. So, until the hype around such ideas dies out naturally, there is no way any authoritative party can intervene.
The only thing you can do as a parent is take responsibility for your child and protect them from such challenges. Otherwise, your child is bound to become a victim of such dumb challenges and idiotic ideas.
Controversy over the TikTok challenges
There isn’t any deficiency of cases where young teens died while attempting challenges like “chroming” in late 2023. This trend gained over half a billion views on TikTok, where participants would have to inhale toxic fumes from deodorant.
These fumes often lead to seizures and permanent organ damage in some people. Moreover, a 13-year-old girl from Australia lost her life while participating in the chroming challenge. This tragic news did raise some awareness among parents about dangerous TikTok challenges.
However, there are still a lot of parents who ignore such news and believe that their children won’t be influenced by social media.
If you’re of a similar mind, take some time to browse through all the cases where young teens lost their lives attempting dumb TikTok challenges. You’ll surely consider taking your kid’s phone away from him or blocking all their apps to keep them safe.
Dangerous TikTok challenges should be banned in schools
Dangerous TikTok challenges can have a permanent impact on your kid’s physical health. Sadly, kids are bound to take more risks and pursue idiotic TikTok challenges when they are hyped up by their school buddies. So, it is only natural that such challenges should be banned in schools.
One issue here, however, is that the deen and teachers aren’t aware of what in-trend challenge they need to ban. Until and unless a severe case presents itself within the school premises, most institutions won’t take the steps necessary to ban such activities.
For this reason, you’ll need to be a more proactive parent and communicate your concerns with the school administration. That way, they’ll be able to implement restrictions accordingly to avoid any unnecessary accidents.
Popular TikTok challenges in school
There have been countless challenges within TikTok around destroying school property or ingesting horrendous food items on school grounds. While the majority of these seemed quirky at first, it didn’t take long for students to take things to new extremes. Here are some details on what type of challenges kids have attempted so far in schools.
- Stealing challenges: These challenges include stealing stuff like fire extinguishers, soap dispensers, and other stationaries from the school. For the most part, stealing soap dispensers doesn’t seem like such a big issue. However, things really took a turn for the worse when students started stealing safety equipment from the school.
- Violence challenges: These challenges involved slapping a teacher or a peer within the school grounds. While most students avoided participation in this challenge out of fear, there were still a lot of violent outbursts. Moreover, a lot of students got suspended after showing such disrespectful behavior towards their teachers.
- Vandalism challenges: These challenges involved destroying school property, such as desks and chairs, along with study equipment. Teachers were unable to use projectors or showcase any study material because of such idiotic TikTok challenges.
- Ingestion challenges: These challenges involved the ingestion of extremely spicy chips and other disgusting substances just to stand out. Sadly, many cases were reported where students had to deal with vomiting and horrible stomachaches.
- False report challenges: These challenges involved calling the police from the school grounds and reporting false school shootings. This challenge was extremely dangerous as the authorities had to take more time to verify such calls. So, in the case of a real school shooting, it would take longer for the police to show up just because of these false reports.
The science behind risky behavior
Kids are always curious about trying out new things. Most of the time, risky behavior results in excessive dopamine release to bring attention to the unexpected outcomes at hand. Kids can get addicted to the adrenaline they get from putting themselves in danger.
Moreover, the prestige and the hype their peers offer further fuel a child’s intention to pursue risky tasks. So, it is a blend of attention gained from others with excessive dopamine and adrenaline release in the brain that causes people to pursue such idiotic challenges.
There are a lot of cases where parents had to take their children to the ER just because they were following a TikTok trend.
Moreover, several teenagers ended up dead after following challenges like chroming or the coronavirus challenge. If only these children could comprehend that they are putting their lives on the line just to get some likes and views.
Measures TikTok takes to keep kids safe
The only thing that TikTok has done so far is offer Family Pairing Mode. This mode allows parents to link to their kids’ TikTok accounts and control what kind of content they can watch.
Moreover, it allows parents to control the screen time limit and access direct messages. Still, this mode relies pretty heavily on the intervention from parents. So, you’ll have to take some time to set up these parental controls within TikTok.
The sad part? Even after you set up everything within TikTok, there is no guarantee that your child will remain protected from dangerous challenges. TikTok only allows parents to block off mature content, and it sometimes doesn’t consider dangerous challenges to be mature content.
So, your child can very well be exposed to idiotic behavior from other children. Sadly, there is no feature within TikTok that will allow you to see what your kid consumes all day. For this reason, it is best to explore other parental control tools to keep your child safe.
Tips for parents to protect their kids from dangerous TikTok challenges
It will take a lot more than the dedicated parental control options within TikTok to keep your child safe. You’ll have to actively participate in their lives and help them realize the difference between appropriate and inappropriate behavior. Here are some tips that have helped parents get their kids on track.
- Open communication: You need to talk daily with your child about their online activities and help them realize that the internet is filled with dumb people. You need to train your child that they should always put their common sense first and avoid blindly following trends.
- Outdoor events: The more your kids are interested in sports and outdoor events, the less they are interested in the digital world. You need to arrange more and more plans every weekend and make your kids comfortable with their real-life friends.
- Third-party parental control tools: A good way to completely restrict and monitor your child’s behavior on their phone is through a good parental control application. Sadly, the native parental controls within TikTok aren’t good enough. So, you can rely on apps like FamiSafe and FlashGet Kids to monitor your child. These apps have all the restrictive and monitoring features you might need to safeguard your kid.
How do parental control apps work for your child’s safety on TikTok?
When you integrate an app like FlashGet Kids into your family, you can use features like usage limits and screen mirroring to protect your child.
These live monitoring features are more than enough to monitor whatever your child does on their device. Here is how you can set up FlashGet Kids for your child’s safety on TikTok.
- Download and install FlashGet Kids on your own phone.
- Create your parent account after launching this app.
- Get your kids’ phone and install FlashGet Kids (kids version) through the web browser.
- Pair both apps by following the instructions within the FlashGet Kids app.
- Open this app on your phone and go to usage limits.
- Set up limits for TikTok (1 or 2 hours).
- Use the screen mirroring feature.
You can set up a complete weekly schedule for TikTok usage through the FlashGet Kids app. I’d recommend that you don’t allow your kid to spend more than one hour on this app. Moreover, you should consider using the screen mirroring feature within FlashGet Kids to see what your child does on their phone.
FAQs
What are the dangerous TikTok trends in 2024?
So far, the outlet challenge and Benadryl challenges have been the most dangerous in 2024. These challenges involve electrocuting yourself and taking large doses of allergy medicine.
What are the most popular dangerous Tiktok challenges in school?
The blackout challenge and the dragon’s breath challenges were the most dangerous in school. Students attempted to pass out by simply holding their breath in the blackout challenge. Similarly, the dragon’s breath challenge included ingesting liquid nitrogen-coated candy.
