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.
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. Parents of teens, there are a few alarming Internet trends to watch out for: