Keeping Teens Safe From Trendy Social Media Challenges

The headline in my inbox this week was: “FDA warns that social media trend is dangerous.” It was an emergency alert right beside information about COVID and antibiotic resistance.

Apparently, the latest social media video challenge encourages people to cook chicken in NyQuil, presumably to get high using the over-the-counter cold medicine. It comes on the heels of a TikTok challenge about using Benadryl and other allergy medications to evoke hallucinations.

It’s no secret to whom these social media challenges appeal: The brains of teenagers are primed toward risk-taking. This is because the brain develops unevenly, with the reward-seeking, risk-taking parts fully developed by the teenage years, but the more complex, highly evolved bits of the brain that allow us to think through consequences not fully functioning until the mid-20s. It’s a recipe for much of the behavior that elicits the classic parental response, “What were you thinking?!” It turns out that they are thinking; their brains just aren’t yet working the way adult brains do.

Adolescence is also a phase of life where kids push away from their parents and turn toward peers, who increasingly influence their decisions. Both things are developmentally normal and were evolutionarily advantageous since adolescents historically needed to leave home to create their own lives and families. That required one to disengage from parents and embark on a potentially risky, new adventure into the unknown—hence the evolutionary drive toward risk-taking brains in adolescents. In current times, we are stuck with the evolutionary artifacts of that process, where parents have the joy of experiencing first-hand what neuroscientists call “asynchronous brain development” (meaning reward-driven behavior comes before decision-making skills), which manifests in the form of things like eating Tide pods.

Of course, there is a lot of variability between kids in this behavior. Risk-taking is also genetically influenced, meaning some adolescents are more naturally disposed toward impulsivity than others. Differences in risk-taking show up early, with some toddlers gleefully dangling from the top of the swing set and others quietly playing in the sandbox. The swing set danglers are the kids who are also more likely to be cooking chicken in NyQuil.

So what’s a parent to do?

It turns out that there’s a shockingly simple and effective preventative measure that parents can take, but many never do: Talk with your child.

I know, I know, I’m the parent of a teenage boy. They aren’t always particularly fun to engage with, considering their eye-rolling and sighing. They often seem generally annoyed by your presence, even more so by your conversation. But here’s the thing: Research consistently shows that talking to kids makes a difference, even when they seem to be ignoring you. Letting your kids know about household expectations surrounding behavior is associated with reduced risk-taking in kids.

The key is to talk with them, not at them. The most effective way to do this is to ask questions:

“Have you heard of the new social media challenge where people are cooking chicken in NyQuil?”

“What do you think about that?”

You can slip in some key tidbits about your concerns: “The thing that’s worrisome is that when you boil drugs, it can get into your lungs and be harmful.”

Contrast that to telling your child what to do:

“There’s a stupid viral video about cooking chicken in NyQuil. Don’t do it.”

That may seem like a reasonable thing to say, but the teenage brain, primed to push back against parents, may consciously or unconsciously file that away as a means of pushing parental boundaries. It’s also human nature to produce counterfactuals. So, when you say, “It’s dangerous,” they may respond with, “But it’s fun.” But if you ask, “What do you think?” they’re far more likely to generate, “It’s stupid.” Better for it to come from their mouth than yours.

In short, talk with your teen, even when they don’t make it easy. They are listening even when they don’t show it. Knowing you care makes it less likely they’ll be eating Tide pods, cooking Nyquil chicken, or following whatever crazy social media trend comes next.