Challenges

Adolescents who challenge each other and do crazy things is of all times. Nowadays you can find a new challenge on the internet almost every day. There are many types of challenges and luckily most are innocent and funny. The challenges are filmed by teenagers and then shared via the internet and social media. As a result, the spread is extremely fast.

Some examples of recent challenges are:

• deodorant challenge
You spray deodorant on someone's skin until the person cannot stand it anymore: a burn occurs.

• cinnamon challenge
You put a full spoon of cinnamon in your mouth and try to swallow it without drinking. This leads to a lot of coughing and boasting and sometimes gagging and vomiting. There are many videos about this on YouTube. Adults and even celebrities have done it. It is therefore understandable that adolescents find it funny and think it cannot do any harm. Yet the cinnamon challenge is not without risks. It can lead to suffocation. Cinnamon can also get into the lungs and block the airways.

• Kylie Lip challenge
Kylie Jenner is an American celebrity and style icon with a huge number of followers on social media. Many children participated in the Kylie Lip challenge on Instagram and Snapchat. By sucking on a plastic bottle, so that your lips evacuate, you have just as full lips in a few minutes as Kylie. In many cases this resulted in bruising and minor injuries.

• choking game
This strangling game was also played in the past. This 'game' where children choke each other exists in all kinds of variants. The intention is to release just before fainting. If the brain gets blood again, it gives a 'high' feeling. Children also play this game in our country. Sometimes under 9-year olds. Children can suffer severe brain damage and children have died as well.

• Blue Whale Challenge
This challenge is actually more of a scary story that goes around among teenagers. In Russia, two teenagers committed suicide in 2014. They would have a master who led them to suicide in fifty steps. On the internet there are so-called lists of these fifty assignments called the Blue Whale (to blue whales that sometimes massively commit suicide and follow each other in that). It is fortunately not the case that this Blue Whale challenge is fully played. It is more about the fear and fascination of adolescents that someone can cause them to do such bad things, that you want to die. That fear will lead a life on the internet. For example, there are sometimes gloomy teenagers who post messages with photos of a blue whale.

Source: StichtingOpvoeden.nl