Family Why don't teens see danger?
The answer is in your brain
The Skullbreaker, The hunt for the posh,
Vacuum challenge
, The blue whale ... These and other dangerous viral challenges have led thousands of teenagers to endanger their lives or those of others without weighing the consequences. What can be 'attractive' in shooting videos tripping a friend, beating up kids living in upper-class neighborhoods,
vacuuming
themselves with a vacuum cleaner, or self-injuring in various tests, as demanded by the terrifying challenge of The blue whale? According to experts,
sharing these challenges makes them feel connected to each other during their transition to the adult world,
a 'journey' that, in reality, is the closest thing to a duel.
This is how Enric Soler, tutor of the UOC degree in Psychology, explains it, who recalls that
adolescence
comes from the Latin
adolescere
, that is, 'the one who grows up', 'the one who suffers'
. "It is about the
mourning for the loss of the body and childhood privileges
and integration into the adult world."
Soler maintains that, while they are going through this stage of such brutal changes, "they are very alone; neither the children nor the elderly understand them."
The life cycle directs them towards the adult world, "which they constantly challenge"
but, while this transformation lasts, "they can only satisfy their gregarious needs by sharing challenges, feeling integrated into their world, that of adolescents," he says.
This adolescent world of shared experiences is found today, above all, in social networks.
According to the study Maladaptive use of ICT in adolescents: profiles, supervision and technological stress, more than 60% of adolescents use ICT without supervision and almost half, 45%, have a maladaptive use of them;
that is, they do not use them in a responsible way.
All this takes place in an environment dominated by the
"
like
dictatorship
"
, which pushes them to do whatever they consider necessary to gain more popularity.
Unfortunately, in this scenario,
viral challenges can give many points: getting one of the 4.2 billion
likes
that are given daily
is a task that these types of challenges can help a lot.
However, not all teens who sign up for a viral challenge choose violent challenges or ridicule others. There are those who try to make their video viral by
throwing a bucket of ice water to raise funds for amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS)
, or by signing up for a couple choreography with mirror movements, as in the Oh na na na challenge.
What makes you opt for these types of 'white' challenges or those that experts describe as 'maladaptive'?
In Soler's opinion, everything depends on the way in which they face this transition towards the world of the elderly. "Any behavior that is directed towards behaviors typical of adults will be considered a
healthy behavior
. On the contrary, the resistance to go through that duel will lead to stagnation or even an evolutionary regression of the person," he says.
And as an example, he gives the example of the challenge of 'La hunt del pijo', behind which hides an attempt to channel the anger typical of any duel in a violent way, that is, in a childish way.
"A small child can have a tantrum when something does not go as expected, but when an adolescent boy behaves like an enraged child, he has much more physical and mental capacity to
voluntarily
harm
his neighbor, or also himself," warns Soler.
There is no doubt that the
current situation
, with an increasingly less attractive socio-economic and employment panorama, is not an incentive to dive happily into the adult world.
And this can be another factor that exerts
resistance in the adolescent when it comes to integrating into the new adult reality
that they have to live.
"It is no coincidence that in the challenge of 'The hunt for the posh', adolescents who believe they have a worse future prospect violently attack others whom they perceive with more facilities to function better in the adult world", explains Enric To usually do.
Learn to show feelings
In addition, there is another circumstance that can influence the attraction that some adolescents feel towards maladaptive viral challenges. "In the deaths of family members that are not shared with children, even with the good intention of protecting them from suffering, they will feel excluded from the feeling of pain for the loss of a significant family member and, upon reaching puberty They
will tend not to share with their parents the mixed feelings of being a child and an adult at the same time.
In this way, they will go through adolescence alone, surely with the same good intention: not to worry them, "he says.
In summary, the lack of an attractive adulthood expectation, the fact of growing up in a family that lives with its back to its own griefs, and the interaction with other adolescents who are grouped, unconsciously, with these related factors can be a good
breeding ground.
for a teenager when it comes to joining a viral challenge like La hunt del pijo or The blue whale.
But, in addition to all of the above, in the opinion of José Ramón Ubieto, psychoanalyst and collaborating professor at the UOC's Studies in Psychology and Education Sciences,
the path from childhood to adulthood involves going through "rites of passage through of those who are looking to pass a test
. And due to the very nature of the challenge, what is expected is that they take place outside the family, "he explains.
Paradoxically, those challenges that they hide from their parents hope that they will be seen by the more people, the better. It is one of the characteristics of the viral challenge of the digital age that did not exist in the analog world or, at least not with such magnitude. To this is added that
social networks can generate an "echo chamber" effect due to the tendency to unify opinions
, as José Ramón Ubieto recalls. And it is especially worrisome in the case of violent challenges. "In social networks, messages are received that go in the same direction as what one poses, so that violence can multiply when
feeling supported by others
."
To avoid this, Ubieto advises
parents to hold informal conversations that help adolescents talk with them and allow them to know their opinion about what worries them
, in addition to letting them know what that stage was like for them.
"The way to introduce a responsibility is for them to feel that we care,
pay attention to their concerns
. A good contribution that parents can share with their children is about how their adolescence was. They can move from the economy of attention -which focuses on individual attention in connection - to the conversation in the mode of
attentive presence
, where what prevails is the bond and not the unidirectional connection ", says the teacher.
According to the criteria of The Trust Project
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