March 29, 2024

Kids will be kids

Despite whatever you’ve read, the kids are all right. Sure, it’s easy to find plenty of evidence to the contrary, you don’t have to look very hard to find stories of students taking the Tide Pod Challenge, a dare that involves ingesting the concentrated laundry detergent. Even in Newton, students at Berg Middle School are in the midst of an “eraser challenge” a game that involves rubbing a pencil on your arm until it starts to bleed.

It might be easy to dismiss these stories as media hype, except it isn’t; in mid January the American Association of Poison Control Centers reported a spike in cases of Tide Pod relating poisoning, with the Washington Post reporting 37 cases of Tide Pod ingestion in the first two weeks of the year. The AAPCC estimated at least half of those cases were intentional.

As an adult, it’s pretty easy to climb up on our moral high horses and proclaim, “I never did anything that stupid when I was a kid!”

Except you did, you’ve just forgotten all about it now you’re an adult.

This is usually a segway into the argument that millenials are stupid, lazy and doing irreplaceable damage to the country. The funny thing is this isn’t anything new, your parents said the same things about you. Their parents — more of the same. Every generation is convinced folks who are coming in behind them are going to be the ones who finally flush the planet down the toilet for good.

Even without the availability of concentrated laundry detergent to consume, my brother and I still found plenty of ways to get into trouble. Whether it was using blankets for parachutes and the cushions from my mom’s “good” white couch in an attempt to fly or racing lawn mowers, growing up on the farm offered plenty of opportunities for two mischievous, unsupervised little boys.

All we were really doing was following in the footsteps of my dad and his brother. Dad still has a scar on his leg from a gasoline burn, a lasting reminder of a homemade “bomb” gone wrong. After filling a mason jar with gasoline Dad and my uncle couldn’t get it to light on fire. Frustrated, my dad kicked the jar, jostling the contents enough to cause an explosion.

They also “borrowed” the family tractor, and then promptly steered right through the farm’s chicken coop, giving the birds a real run for the money. I can only imagine how steep the drop off in egg production must’ve been the following week.

Instead of buying into this doom and gloom metaphor, let’s see if we can’t find a little perspective on these issues, after all, where there’s common ground, there’s understanding. I think it’s ironic the same people who are outraged about the consumption of Tide Pods probably had their mouths washed out with soap as a children, probably for uttering one of George Carlin’s seven dirty words.

I’ve never eaten a Tide Pod, nor have I ever wanted too. They weren’t around when I was young and dumb, but if they were I’m sure someone I knew would’ve tried to eat one. In middle school, I snorted a packet of mustard up my nose on a dare. Even now I swear that side of my nose still starts running first in cold weather.

If you’re reading this, I’m guessing you’ve never eaten a Tide Pod either, but I’m sure if you think about it long enough you can remember some of the dumb stuff you did when you were a kid. It’s part of growing up, we give our kids enough rope to explore and to take risks, we just hope it’s not enough to hang themselves. Being a kid is about taking chances, even if it means your arm is sporting a nasty burn mark on it.

Contact David Dolmage
at ddolmage@newtondailynews.com