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My lad has started year 7 (first year of high school) this year.
Over the year so far, there have been staggering examples of stupidity on display by some of his peers - such as, for example, the kid who lifted a drain cover climbed in, and then got stuck, necessitating rescue from several members of staff.
But yesterday's news really reached the nadir of moronic behaviour.
So, apparently all of year 7 were called into an 'emergency' assembly yesterday - the second in two days (the first related to some online bullying incident). The headteacher went on to explain that some kids in year 8 (i.e. a year older) had been playing a game where (and, I kid you not) they take turns to throttle each other just to the point of asphyxiation - i.e. up to the point they lose consciousness.
And, as predictably as night follows day, something has gone wrong. Apparently in this particular instance, not only did the throttler go too far, resulting in the throttleee passing out, they were doing this game at the top of a flight of very high, very hard stone steps, which meant when throttlee passed out, they then fell down the entirety of a flight of steps, resulting in what was apparently a very serious head injury.
I mean.... I was genuinely at a loss for words. Not only do these kids take part in a game where they strangle each other to the point of unconsciousness, but they did so, not on the soft, comforting embrace of the field - oh no, they did so at the top of a flight of steps!
I did some pretty stupid things as a kid with very little regard for my own safety (often involving bikes!) but even back then I would have thought that was a stupid idea. My belief has been somewhat beggared!
Was about to come on here and defend kids generally, assuming the OP would be about kids not saying please and thankyou's, or being too loud for our old ears....
That though is a bloody stupid thing to do!
I'd be changing my kid's school !
You can bet your arse this will be some tiktok craze.
Kids have always done daft stuff, they're kids, it's just more prevalent now due to them videoing the damage now!
I can remember some of the daft stuff i saw when i was that age, and the accidents that happened because of it, although we never had assemblies after the fact, it was usually hidden and whatever led to it being banned 😂
PS you don't live in some far off remote village then, with interesting 'locals' ? Like Cornwall or Essex ? (trying some humor !).
Never heard of the throttling issue. We used to dangle classmates over the top of banisters. Wasn't so funny when they did it to me, and only my best mate was left clinging onto my ankle as the rest got bored.
Kids were doing this in the late 1970s, at least they were at my school. Not quite the same method but the idea was to make someone faint. And then one cracked their head as they fell. Cue announcement at assembly.
You can bet your arse this will be some tiktok craze.
+1
i was at pretty shitty comp when both WWF and american football popularity was at its peak. it was pretty savage.
fossy
Full MemberI’d be changing my kid’s school !
Really? Nothing in the OPs post comes across as anything more than kids doing dumb stuff with no thoughts to potential consequences - standard since the dawn of time
Kids are kids - they learn by doing, often making mistakes on the way.
If however I can be so bold, I think we have an issue of kids having fewer opportunities in life. These narrower experiences mean they have less judgement - particularly around risk and benefit.
So many children are driven from a - b, to attend adult led and controlled activities, to a nursery or school where control of everything is a goal. They don't get opportunity for free play at a young enough age. They miss some basic skills in judgement, let alone reduced development of physical, social and emotional literacy. In doing this we strip away children's ability to make good judgements around risk and learn from them at an early age - and remember risk is physical, social and emotional.
As tweens & teens, they are hard wired to take risk. It is a developmental phase and they have to do it. In lieu of a 'good' risk (flinging a bike down a muddy hillside, playing an instrument in a concert, meeting new people regularly) they take any risk. This then is often the 'teen rebellion' of drink, drugs, sex, odd relationships, and inappropriate risk taking such as climbing in manholes, daring each other to cross roads in front of cars, shoplifting (etc).
This has been going on for nearly two generations now.
And the solution is not another telling off by parents or an assembly with a headteacher going 'what is wrong with you?' because the answer is 'you!'. The young people do not know - they haven't go the experience. So the adults need to change.
Kids are kids – they learn by doing, often making mistakes on the way.
Came on to say this. Kids have always done stupid things.
I remember around that age being shown how to make myself faint and finding it amusing passing out on my bed. Only after a few goes I fell the wrong way and smashed my face into my desk. Woke up with the SNES on my back wondering what happened. Yes I too was an idiot.
I went to a rough comprehensive in the 70s. All this and worse. One kid badly concussed and blinded in one eye when some knobber put a rock in a snowball during a mass playground snowball fight. A kid firing darts from a gat air pistol at the blackboard just past the teacher's head. Duels with airbomb fireworks. Fires lit in the bins, gas taps left turned on full after every chemistry lesson. I could go on. Maybe some are shocked because they went to nice genteel schools, but IME kids have always been idiots.
Duels with airbomb fireworks.
gimma Hi 4
was always much cheaper on nov 6th...
blokeuptheroad
I went to a rough comprehensive in the 70s. All this and worse. One kid badly concussed and blinded in one eye when some knobber put a rock in a snowball during a mass playground snowball fight. A kid firing darts from a gat air pistol at the blackboard just past the teacher’s head. Duels with airbomb fireworks. Fires lit in the bins, gas taps left turned on full after every chemistry lesson. I could go on. Maybe some are shocked because they went to nice genteel schools, but IME kids have always been idiots.
Absolutely - I went to a boggo comp in the 90s and we had people carrying weapons like knives, baseball bats, nunchucks, people throwing darts at each other - I remember demonstrating my juggling prowess in home ec using kitchen knives - and the gas tap flamethrower thing happened every lesson despite endless remonstrations to the contrary. One really scary occasion was when I was dared to remove the weight off a pressure cooker whilst it was at full pressure - it launched itself into the ceiling and a jet of blue pressurised steam roared out.
I know kids are knobbers, I've been one. But even at my absolute stupidest, I couldn't have conceived of deliberately throttling each other until we pass out!
some kids in year 8 (i.e. a year older) had been playing a game where (and, I kid you not) they take turns to throttle each other just to the point of asphyxiation – i.e. up to the point they lose consciousness.
Maybe the OP is sensationalising a little with the word "throttling" (or maybe the head-teacher was), but we used to do something similar when I was a stupid kid of the same age. I only did it once, but it was quite good fun and I remember the sensation to this day (45+ years later)! We did it in a grassy field though, stone steps is downright dumb. We also used to set fire to stuff, blow up aerosols, fling Dutch Arrows about etc etc. At least they ain't indoors playing video games 😆
The only thing irresponsible I've passed down to my kid is "Here's a tree in summer, here's a tree in winter. Here's a bunch of flowers, here's the April showers" 😀
I'm a Scout leader, so deal with kids of this age a lot. What you need to remember is:
1) They can occasionally be quite staggeringly stupid
2) Their grasp of consequence is limited
3) They instinctively do what everyone else is doing
Combine the three and, well, there you go.
If however I can be so bold, I think we have an issue of kids having fewer opportunities in life. These narrower experiences mean they have less judgement – particularly around risk and benefit.
So many children are driven from a – b, to attend adult led and controlled activities, to a nursery or school where control of everything is a goal. They don’t get opportunity for free play at a young enough age. They miss some basic skills in judgement, let alone reduced development of physical, social and emotional literacy. In doing this we strip away children’s ability to make good judgements around risk and learn from them at an early age – and remember risk is physical, social and emotional.
As tweens & teens, they are hard wired to take risk. It is a developmental phase and they have to do it. In lieu of a ‘good’ risk (flinging a bike down a muddy hillside, playing an instrument in a concert, meeting new people regularly) they take any risk. This then is often the ‘teen rebellion’ of drink, drugs, sex, odd relationships, and inappropriate risk taking such as climbing in manholes, daring each other to cross roads in front of cars, shoplifting (etc).
This has been going on for nearly two generations now.
And the solution is not another telling off by parents or an assembly with a headteacher going ‘what is wrong with you?’ because the answer is ‘you!’. The young people do not know – they haven’t go the experience. So the adults need to change.
And aaaaaaaaaaaaall of this.
We had a mum going apesh1t last week as we had her 10 year old pride and joy crossing a road (at a pelican crossing) unsupervised. If your child has got to the age of ten without being able to press the button and wait for the green man, I'd say that's on you, love.
I'm surprised you are surprised. The throttling thing was standard when I was at school in the 80's & early 90's. A.K.A Giving someone a sleeper.
They're kids, that's what's wrong with them. I hate to break it to all the predictable "blame social meeja" knee-jerkers, but kids have been acting like bellends long before TikTok.
It's just a phase. They'll hopefully grow out of it in about ten years.
Daughter #1 (yr8) came home to tell me one of her class had to go to hospital having smashed out 2 front teeth yesterday falling face first onto a changing room bench whilst being tickled!
I went to a very well respected, very middle class (ex grammar) comp. We still had our fair share of ‘incidents’ from the setting fire to the high jump crash mat, to the ‘daubing of excrement’ all over the boys toilets (as a teenage boy try to stifle laughter whilst that’s being stated to all the male school members held behind after assembly). When I was in the 6th form one of the lower 6th kids managed to burn his best friend’s face after a Henry hoover / meths flamethrower experiment went wrong 😳
Maybe the OP is sensationalising a little with the word “throttling” (or maybe the head-teacher was),
Nope, that's how my lad came back and reported it - actual strangulation.
We had some great games at that age. Chasing each other with hairspray & lighter flame throwers; one person in the centre of the room with a cushion, blocking the darts the rest of us were throwing at him; adopting an old spazchariot (plastic Robin Reliant-like mobility car) that'd been abandoned in the local sand dunes - one of us would get in, the others would flip it so it rolled over and over down the dunes. It was good fun!
IME there's less of this going on as schools are less tolerant of it.
Growing up in the 70's/80s there was always some way to injure one-another going on.
Bowie-knife chicken was a favourite in our village where you kept closing your legs closer and closer while someone threw a knife into the ground between them. And every kid seemed to have a bowie knife and black-widow catapult.
Kids have always done dumb and dangerous stuff. Sounds like the school are trying their best to deal with it.
Whether it's worse now I'm not sure - social media makes this things flare up and spread quicker and maybe kids who've been online for much of the last two years are a bit disconnected from the cause and effect, and from not having a responsible adult pointing out the risks.
What I can see, from kids around our area, from my daughters feedback from school (year 10), feedback from Scout and Guide leaders we work with and from MrsMc's work as a social worker is that kids who missed out from the normal transition from primary to secondary because of lockdown have missed out on many of the activities like Year 6 residential trips, proper transition to secondary where being a gobby little shite to older kids saw you put back in your place, those things that taught a bit of self awareness, respect and maturity, and the behavioural fallout is taking a massive amount of time to work through.
We also had a club where one of the initiation ceremonies was a form of Japanese WWII torture that I'd read about in a book - now popularly known as 'water boarding.'
You can bet your arse this will be some tiktok craze
I was thinking it might be from something like squid games. I was on a "giant bouncy cushion" with my 6yo daughter last year and a kid, maybe 8, came on and says "Alright big man, wanna play Squid Games?". I politely declined, at which point he came over and mimicked slitting mine and my daughter's necks.
Which was nice.
that’s how my lad came back and reported it – actual strangulation
Fair enough. I guess if they enjoy the sensation enough they can later get into autoerotic asphyxiation
kids who missed out from the normal transition from primary to secondary because of lockdown have missed out on many of the activities like Year 6 residential trips, proper transition to secondary where being a gobby little shite to older kids saw you put back in your place, those things that taught a bit of self awareness, respect and maturity, and the behavioural fallout is taking a massive amount of time to work through.
Yeah, we're seeing this (in Scouts). There's a cohort of 'older' kids who are still behaving like 'younger' kids, as they missed out on 18-24 months of 'growing up'. And Scouts is between the ages of 10-14, so bang on on the primary/secondary cutover, where two years is a long time developmentally wise.
Interesting observation IHN and MCD.
We at work are seeing at younger end kids arriving at nursery and school 'missing' two years of development in language, physical literacy, social skills and creativity in play. Basics like not potty trained either...
I'm in the "that's kids" camp here. Some of the stuff my 74 year old Dad told me about from his school days is mental. Setting trip wires for steam trains, uncoupling trains, setting fire to dustcarts, the kind of stuff you'd get an asbo for these days. I don't think we were quite as loose in the 80s and 90s.
When I was on a school trip in 1980, the hotel had a continuous bannister on the stairway. We had a challenge to see who could slide down the fastest from the top (4th floor). In the pursuit of speed, one of my mates over balanced and fell from the second floor. His fall to the ground slightly slowed by smashing his face onto the top of a vending machine.
At Grammar School a few years later, we'd regularly turn the gas taps into flame throwers causing the occasional scald. "The tube slipped off the tap Sir, mustn't have been on tight." was the standard defence.
One day on the way to said Grammar school, on passing a shopping trolley, one of my mates complained the was tired & wanted to be pushed in it so we did. This turned into regular F1 trolley races as we passed the supermarket on the way in. One time I had the racing line to a dropped kerb, my mate thought he could bump up the kerb to get in front, but his co-pilot in the trolley was a bit lardy and didn't follow instructions to shift to the back of the trolley. Hence the front wheels hit the kerb ejecting Roger, splitting his head open. Not sure if the school nurse believed Rog's story that he tripped & fell!
So to me:
1) kids will be kids
2) even those who are thought to be "intelligent" are not immune from it (as my Dad said- there's an inverse relationship between common sense & intelligence).
I remember 1982 secondary school as some kind of torture camp/(anti-)social-experiment/personal hell
-bombs made from steel tubes and *chemistry*
-random arson
-shooting each other with airgun darts and pellets
-choking by school tie
-brutal ‘dead-legs’
-rock-throwing ‘fights’
-random self-piercing
kids have been acting like bellends long before TikTok.
Tru dat!!!!
The stupidity of my son sometimes beggars belief. I mean, he's a smart lad...but...jeesh!!
DrP
Kids were doing this in the late 1970s, at least they were at my school. Not quite the same method but the idea was to make someone faint. And then one cracked their head as they fell. Cue announcement at assembly.
Sounds like we went to the same school.
Seriously, that was the least of it. I remember when I was about 10 and a couple of kids whose older brothers were in gangs were having a big laugh in class about another kid who threw up when they were drinking beer, "Davey can't handle his piss, ha ha." We had a teacher straight out of training, she was utterly horrified. Then there were the warnings about sniffing petrol, which served more as an instruction manual than a deterrent. We moved away, but apparently the school got burned down a bit after that. Then the new school got burned down a couple of months after we moved away again, only for school number three to also get burned down. Fun times back then.
I'd like to be able to join in with the incredulity of the OP but not convinced that I wasn't also that stupid when I was that age.
It does make you wince looking at it from an adult POV though.
Fair enough. I guess if they enjoy the sensation enough they can later get into autoerotic asphyxiation
Sounds perfect prep to become a Tory MP, just need to add an orange in there IIRC.....
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stephen_Milligan
Oh, another good one I remember was when some wag got some copper sulphate crystals and told his mates they were jelly crystals, which we used to eat as a sweet. Bunch of kids off to A&E for a stomach pump. What a jolly jape.
& +1 to HN & MCD as a Scout leader we're noticing the difference in the younger ones compared to those that had a couple of years experience before lockdown.
I'm rather getting the impression from this thread it's a wonder we managed to make it out of the 80's at all! 😂
Sounds perfect prep to become a Tory MP, just need to add an orange in there IIRC…..
And a black bin bag, don't forget the bin bag.
Is this a rare moment of STW (minus fossy) agreeing on something?
I was just about to post that footflaps
Does it mention Guinness having to withdraw an advert with mocked up photo and the strap line "a little bit of what you like is good for you"?
And a black bin bag, don’t forget the bin bag.
I find it quite hard keeping up with the Tories, one minute it's oranges and black bags, next tractor porn in the main chamber.
You have to admire their willingness to try new things.