By Pattie Mihalik

newsgirl@comcast.net

If you are among those who watched the television reports or read newspaper accounts of teens eating Tide laundry pods, that might have been your reaction.

We adults have a hard time understanding why kids deliberately do such dumb stuff.

One teenager was interviewed on TV after he got sick trying to ingest one of those brightly colored laundry pods.

His answer when asked why he did it: “They dared me.”

My husband and I sat there shaking our heads at “those dumb teens.” Later, I remembered something.

I used to be one.

Maybe you were too, if you think back to those years when your teenage brain wasn’t fully formed.

I was always a “good kid.” At least that’s what my parents claimed.

Maybe one reason why they thought so was because most of the crazy stuff I did didn’t come to their attention.

But I vividly recalled the time when my dumb stunt couldn’t be hidden because I had to be rushed to the nearest doctor.

I was 15 or 16 at the time, on vacation with my father to visit his friends in Somers Point, New Jersey. At the time the town had a high two-story bathhouse on a long pier that extended into the ocean. The bathhouse had a steep roof shaped much like the roofs on a typical house.

I was there with some new teenage friends enjoying a day at the beach.

Don’t know what led up to the challenge. All I remember is one boy said, “I bet you can’t climb up on the roof and jump into the water.”

Always a tomboy, I took one look at it and said, “I bet I can.”

So I did.

Without much thought about what would happen next, I climbed up to the roof then jumped into the water.

Not knowing much about physics, I didn’t know that the higher the jump, the deeper the diver went into the water. It was a long way down for me.

I remember having a bit of panic as I felt like I was running out of air while I was still descending into the water.

Finally, when I broke the surface of the water, I grabbed onto a nearby pole. Then I wiped my face, trying to clear away the salt water.

Within minutes my face started to burn. And burn. I got my first introduction to the fact that ocean poles are coated with creosote meant to preserve the wood.

After all these years I still have faint scars from where the creosote burned my face.

I don’t remember much about the aftermath of that act of stupidity, except that my father was greatly disappointed in me.

I heard a lot of talk about being a leader, not a follower.

Why did I do it?

It was a dare.

My dad used to say he was worried about me because there were two things I lacked: A sense of fear and the built-in caution that would keep me from trouble.

The sense of caution came in later years. So did fear about so many things that my teenage self would not have noticed.

At Christmastime my daughters and I drove to Shamokin along a steep, narrow mountain road without any guide rails. It’s really a dangerous mountain road, and just being on it, especially with the fog that’s always there, scares me now.

I confessed to my daughters that when I was a teenager I used to ride with guys who raced each other in their fast cars on that mountain road. My daughter said she couldn’t believe I would do something that stupid.

It was stupid.

Why did I do it? I was a teenager with a brain not yet fully formed. Fortunately, I also must have had a guardian angel that looked after me.

When I got older and had children of my own I started reading about teenage brain development. No matter how much book smarts a kid has, his brain is different as a teenager than it will be in full maturity.

Scientists tell us there is a biological explanation for this difference. Studies show that the teenage brain is still developing well into early adulthood.

The frontal cortex, the area of the brain that controls reasoning and helps us think before we act, develops later. In teenagers, this part of the brain is still changing and maturing.

There are many interesting articles written about adolescent risk taking, impulsivity and brain development. Adolescents, we are told, do not rationally weigh risks.

In other words, kids do stupid stuff.

Oh, not every kid. But kids probably do more dumb stuff than parents know about.

Thankfully, most of them live to tell about it.

In the case of kids who follow a dare to eat Tide detergent pods, there had better be plenty of guardian angels at work.

So far this year there have been 39 cases of kids who were physically harmed trying the social media challenge. Trying to ingest that stuff burns the mouth and lips and can stop breathing.

There will always be new threats, new dares, new harmful practices that will lure kids into danger.

Some day those same kids might grow up and wonder how they ever could have been so dumb.

Contact Pattie Mihalik at newsgirl@comcast.net.