Just last month, a New Jersey seventh grade student suffered a concussion and seizure after fellow students subjected him to the Tiktok prank. While this child is still suffering ongoing neurological issues, his parents are apparently still awaiting the results of their son's school district's investigation of this incident.
The Tiktok Challenge
The prank, also known as “the skull breaker challenge,” involves two people fooling a third person - the victim - into falling flat on their face or head.
In this particular instance, the other students perpetrating the challenge lied to this boy, telling him they were going to have a contest to see which one of them could jump the highest.
Instead - and as they planned - only the victim jumped. And while the victim was airborne, the other two kids knocked his legs out from under him, causing him to slam the back of his head into the hard floor.
20 minutes later, the victim was unresponsive, he wet his pants, and then was alternately sleepy, and then periodically picking up his head to scream "Mommy, my head hurts!" before laying down again.
At this point, the boy has no memory of the incident, or that 10-hour period, for that matter. And although he loves sports, right now he is being held out of those activities to a large degree as a precaution, which - understandably - he finds terribly frustrating.
The Takeaways
If this sounds scary to you, it should.
What we, as parents, can do about it is to educate our children about the serious dangers in blindly following online "challenges," as this one apparently started in Venezuela, where it’s called rompcráneos, and is spreading worldwide.
