The Choking Game Terrifies Me...

Though there are many, many years until my daughter is a teenager, every time I hear about the choking game, I get a little chill down my spine.

Momlogic.com ran an article today on two teens who died as a result of the choking game. This isn't the first time I'd heard of it. In fact, I read about it in a magazine several years ago, long before I had children and thought, what a strange concept.

Each generation has something they can look back on from their teen years and think - what idiots we were.  (For mine, it may have been angel trumpets or huffing, the latter of which sadly took the life of a friend when I was in 10th grade.)  But this scares me even more because your kids can be in the next room from you and you'd never know. It doesn't have a "smell", they don't need to buy anything extraordinary...and it seems like kids who are normally "good kids" are the ones who fall victim to it.

Without experience with a teenage child, I'd imagine the first step to preventing this would be building a relationship of openness and trust - but I'm also realistic. Teens are a secretive bunch. I'm just going to hope that in 15 years, the "cool" thing is to hang out with mom and eat your vegetables.