I recall being dared by my friends, as a child, to put my hand on the electric fence surrounding a cow field just down the rural country lane from the southwestern Pennsylvania home where I grew up.

I accepted the dare, and we all laughed out loud as the electric volt zapped through my body. It was, well, shocking, but since I’m still here to write about it, I guess it ended OK.

I’m pretty sure reading this will be the first time my mother learns of my ridiculous childhood stunt.

Sadly, when Jacob Stevens’ parents learned about the stupid teen challenge their son recently took in the company of his buddies, he already was in a seizure.

The 13-year-old boy from Columbus never woke up.

The boy had been participating in TikTok’s “Benadryl Challenge.” It involves a very dangerous ingestion of 12 to 14 antihistamines — six times the recommended dose — to induce hallucinations.

In the challenge, others video record the episode and then upload it to their TikTok accounts in hopes of gaining social media stardom.

Jacob’s devastated father, Justin, told WSYX, ABC 6, in Columbus that, indeed, his son’s friends captured video of the boy downing the pills before his body started to seize.

Jacob was subsequently rushed to the hospital and put on a ventilator.

He died six days later. His family opted to remove life support after he spent six days at Nationwide Children’s Hospital with no brain activity, ABC 6 reported.

Jacob’s parents described him as a well-mannered, funny, loving kid, who had played football for Greenfield schools.

Undeniably, kids do stupid things. But the sad difference between the stupid things you and I might have done as children and the things kids today do is ramped up exponentially by the unrelenting draw of social media.

The “Benadryl Challenge” has existed on social media platforms dating back to at least 2020. Just imagine all the impressionable kids that have seen these videos during that time and tried it themselves or egged on buddies to do it.

What’s worse is that this particular horrible story is not unique.

A former Cortland woman experienced the unspeakable horror of discovering her 10-year-old son dead in 2019 inside their Summit County home after he played a “choking game” — a non-autoerotic, pass-out activity, that she suspects he learned about online.

Others have said the activity’s prevalence is nationwide. The physical goal of the “game” is to restrict cerebral blood flow to the point of nearly or actually passing out for a variety of reasons, including curiosity, competition, dare, and / or to experience an altered state. This is accomplished by a variety of methods, including compression of the carotid arteries using hands or a ligature; compression to the chest after hyperventilation; competition or dare to see who can resist passing out the longest under a choke hold. Many kids also try this “game” alone by using a ligature (causing the majority of deaths). Since they don’t know when they’re actually going to faint, they black out — resulting in accidental asphyxiation.

Kids can become addicted to this activity because of the euphoria they experience — not realizing that their brain actually is dying slowly.

When interviewed by this newspaper, that mother said she didn’t want her son’s death to be for nothing.

These tragedies, indeed, must send critically important lessons to all of us — that is to monitor our children’s web activity.

Parents often face pushback from our children searching for independence and privacy, but we also must safeguard their actions and activities.

Here are some tips offered by experts.

Monitor your children’s online activity manually or via online software and parental control apps designed for this intended purpose.

Limit the amount of time children spend unsupervised.

Know well your children’s friends and keep in touch with those friends’ parents. When your child goes to a friend’s house, know where he or she will be, whether parents are home and what they will be doing.

Ask questions and stay interested in their activities.

If we can take steps to monitor and better guard the safety of our kids from what they think are just online “games,” we must do it.

blinert@tribtoday.com