By Gavin Boyle
A new trend on TikTok encourages kids to microwave squishy toys and play with their insides, but doing so can superheat them and lead to explosions and severe burns.
“[My daughter] stuck it in the microwave. I was watching her and saw her touch it to check it wasn’t too hot when she pulled it out. It all happened so quickly. I heard her scream, and it was like a blood-curdling scream. It had exploded all over her chest, mouth and chin,” said a father whose daughter received third degree burns after heating up a toy. “I was a complete muss. She spent a week in the hospital and for three days of that she was in a coma.”
“She was still screaming when we got to the hospital, and it’s a good 30-minute drive from where we live,” the girl’s mother added. “It was terrible how scared she was and how much it hurt her. I was panicked, devastated, terrified and heartbroken. It was [something] she followed that she’d seen on TikTok and YouTube.”
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Unfortunately, this girl is not the only person to have been harmed while attempting to heat up these toys. And 8-year-old boy from Utah received similar burns when a heated up squishy toy exploded on him, causing him to spend 18 days in the hospital and undergo several skin graft surgeries.
These toys, which are most often created with food-grade silicon and sometimes have other squishy materials inside, feature warnings against heating or freezing the products.
This is not the only dangerous trend spreading on TikTok this summer. In July, kids were going viral for the “TikTok Door Knock” challenge, which consisted of them breaking down doors in the middle of the night.
Related: How TikTok Harms Kids on an ‘Industrial Scale’
“While ‘ding dong ditch’ has been a hallmark for decades of kids who were looking to have a little mischievous fun, today’s youth have taken things to a more serious level by kicking in door and ultimately causing damage,” the Fleetwood Police Department in Pennsylvania said, per Fox News.
“Besides the financial consequences to homeowners who are often left with the expense of repairs, there is the potential for a child to be seriously hurt or even killed by someone who believes, especially in the middle of the night, that their residence is being broken into and ultimately determines there is an imminent threat to life and property,” the department continued.
Dozens of other dangerous challenges that have caused damage, injury and death have spread across the app over the years. While TikTok claims it cares about its users safety and censors posts that would encourage dangerous acts, time after time, this proves untrue.
Unfortunately, the squishy toy trend is yet another example which has led to multiple kids’ horrific injuries.
Read Next: Deadly TikTok Trends Spark Lawsuits, Possible Bans
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