Latest news with #ThisTeenageLife
Vox
26-06-2025
- General
- Vox
The hidden pressure messing with teen birthdays
is a senior correspondent for Vox, where she covers American family life, work, and education. Previously, she was an editor and writer at the New York Times. She is also the author of four novels, including the forthcoming Bog Queen, which you can preorder here This story originally appeared in Kids Today, Vox's newsletter about kids, for everyone. Sign up here for future editions. Birthdays are supposed to be fun. You eat cake, you open presents, maybe you have a party. They can also, however, become a source of pressure and anxiety. And for many teens today, birthdays are a time when the public nature of social media and the private joys of friendship awkwardly collide. Teens often post celebratory photos or messages on their Instagram stories for friends' birthdays, Kashika, 19, told me a few weeks ago in a conversation about kids and friendship. Then the birthday kid will reshare those posts to their own account. The number of posts you share 'forms an image of how many friends you might have,' Kashika explained. Kashika, a contributor to the podcast This Teenage Life, remembered seeing classmates share tons of birthday stories, and thinking, 'Oh my God, they're so popular.' Then, on her birthday, not a single person posted a story for her. 'I felt really bad,' she said. The birthday post (or lack thereof) has become a common source of anxiety, according to experts who work with kids. Teens report 'feeling a lot of pressure to post for people's birthdays, to post in a certain way, to post efficiently, effusively,' Emily Weinstein, executive director of Harvard's Center for Digital Thriving, told me. On the flip side, teenagers worry about having enough people post on their birthdays to 'signal that you have people who really care about you' or to 'show that you have a sufficient number of friends,' Weinstein said. Birthday wishes are one way that teens feel pressure to 'perform closeness' on social media, posting photos and messages of affection publicly 'both as part of being a good friend and as a way of validating their own social acceptance and connectedness,' Weinstein and Carrie James wrote in their 2022 book, Behind Their Screens. Performing closeness isn't new — teens used to decorate one another's lockers for birthdays, Devorah Heitner, author of the book Growing Up in Public: Coming of Age in a Digital World, told me (we did not do this at my school, and now I feel left out). But social media adds a new layer of labor to kids' already fraught social lives, forcing them to make calculations about how to celebrate their friends online — and how to respond if their friends don't do the same for them. The pressure to post Birthdays on social media offer a whole buffet of new stressors, kids and experts told me. For one thing, posts are easier to quantify than locker decorations. 'You can literally just count the likes or count the reposts,' Heitner said. 'That's very vivid.' Even posting on other people's birthdays can be nerve-wracking, kids say. 'I used to post for every friend that I had,' Divya, 19, told me. But then she realized that other kids were only posting birthday stories for friends who had posted birthday stories for them. 'It felt very weird,' Divya said, because she didn't personally care if someone had posted a birthday message for her or not. There's also pressure to make your birthday post reflect the level of your friendship. 'If someone is your best friend, you have to make it extra special,' Divya, a This Teenage Life contributor, told me. 'You have to just do it for the sake of making your friends feel special on social media.' That pressure to craft the perfect birthday post that communicates the specialness of a friendship is part of a larger pattern, experts say. On the one hand, 'social media offer compelling opportunities to validate relationships and show public support for others,' Weinstein and James write. On the other, 'when so much of posting is an expectation and over-the-top compliments are the norm, being authentic can feel nearly impossible and knowing what's authentic can be like reading tea leaves.' The pressure to perform closeness can be exhausting and annoying, kids say. One 17-year-old, Michelle, told Weinstein and James that she'd recently gotten stressed because she liked a friend's photo but couldn't think of a comment right away. 'I get really nervous about it too, because I have to think of something quick, and it has to be something really good,' she said. Once she'd engaged by liking the post, the clock was suddenly ticking. 'There's definitely expectations to comment on a post.' Especially among younger teen girls, 'there's a feeling that if we are close, people should know we're close,' Weinstein said. If they're not representing their friendship online through likes, comments, and posts, some teens feel 'they're not somehow not doing justice to the relationship.' As Kashika put it, Instagram stories and other social media posts become 'like a declaration in society that this person is my friend.' Pushing back on the pressure Performing closeness is far from unique to teenagers — adults are doing the same thing when they post cute photos and adoring captions on their anniversaries, Heitner said. And getting fewer birthday posts than you'd like, or fewer than other people get, can feel lousy whether you're celebrating your 14th birthday or your fortieth. After all, millennials on Facebook arguably invented birthday posting culture (and stressful birthday comparisons along with it). But for teenagers, whose needs for social approval and inclusion are so high, an underwhelming birthday on Instagram can be especially hard, Heitner said. Luckily, teens are developing some of their own ways of coping with the pressure social media puts on their friendships. Some are just using Instagram less in general, Heitner said. 'It is socially acceptable now to be a kid who's like, 'I don't really like this. I barely check it.'' Others are learning to draw a distinction between performed closeness and the real thing. Kashika felt bad 'for a while' when no one posted on her birthday, she told me. But 'then I thought, no, this is just part of social media,' she said. 'It does not actually depict our real friendship. And then my mood got a little better.' What I'm reading Families are reporting disturbing conditions at Texas immigration detention facilities, including adults fighting with children for clean water, and a lack of medical care for a boy with a blood disorder whose feet became so swollen he couldn't walk. The Trump administration is reinstating some research contracts at the Education Department that were initially terminated by DOGE, including a study on how to help kids with reading difficulties. The idea of giving kids a ''90s summer' may be a fantasy now that YouTube exists. My little kid and I have been revisiting Arnold Lobel's Mouse Soup, which includes stories about a lady who becomes obsessed with a rosebush growing out of her couch, and some rocks who learn the power of perspective. From my inbox When I talk to teens, I like to ask them what adults these days get wrong about young people. What don't we understand? Now I'm posing this to you — whether you're a kid or an adult with kids in your life, what do you think grown-ups are getting wrong? What aspects of kids' lives today need to be demystified or explained? Let me know at
Vox
05-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Vox
Do kids need a best friend?
is a senior correspondent for Vox, where she covers American family life, work, and education. Previously, she was an editor and writer at the New York Times. She is also the author of four novels, including the forthcoming Bog Queen, which you can preorder here As important as best-friendships can be, they don't always last forever. Amr Bo Shanab via Getty Images/fStop This story originally appeared in Kids Today, Vox's newsletter about kids, for everyone. Sign up here for future editions. Divya met her best friend when she was just 4 years old. They've been through all the phases of childhood and adolescence together, and more than 14 years later, they're still incredibly close, Divya told me. They don't see each other every day, but whenever they get together, it's like no time has passed. 'Every time I look back to that particular friendship, I just feel amazed, and I feel like it's an achievement in itself,' the 19-year-old said. Having a friend like Divya's can be a joy for kids, just as it can be for adults. 'We all would like to have somebody who is there for us through thick and thin, and who knows us deeply and loves us anyway,' said Eileen Kennedy-Moore, a clinical psychologist and host of the podcast Kids Ask Dr. Friendtastic. Kids with best friends tend to be less anxious, better able to handle rejection and bullying, and even more engaged in school, Kennedy-Moore said. But when I reached out to a group of contributors from the podcast This Teenage Life (Divya among them) to talk about friendship, one of the first topics that came up was pressure. Adults and other kids alike send the message that everyone needs a best friend, or that friendship should look a certain way, the teens told me. Even Divya gets worried sometimes when she sees other teens post on social media about talking to their best friends every day. She starts to worry: 'Are we even best friends or not?' The good news is that kids don't need a certain kind of best-friendship, or even a best friend at all. 'What kids need is a repertoire of anchors,' people who 'hold you up, that are there for you,' said Michele Borba, an educational psychologist and author of the book Thrivers: The Surprising Reasons Why Some Kids Struggle and Others Thrive. Maybe one friend is for sharing worries, and another is for sharing soccer games, and that's okay. As Brin, 18, put it, 'not all friends can help with every single thing.' Best friends are valuable — but not constant Kids have preferences for one classmate over another as early as preschool, Kennedy-Moore said. They may even use the term 'best friend,' but they don't always understand its meaning the same way older kids do. My 2-year-old, for example, says that his left foot and right foot are best friends. Real best-friendship starts a bit later, often by kindergarten or first grade, experts say. It's a common experience, but not universal — research has shown that about half of kids have a best friend who would also identify them as a best friend, Kennedy-Moore said. Definitions have shifted with time, but today, a best friend is usually 'someone that you can trust will always be there for you, someone you can trust with your intimate secrets,' said Barry Schneider, an emeritus professor of psychology at the University of Ottawa who studies children's friendships. When teens talked to me about their best friends, many of them emphasized not just common interests, but mutual support: 'She was super helpful, and she was always there when I needed her,' Pratyusha, 18, said of one best friend from the past. As important as best-friendships can be, they don't always last forever. In one study of seventh-grade best friends, only a quarter of best-friendships lasted until eighth grade, and only 1 percent all the way until senior year of high school, Kennedy-Moore said. Kids also go through periods when they have a best friend and periods when they don't — in another study, two-thirds of fifth-graders had a best friend, leaving about 33 percent without. By sixth grade, the share of best-friendless kids had dropped to 17 percent. The kids who gained a best friend had become kinder and more helpful according to their peers, suggesting that building social skills can help children acquire a best friend, Kennedy-Moore has written. As shifting as best-friendship can be, having that one super close relationship can have real benefits, experts say. Some research, for example, shows that having a best friend is protective against depression, Schneider said. Brin, now 18, met their first best friend in day care, and they're still close today. 'This person is like a sibling to me,' Brin said. 'I know that no matter what, I can always go to them for help.' The pressure to pair off But the idea of best-friendship can also be stressful, teens say. Brin remembers taking a mental health survey in elementary school that asked if they had a best friend in the school district. 'That made me feel so guilty for not feeling like I connected to anybody' within their school, Brin said. 'Our world is very set up for partners or couples,' Stella, 19, told me. Teens get the message that certain activities are for two — 'this is for you and a partner, or this is for you and a friend,' Brin said. 'It's always expected that you have somebody else with you, or else you're kind of weird, like going to the movies by yourself.' Social media can amplify these pressures. Teens will hard-launch a best-friendship on Instagram just like people announce new relationships, Stella said. Some best friends will post about choosing their outfits together before going out. 'They will post aesthetic pictures, they will take trips,' Divya said. 'It does make me feel like, am I missing out?' Best friends are not mandatory Despite the messages kids get, experts say it's completely okay not to have one particular best friend. 'The best analogy is romantic relationships,' Kennedy-Moore said. 'Can you be happy single? Sure, absolutely, you can have other enriching relationships.' It's important 'to break through all-or-nothing thinking about friendships,' she added. She sometimes talks with kids about tiers of friendship, from kids you talk with at the bus stop to soulmates who know everything about you. 'We might have a math class friend, or we might have a neighbor friend, or we might have a soccer friend, and all of these have value.' For the teens who talked to me, having an official best friend was less important than having people to rely on. 'I don't necessarily feel like I had best friends this year,' Stella, a first-year college student, told me. 'But by the end of it, it was like, these are people that I feel like I can trust.' 'It doesn't really matter if you have the label of best friend, or if you're matching clothes or not, if you're wishing each other happy birthday or not on Instagram,' Medha, 15, told me. 'It just matters that you have someone to help you when you're feeling low, to congratulate you when you're feeling high, when you're very happy, and to keep motivating you all the time.' What I'm reading Some surveys show fewer parents are reading to their kids now than in the past. It could be one reason fewer kids are reading for pleasure. Even young kids see disasters like wildfires and worry about the future of our planet. These early educators are helping to give kids a sense of hope. After HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. announced last week that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention would no longer recommend Covid vaccines for healthy kids, the agency stated that the shots would now be 'recommended vaccination based on shared clinical decision-making,' meaning kids can get them after talking with their doctor (the shots should still be covered by insurance). My little kid has been enjoying the picture book I Was So Mad, which is relatable for young children because they are always mad at you for telling them not to do cool stuff. From my inbox One of the best parts of writing this newsletter is hearing from young people directly about their lives. If you're a teenager and there's something you'd like to see me cover here — or something you feel like adults always get wrong about kids your age — feel free to get in touch at (if your parents are okay with it, of course). And thanks, as always, to readers of all ages for writing in! (By emailing, you acknowledge that we may use your message in a story, and a Vox reporter may follow up with you. You also agree to Vox Media LLC Terms of Use, Privacy Policy, and Cookie Policy.)
