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Birthdays are supposed to be fun. You eat cake, open gifts, you may have a party. They can also become a source of pressure and anxiety. And for many teenagers today, birthdays are a time when the public nature of social networks and the deprived joys of friendship collide awkwardly.
Teenagers often publish photos or messages of celebration in their Instagram stories for friends’ birthdays, Kashika, 19, told me a few weeks ago in a conversation about children and friendship. Then the birthday boy will restructure those publications on his own account. The number of publications that shares “forms an image of how many friends you could have,” Kashika explained.
Kashika, collaborator of the podcast This teenage lifeHe remembered to have seen classmates share tons of birthday stories and think: “Oh my God, they are so popular.” Then, on her birthday, not a single person published a story for her. “I felt really bathing,” he said.
The birthday publication (or lack of it) has become a common source of anxiety, according to experts who work with children. Teenagers report that “feeling a lot of pressure to publish people’s birthdays, publish in a certain way, publish efficiently, effusively,” Emily Weinstein, executive director of the Harvard downtown for Digital Proving told me. On the other hand, teenagers care about having enough people by publishing on their birthdays to “point out that you have people who really care about you” or to “show that you have a sufficient number of friends,” said Weinstein.
Birthday wishes are the way they feel pressure to “act closely” on social networks, publish photos and messages of affection publicly “as part of being a good friend and as a way of validating their own social acceptance and connection, Weinness, Weinness, Weinness, Weinness, Weinness, Weinness, Weinires”, Behind your screens.
Carrying out the proximity is not new: teenagers used to decorate the lockers of others for birthdays, Devorah Heitner, author of the book Growing up in public: majority in a digital world” I told myself (we didn’t do this at my school, and now I feel except). But social networks add a new layer of work to the social life already tense of children, which forces them to calculate how to celebrate their friends online and how to answer if their friends do not do the same for the subject.
Birthdays on social networks sacrifice a complete buffet or new stressors, children and experts told me. On the one hand, publications are easier to quantify than the decorations of the boxes. “You can literally count the tastes or count the reposts,” said Heitner. “That is very vivid.”
Just publishing on other people’s birthdays can be stressful, children say. “I used to publish for every friend he had,” Divya, 19, told me. But then he realized that other children only published birthday stories for friends who had published birthday stories for them. “She felt very weird,” said Divya, because she personally worried about having posted a birthday message for her or not.
There is also pressure for your birthday publication to reflect the level of your friendship. “Ifyone is your best friend, you have to make it very special,” Divya, a This teenage life Collaborator, he told me. “You have to do it for making your friends feel special on social networks.”
That pressure to create the perfect birthday publication that communicates the specialty of a friendship is part of a larger pattern, experts say. On the one hand, “social networks sacrifice convincing opportunities to validate relationships and show public support to others,” Weinstein and James write. On the other hand, “when much of the publication is an expectation and the exaggerated compliments are the norm, the authentic bee can feel almost impossible and know what is authentic can be read reading tea brochures.”
The pressure to perform Closesse can be exhausting and annoying, children say. Michelle, 17, told Weinstein and James that he had recently underlined because he liked the photo of a friend but could not think of an immediate comment. “I also get a lot of nervous about that, because I have to think about something fast, and it has to be something really good,” he said. Once he promised to like the position, the clock was suddenly marking. “There are definitely expectations to comment in a publication.”
Special among younger teenagers, “there is the feeling that if we are close, people should know that we are close,” said Weinstein. If they do not represent their friendship online through I like it, comments and publications, some adolescents feel that “not in some way they do not do justice to the relationship.”
As Kashika said, Instagram’s stories and other publications on social networks become “as a statement in society that this person is my friend.”
Pushing back in pressure
Performing Closses is far from exclusive to adolescents: adults are doing the same when they publish beautiful photos and subtitles in their anniversaries, Heitner said. And get Feer’s birthday publications of what he would like, or Ferher that other people can feel lousy if he is celebrating his 14th birthday or his quadrages. After all, millennials on Facebook possibly invented the culture of birthday publication (and stressful birthday comparisons along with it).
But for adolescents, whose needs for approval and social inclusion are so high, a disappointing birthday on Instagram can be special, Heitner said.
Fortunately, adolescents are developing some of their own ways of dealing with the pressure that social networks impose their friends. Some only use Instagram less generally, Heitner said. “Now it is socially acceptable to be a child who says:” I really don’t like this. I barely check it. ”
Others are learning to draw a distinction between performance and real. Kashika felt Bath “for a while”, when no one posted on his birthday, he told me. But “then I thought, no, this is only part of social networks,” he said. “It doesn’t really represent our true friendship. And then my mood improved a bit.”
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When I talk to teenagers, I like to ask them what adults these days are wrong about young people. What do we not understand? Now I am presenting you this, if you are a child or an adult with children in your life, what do you think adults are wrong? What aspects of children’s life today should be demystified or explained? Let me know at anna.north@vox.com!