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We advertise good friendships as part of the Complete Teenage Experience, because good friendships make for great stories. Content creators romanticize adolescent friendships the same way Hallmark movies treat love: there is a lid for every pot, a yin for every yang, and a savior for every screwup. Turn on any Netflix original movie about teenagers or read any great YA book, and you will see that the perfect sidekick (funny! supportive! quirky! endlessly loyal!) is a fixture in each teen’s life. In reality, middle school friendships play out less like Netflix originals, and more like those toy commercials that came on during Saturday morning cartoons when we were kids. As an only child, I remember yearning to have the same fun those kids were having, begging my parents for the Barbie Jeep or Hot Wheels Track until they gave in. But soon after ripping the toy from its packaging, I came to the stark realization that it was nothing like advertised. Those kids were only pretending to have fun, the set designers made the toys seem infinitely cooler than they actually were, and more often than not, we didn’t even have the right-sized batteries. What a colossal disappointment! Especially when those kids on TV looked like they were having the time of their lives.
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Michelle Icard (Fourteen Talks by Age Fourteen: The Essential Conversations You Need to Have with Your Kids Before They Start High School)