Cotton Candy Friends

These articles are by Vanessa Van Petten who runs RadicalParenting.com a parenting blog written from the kid’s perspective with 80 teen writers. Their goal is to give teens a voice.

“I am having a quarter-life crisis.

And it reminds me of cotton candy…how wonderful at a summer carnival, big pink fluffs of sugary goodness.  Until two hours later, then your teeth hurt a little and you are hungry for real food.

I am (maybe unfortunately) a Facebook Kid.  I was one of the first on Facebook, as Emory was in the second round of entries after the Ivy League Schools.  It was so exciting (still is often times) I could ‘friend’ the hot guy from poli sci, ‘poke’ the hot guy from the party this weekend and spy on my boyfriend’s exes pics.

Now that I am out of college, I am able to remember (and by remember I mean I get a reminder each morning) all of my friends’ birthdays, contact semi-friends in San Fran when I go for the weekend and keep up on the fact that my peeps in New York just went to an Aerosmith concert.

Great, so how does this serve me other than keeping up on pretty superficial (albeit sometimes interesting friendships)?  In the last week I have gotten calls from numerous college friends who are depressed because they have no ‘real friends.’

The teen (and 20 something) social interaction right now is like cotton candy, its fun and tasty for a little while, but after two hours you are hungry for real food, real connection.

My teen intern wrote a fabulous article on how Facebook is changing the definition of friendship and this is my follow-up article on this important issue.

1)    Possessive– “When you get cotton candy, you want it all to yourself…or you better get your share”
I have noticed that my friends and I are getting increasingly catty and possessive.

To read the rest of Vanessa’s article, please visit Cotton Candy Friends