Best friends (My Parent Quotient post from last week)

The minefield of friendships and best friends and second best friends is something that the boy seems to be negotiating carefully these days. At the best, to take the minefield analogy a bit further, it could be called a tap dance in a minefield. The boy has around ten to 12 friends in the building complex we live in who could be called his good friends. And another ten to twelve friends from school he interacts with out of school hours via phone calls and whatsapp groups.

What I notice though, and what is strikingly different from how things were when I was young and in school, is that there don’t seem to be best friends anymore. Kids these days have many good friends, close friends, groups of friends. But they don’t have best friends. That one friend who is closer to them than perhaps, even siblings are. And that intrigues me.

“Don’t you have a best friend?” I asked him the other day.

He looked at me blankly. “I have many best friends,” he replied, rattling off names with the speed of a passing express train.

“That’s not what I mean,” I tried again. “Isn’t there one friend who is your very best friend, over all the other friends?”

He frowned a bit, and thought deeply. “Sometimes, I am best friends with A, then he is rude to me and we have a fight, then I become best friends with P and then I might have a fight with him and we don’t talk so then I be good friends with everyone.”

Read the rest of the post here