My Parle G Parent Quotient post for this week: Of friendships in the tweens

The brat is now at a stage when his friends probably mean more to him than his parents do. Other parents, who have been through this stage, assure me that this is normal and I must just reconcile myself to the fact I will now first be upstaged by friends, and this will increase progressively as love interests and then, eventually, his spouse comes into the picture.

I might as well slit my wrists now and bid good bye to the cruel world while I still make for a pretty corpse.

Seriously though, being thus displaced in the affections of the child can be a trifle dispiriting. But, one girded one’s loins, metaphorically speaking of course, and resigned oneself to the new shift in equations and watched on bemusedly as the child bounded from friendship to friendship, through spats and the kind of internal group politics that gave one a clear idea of the machinations of the adult world that they were headed towards.

So, here are the friendships of the tween world.

Read the rest here