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Birthdays are supposed to be fun. You eat cake, you open presents, maybe you have a party. They can also, however, become a source of pressure and anxiety. And for many teens today, birthdays are a time when the public nature of social media and the private joys of friendship awkwardly collide.

Teens often post celebratory photos or messages on their Instagram stories for friends’ birthdays, Kashika, 19, told me a few weeks ago in a conversation about kids and friendship. Then the birthday kid will reshare those posts to their own account. The number of posts you share “forms an image of how many friends you might have,” Kashika explained.

Kashika, a contributor to the podcast This Teenage Life, remembered seeing classmates share tons of birthday stories, and thinking, “Oh my God, they’re so popular.” Then, on her birthday, not a single person posted a story for her. “I felt really bad,” she said.

The birthday post (or lack thereof) has become a common source of anxiety, according to experts who work with kids. Teens report “feeling a lot of pressure to post for people’s birthdays, to post in a certain way, to post efficiently, effusively,” Emily Weinstein, executive director of Harvard’s Center for Digital Thriving, told me. On the flip side, teenagers worry about having enough people post on their birthdays to “signal that you have people who really care about you” or to “show that you have a sufficient number of friends,” Weinstein said.

Birthday wishes are one way........

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