Bubble tea is expensive, sugary and, as my kids have discovered, causing tween warfare | Emma Brockes

At Tea Magic in New York, I'm happy to indulge my girls and their friends in the latest soft-drink craze. Until things kick off

Last Friday, I took four nine-year-old girls to their favourite after-school hang-out, Tea Magic, a place that is distinct from, and in their view superior to, Shiny Tea, Gong Cha Tea, Coco Tea and Mochi Dulci. If you had to create in a laboratory an environment to appeal to tween girls it would be this one: on each wall, huge Hello Kitty-type murals and a menu involving combined fluorescent syrups and a range of brightly coloured add-ons loosely inspired by the tapioca boba tea". Within seven minutes, everyone was jacked up on sugar, including a group of girls from a rival elementary school, whereupon things briefly got exciting.

As someone who grew up in the era of Panda Cola, I'll admit that fashion as expressed through the medium of soft drinks is something I occasionally struggle with. Fifteen years ago, I was kind of on board with iced coffee, which was a mistake. (First, the ice means you get less coffee, which means the Man wins again. Second, when the ice melts, you are effectively drinking coffee-flavoured water; wise up people, this isn't desirable). More recently, when fruit-flavoured seltzer became a thing in New York - specifically, the brand La Croix - I wasn't on board with that, either, mainly because I'm not 14 years old, and also because we buy our seltzer in 32-can off-brand crates from Costco that cost about half the price.

Emma Brockes is a Guardian columnist