Friendship in Childhood and Adolescence

Phil Erwin

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780415162326
• eBook ISBN: 9781317798521
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: History & Theory in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

Friendships are crucial to children's well-being and happiness and lay important foundations upon which later relationships in adolescence and adulthood are built.

This clear, well-structured overview of the nature and significance of children's and adolescents' friendships examines issues such as the impact of social-cognitive development, relationship problems, and methods of promoting positive relationships.

Chapter 1
Introduction and background

■	Friendship and other relationships
■	Numbers of friends
■	Why form friendships?
	Friendship motivation
	A training ground for relationship skills
	Confidence in intimacy
	Exchanging and testing social knowledge
	Stimulating social cognitive development
	Companionship and social support
	Emotional buffering
■	Stages of relating
	Acquaintance
	Build-up
	Continuation and consolidation
	Deterioration
	Ending
■	Integrative overview of the book
■	Summary
■	Further reading

ALTHOUGH CHILDREN'S PEER RELATIONSHIPS have been the subject of research attention since at least the 1920s, it is only since the 1970s that systematic theories have been proposed to integrate the rapidly growing body of empirical knowledge. Children are involved in a variety of relationships with parents, other adults, siblings, peers and so on. Two simple characteristics which distinguish children's peer relationships from their other relationships are their levels of equality and power. Relationships with peers are relationships broadly among equals. Both parties benefit from and contribute to the relationship in roughly equal measure and there is a broad balance of power. In contrast, many of a child's relationships are more hierarchically structured and are decidedly unequal. Older children and adults, especially parents, have considerably greater knowledge, resources and power and so are much more able to determine the course of a relationship and the relative outcomes for themselves and the child. The focus of this book is on children's relationships with their peers and, more specifically, children's friendships - their well-established reciprocal relationships with peers. However, these relationships do exist within a broader social context which includes a range of previous and current other social and personal relationships and so it is also important to bear these potential influences in mind if we are to fully understand the nature and significance of children's friendships.

In this chapter I will provide a contextual and integrative setting for the other chapters in the book. The contextual function of this chapter is fulfilled by an examination of several broad background issues. In the first section I examine the place of children's peer relationships within the child's broader social network. The subsequent sections consider the extent of children's friendship networks and even why children almost inevitably seek to form relationships with peers. A functional analysis would argue that relationships exist because they serve some generally adaptive purpose or function. Although friendship is the goal of many social relationships it is but a late stage in a more dynamic process of acquaintanceship. In recognition of the dynamic developmental forces within relationships some views on the sequential development of relationships are considered. Taken together, these issues lay a trail which leads to several major themes which are followed up in the remaining chapters of the book. These are briefly outlined to show how they relate to each other and the contextual issues covered in this chapter.

Friendship and other relationships

Children's earliest relationships are normally with the primary caregiver, usually the mother, and the rest of the immediate family. Throughout early childhood parents remain the major source of nurturance and the relationship that children have with their parents is closely linked to their current and future sense of wellbeing and happiness (Greenberg et al., 1983). The significance of peer relationships increases and changes with age. For young children, relationships with parents are undoubtedly a considerably more important source of support and nurturance than are relationships with peers. From middle childhood through to adulthood this pattern changes and children's relationships with their peers become increasingly stable, intimate and personally significant, while those with parents become increasingly concerned with routine matters such as behavioural and time management issues (Furman and Buhrmester, 1992). What time they can stay out till or styles of clothing are common sources of conflict between adolescents and parents in early- and mid-adolescence. By earlyto mid-adolescence, relationships with peers have overtaken those with parents as sources of intimacy and social support.

Numbers of friends

The social contacts of young children are mainly with kin. To a large extent they are dependent on their parents for any social contacts outside of the immediate family. Parents are largely responsible for arranging contacts, venues, times and transportation to meetings. These early social contacts are relatively superficial and transient but represent an important precursor and preparation for the more sophisticated relationships of later childhood onwards. Parents providing their children with such experiences are giving them an important head start on their less fortunate counterparts.

With age, the child's social network includes proportionately more peers and there is more daily contact with peers. Research by Feiring and Lewis (1989) on the social networks of 3- to 9-year-old children showed that even children as young as 3 often have fairly extensive social networks, on average twenty-two social contacts. By middle childhood this may have risen to thirtynine. Although children's daily contacts generally contain more non-relatives than relatives, and more adults than peers, this pattern is likely to be more marked in older children. About a third of a child's social network may be comprised of peers, and with age children show steadily increasing levels of daily interactions with these individuals.

Children start to use the term 'best' friend at about the age of 4. At this age most children will be involved in at least one close, reciprocated peer relationship (Hinde et a I., 1985), though this may be almost the full extent of the friendship network. Throughout the school years there is greater opportunity and ability to establish and maintain friendships and they increase in number from five or six at age 6 to about nine or ten at age 9 (Feiring and Lewis, 1989). However, the meaning that young children ascribe to the term 'best friend' is different from its use by older children. Throughout middle-childhood best friends may be chosen because of the demands of specific situations or occasions (Ray et al., 1995). As examples, children may have different friends at school and in the home neighbourhood, and specific individuals may be chosen when certain games are played. At this age many friendships are relatively transient, but they are also formed easily and children gain more friends than they lose (Buhrmester and Furman, 1987). With the advent of adolescence, relationships assume a new character and intimacy - and they also become considerably more irreplaceable. The overall number of close friendships possessed by an individual declines slightly as some relationships collapse and are not replaced (Hallinan, 1980).

Why form friendships?

Friendships, and peer relationships in general, serve a number of important functions for the individual. From the general literature on children's peer relationships I have compiled the list below. At any point in time a given relationship may serve one or several of these functions and different functions may be emphasised in different situations or at different points in a relationship.

Friendship motivation

There has long been a recognition by motivational theorists of a basic need for social relationships, termed variously affiliation, affection, or intimacy needs. An exponent of humanistic psychology, Abraham Maslow (1954), suggested a hierarchy of five needs, rising from physiological motives, through safety, love and belonging, esteem to self-actualisation. The lower needs were seen as more significant for survival and as appearing earlier in evolution and development. Higher motives supposedly do not appear until earlier motives have been satisfied. It is interesting to note that relationship needs appear immediately after basic physical needs. Although Maslow's theory has proved popular, some behaviour (e.g. putting yourself in danger to help another) does not seem to fit particularly well into the pattern.

McAdams and Losoff (1984) propose a specific friendship motive as a dimension of personality. They argue that to the extent that relationships satisfy this motive they possess an intrinsic reward value for the individual. Conversely, deprivation of adequate social relationships is aversive and isolated individuals may feel lonely, marginalised and depressed. Isolated and lonely individuals may fantasise about possessing fulfilling relationships and interact with others in increasingly defensive and desperate ways (Jones et al., 1982).

A training ground for relationship skills

Peer relationships give children the opportunity to learn and practise their social-interaction skills with equals. In the case of friendships this includes the skills required to co-operatively build and maintain close relationships, to manage communication, conflict, trust and intimacy. Perhaps surprisingly, friends often tend to quarrel and disagree more than individuals in more casual relationships, but this may be seen as an essential training in how to manage such conflicts in a non-destructive way that will generally permit the relationship to continue and possibly even grow (Shantz, 1993). Of course, not all relationships do continue and flourish and an equally important function of children's relationships is the training they provide in how to cope with the ending of relationships that have gone wrong.

Confidence in intimacy

To a large extent, the intimacy of childhood and adolescent peer relationships may be seen as a continuation of early attachment relationships (Sroufe and Fleeson, 1986). However, Sullivan (1953) also highlighted preadolescence as a crucial time for the development of the first genuinely intimate peer relationships, relationships removed from the dependence on older people. Sullivan saw the close, same-sex friendships of preadolescence as crucial for the development of a sensitivity to the needs of others, our current happiness and later social adjustment. Crucially, this era and these relationships were seen as potentially repairing the damage of earlier poor relationships.

Exchanging and testing social knowledge

Again, Sullivan (1953) was an early writer to stress the role of friendships in preadolescence as an important source of insight and information about the Self. We see ourselves reflected in how others react to us. Relationships do, however, also serve as more general sources of information about others and the world in general. This informational function of relationships is likely to increase in importance with age and as the child increasingly depends on peer relationships rather than relationships with parents.

In terms of testing social knowledge, Festinger (1954) argues that there is a basic need or motivation to evaluate our abilities and attitudes. Arguably, an accurate awareness of our standing enables us to operate more effectively in our world. Many physical skills can be tested objectively. For example, we can time ourselves at running in order to evaluate our ability. Flowever, many attitudes, values and social skills cannot be objectively evaluated and so to test these we must make social comparisons. An individual can evaluate his or her social abilities or attitudes by comparing them with the social abilities and attitudes held by others. This provides a consensual validation rather than an objective validation. It has been argued that the efficacy and social competence resulting from this consensual validation is so important and rewarding to us that we tend to seek out and associate with others who are similar to ourselves. Conversely, we may avoid and be repulsed by very dissimilar individuals. For example, the tendency for children's friends to hold similar attitudes has, at least in part, been explained in these terms (Tan and Singh, 1995). You may well have spotted that this, of course, does tend to mean that in reality we are seeking confirmation rather than a true evaluation of our attitudes and abilities!

Stimulating social cognitive development

Social and cognitive development are intimately related. As you will see throughout this book, developing cognitive abilities are the foundation on which children's relationships are built. But it also works the other way round. Social interaction can promote cognitive development. Working together, children can often solve problems which neither child could have solved on their own (Doise and Mugny, 1984). Working through a difficult problem in a free and open manner with an equal status peer can often be more instructive than being told a solution or procedure by an older child or adult.

Companionship and social support

At the very simplest level, being involved in a relationship is generally regarded as stimulating and good fun by children. They make the child a person of major importance to a figure significant in his or her social world. These friendships may serve to provide stimulation and distraction from other less attractive tasks and duties, provide assistance with difficult tasks and situations, or simply make a mundane activity more enjoyable. A task shared is often a task whose enjoyment is multiplied.

The guaranteed support of peers also protects the child against the travails of the wider social milieu, though in this they may sow the seeds of conflicts for children and parents as the parental role becomes increasingly concerned with daily care and management of the child rather than intimacy (Furman and Buhrmester, 1992). With age, peaking in adolescence, friends may increasingly provide social support for children as they question family rules and obligations, especially as they relate to issues of the child's personal or social identity (Sebald and White, 1980). Common conflicts might be over the child's style of dress, chosen companions, smoking, or perhaps the use of a social drug such as Ecstasy. Sometimes, of course, these conflicts are merely intended to test the limits of parental rules, or even simply to irritate! Despite the points that I have just made about the conflicting demands of peer groups and parents, the rebellion of...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Series preface
• 1 Introduction and background
• 2 Attachment and later relationships
• 3 Social cognitive bases of children's peer relationships
• 4 Patterns of social interaction
• 5 Adolescence
• 6 Relationships in context
• 7 Relationship problems
• 8 Improving peer relationships
• Glossary
• References
• Index