chapter summary:

What Is Special About Peer Relationships

• Theorists such as Piaget, Vygotsky, and Sullivan have argued that the equality, reciprocity, cooperation, and intimacy that characterize many peer relationships enhance children’s ability to reason and their concern for others.

Friendships

• Consistent with theorists’ arguments, peers (especially friends) provide intimacy, support, and rich opportunities for the development of play and for exchange of ideas.
• Even very young children prefer some children over others. Toddlers engage in more complex and cooperative play with friends than with nonfriends, and those who engage in such play exhibit more positive and social behavior with peers when they are older.
• As children grow, friends rely on one another and increasingly provide a context for self-disclosure and intimacy. Adolescent friends, more than younger friends, use friendship as a context for self-exploration, personal problem solving, and as a source of honest feedback.
• Children’s conceptions of friends change with age. Young children define friendship primarily on the basis of actual activities with their peers. With age, issues such as loyalty, mutual understanding, trust, cooperative reciprocity, and self-disclosure become important components of friendship.
• As was suggested by Piaget, Vygotsky, and Sullivan, friends provide emotional support; validation or confirmation of the legitimacy of one’s own thoughts, feelings, and worth; and opportunities for the development of important social and cognitive skills.
• Having friends is associated with positive developmental outcomes, such as social competence and adjustment. However, friends also may have negative effects on children if they engage in problematic behaviors such as violence or substance abuse.
• Intervention programs can be helpful in teaching children social skills. One common approach, social-skills training, involves teaching children skills related to three types of deficits: lack of social knowledge, problems in performing appropriate behaviors, and a lack of appropriate monitoring and self-evaluation. Many recent programs include procedures to foster children’s understanding and communication of emotion and their self-regulation.
• Children tend to become friends with peers who are similar in age, sex, and race, and who are similar in behaviors such as aggression, sociability, and cooperativeness.
• The degree to which adults encourage children to play with unrelated peers varies greatly in different cultures, as does the degree to which parents expect their children to develop social skills with peers (e.g., negotiating, taking initiative, standing up for their rights). In addition, the hours children spend with unrelated peers varies considerably across cultures.

Peers in Groups

• The size of very young children’s playgroups increases with age, and dominance hierarchies emerge by preschool age.
• By middle childhood, most children belong to cliques of same-sex peers, and members of cliques often are similar in their aggressiveness and orientation toward school. Membership in these cliques is not very stable over time.
• In adolescence, the importance of cliques tends to diminish, and adolescents tend to belong to more than one group. With increasing age, adolescents are not only more autonomous but also tend to look more to individual relationships rather than to a social group to fulfill their social needs. Nonetheless, adolescents often are members of crowds. In adolescence, girls and boys associate with one another more with increasing age, both as members of social groups and in dyadic relationships.
• In some circumstances, the peer group may contribute to the development of antisocial behavior, alcohol consumption, and substance use, although youths may also actively seek out peers who engage in similar levels of these behaviors.

Status in the Peer Group

• On the basis of their sociometric ratings, children typically have been classified as popular, rejected, neglected, average, or controversial.
• Children’s status in the larger peer group varies as a function of their social behavior and thinking about their social interactions, as well as their physical attractiveness.
• Popular children—those who rank high on sociometric measures—tend to be socially skilled, prosocial, and well regulated in their expression of emotion and behavior. In contrast, children who are perceived as popular in terms of high status often are aggressive and not always well liked.
• Children who are rejected by their peers often (but not always) are aggressive and/or socially withdrawn. Rejected-aggressive children are low in social skills, tend to make hostile attributions about others’ intentions, and have trouble coming up with constructive strategies for dealing with difficult social situations. Withdrawn children who are rejected during preschool tend to be aggressive and hostile.
• Children who are withdrawn from their peers but are not hostile or aggressive are at less risk for rejection during the early school years, although they tend to become rejected later in elementary school.
• Neglected children—those who are not nominated by peers as either liked or disliked—tend to be less sociable, aggressive, and disruptive than average children. They display relatively few behaviors that differ greatly from those of many other children.
• Controversial children tend to have characteristics of both popular and rejected children: they tend to be aggressive, disruptive, and prone to anger, as well as helpful, cooperative, sociable, good at sports, and humorous.
• Although children’s status with their peers frequently changes over time, those children who are rejected frequently remain rejected. Children who are neglected or controversial are particularly likely to change their status, even over short periods.
• In general, in numerous cultures, children who are popular or rejected share similar characteristics. However, reticent behavior may be more valued in some East Asian cultures and has, at least until recently, been related in China to others’ perceptions of a child’s social competence.
• Rejection by peers in childhood—especially rejection because of aggression—predicts subsequent academic problems, delinquency, substance abuse, social withdrawal, and loneliness and depression. Children who are consistently withdrawn, reticent, and wary with familiar people, including peers, are more likely than less withdrawn children to experience internalizing problems such as depression, low self-worth, and loneliness concurrently and at older ages. It is likely that children’s maladaptive behavior and their peer status both play a causal role in their future adjustment—separately and in combination.

The Role of Parents in Children’s Peer Relationships

• Consistent with the predictions of attachment theorists, securely attached children tend to be more positive in their behavior and affect, more socially skilled, and better liked than insecurely attached children.
• Parents of socially competent and popular children are more likely than parents of less competent children to use warm control, positive verbalizations, reasoning, and explanations in interactions with their children. They also hold more positive beliefs about their children’s abilities. It is likely that the causal links between quality of parenting and children’s social competence are bidirectional and that both environmental and biological factors play a role in the development of children’s social competence with peers.
• Parents are the gatekeepers of young children’s peer interactions in the sense that they organize and control their children’s social experiences.
• Some parents provide emotional coaching for their children to help them in their social interactions with peers. Such coaching, if appropriate and sensitive, often is associated with children’s social competence.
• Stressors such as poverty and marital conflict appear to have a negative effect on the quality of parenting, which in turn is linked to low peer competence in children.