Skip to main content icon/video/no-internet
icon backReturn to Entries

Friendship

Making friends, keeping friends, and being a friend are considered important developmental tasks from early childhood to the adolescent years. Friendships set the stage for children's development of numerous competences, including communication and cognitive skills, as well as emotion regulation and emotion understanding. Friendships also allow children to measure themselves against others, to develop a sense of self-concept, and to acquire the social skills they will use throughout their adult lives. This entry discusses the role that friendships play in school adaptation, in being accepted, and in childhood development. This entry then addresses deleterious effects and other implications of friendships.

Friendships and School Adaptation

Friendships appear to play a crucial role in children's adjustment and adaptation to school. One way that friendships may contribute to children's school performance is by directly stimulating cognitive growth and learning, thus setting the stage for later intellectual performance. Consistent with this proposal, empirical evidence suggests that children demonstrate greater problem-solving ability, task mastery, and creativity when interacting with friends than when working alone and that these skills transfer to other situations. When children collaborate with friends, they are more efficient and productive problem-solvers across a variety of tasks, including creative and oral tasks, as well as more academic tasks, such as scientific reasoning problems or writing assignments. Further evidence links the quality of children's friendships to children's academic performance. Such associations appear as early as the preschool years, with the quality of preschool children's friendships predicting academic performance in elementary school.

A second way that children's friendships may influence adjustment to school is by shaping children's attitudes and motivation toward schooling. For example, research by Carollee Howes indicates that children who moved from one day care setting to another, accompanied by friends, demonstrated higher levels of social competence than children making a similar transition without a friend. Brian Vaughn and his colleagues report a similar finding for preschool children advancing from one Head Start classroom to another. Gary Ladd and his colleagues document the positive value of entering kindergarten in the company of friends on children's adjustment. Particularly noteworthy is their finding that children who moved into kindergarten with mutual friends were better adjusted to school than children who made the transition with acquaintances who were not friends. The transition process from elementary to middle school also appears to proceed more smoothly for children who have friends. Specifically, Kathryn Wentzel found that students who had a friend upon entering middle school displayed better academic and social adjustment at the end of their first year of middle school than students without a friend. In addition to helping children cope with the normative stress that accompanies the transition to a new school, evidence suggests that friendships may help children cope with nonnormative stresses such as becoming the victim of a school bully. In contrast, children without friends not only report being lonely and feeling depressed but also exhibit inappropriate classroom behavior.

Friends, Acquaintances, and Peer Acceptance

The impact that friendships have on children's school adjustment may result from the uniqueness of the friendship relationship compared to children's other social relationships. A great deal of research has been devoted to identifying differences between children's interactions with acquaintances versus friends. Evidence from this body of work suggests that friends feel a sense of responsibility for one another's needs, that they assist each other in meeting those needs, and that they expect no repayment of the assistance they provide to their friend. In contrast, acquaintances tend to feel less responsibility for one another and are more likely to distinguish the circumstances under which they will provide support to each other. In a comprehensive meta-analysis of studies comparing friends and nonfriends, Andrew Newcomb and Catherine Bagwell concluded that friends engage in more frequent positive interactions, including talking, cooperation, and positive affect, than do peers not identified as friends. Friends are also more similar behaviorally to one another, more egalitarian, more loyal to one another, and less likely to assert dominance over one another than are children who are simply acquaintances. These characteristics are presumably a consequence of friends' greater proximity, heightened mutual interest, and intense concern for one another, and they point to the unique affiliative bond that friends share.

...

  • Loading...
locked icon

Sign in to access this content

Get a 30 day FREE TRIAL

  • Watch videos from a variety of sources bringing classroom topics to life
  • Read modern, diverse business cases
  • Explore hundreds of books and reference titles

Read next

More like this

Sage Recommends

We found other relevant content for you on other Sage platforms.

close

Have you created a personal profile? Login or create a profile so that you can save clips, playlists and searches

close
close
close Signed In to profile You are signed in as:
close
Logged in Institution Institution