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Friendships in Childhood

This entry describes friendships in childhood and examines their developmental significance. Most children succeed in forming these relationships, although about 10 percent fail to do so. Enormous differences exist in the number of these relationships that children have, the traits that characterize friends, and the texture of these relationships. Friendships also change in important ways from their earliest manifestations on through childhood and into adolescence even though certain features remain constant.

Social reciprocity and mutuality are central to the meaning of friendships for almost everyone. Sometimes these reciprocities consist of equivalence in resource exchanges; mostly, however, “giving-and-taking” in a broader sense undergirds the attraction that exists between friends both in childhood and adulthood. The most significant age changes observed in childhood occur in the individual's awareness and understanding of these reciprocities and their implications. Cognitive and affective representations of friendship change considerably, but the underlying meaning structure, based in reciprocity, remains constant.

Aspects of Friendship in Childhood

Incidence

Infants and toddlers sometimes show preferences for one another, seeking out other youngsters who have been more-or-less regularly responsive to them. These preferences are revealed in the time that children spend with particular playmates and are not especially nuanced linguistically or affectively. Young children are known to be less fearful of strange situations in the company of a familiar peer rather than an unfamiliar one, but familiarity is not equivalent to friendship.

The word friend usually appears in the third or fourth year, and sometimes preschool-aged children miss their friends when they are absent or talked about. Usually, friendship is defined by the young child in terms of concrete reciprocities (“We play”) and, during the preschool years, approximately 75 percent have preferred playmates. Play, indeed, is the main content of the interaction between friends at this age, and the proportion of the child's time spent with specific partners is a good index to use in identifying these relationships. The number of children possessing these relationships rises during middle childhood when about 85 percent have a best friend and several good friends.

Friendship networks consisting of children and their friends are relatively small during early childhood (approximately 1.7 and .9 for boys and girls, respectively) becoming somewhat larger in middle childhood (3.0 to 5.0, depending on whether unreciprocated choices are included). Amount of time spent with friends increases until adolescence, when about 30 percent of time awake is spent with these associates.

Gender

Children's friendships are gender concordant. About 30 percent of preschool children's friends are other-sex, but this percentage declines through middle childhood reaching 5 percent and rising again in adolescence when about 25 percent of teenagers' friendship networks become mixed-sex. Other-sex friends are likely to be “secondary” rather than “best friends” throughout childhood. Girls have a higher proportion of other-sex friends than boys do, and the other-sex friends of girls are likely to be older than themselves whereas the opposite is the case for boys.

Boys and girls do not differ in the proportion of children who have friends. Every observer knows, however, that the activities of boys with their friends are different from the activities of girls with theirs. During middle childhood, intimacy is a much greater concern in girls' talk about their friends than in boys' talk. Self-ratings of their friendships by girls are more intimate than are those of boys and self-disclosure is more common. At the same time, girls employ relational aggression (including threats to terminate these relationships) more frequently than boys do. Children of both sexes understand these differences. Little is known, however, about intimacy in friendship interaction that is based in camaraderie and shared mastery.

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