Childhood Friendships and Social Capital

Adult Friendships

• Friendships provide social capital, or resources, and reduce mental health problems associated with stigmatization.
• Close peer and friendships groups lessen mental health problems like depression.
• Single people place high value on friendships.
• Many adults follow the "friendship model", where committed roommate arrangements become family.

Childhood Friendships

• Most children form friendships, but about 10% fail to do so.
• Social reciprocity and mutuality are central to the meaning of friendships for almost everyone.
• The word "friend" usually appears in the third or fourth year, and preschool-aged children may miss their friends when they are absent.
• Children typically define friendship in terms of concrete reciprocities, such as "We play".
• In preschool years, 75% of children have preferred playmates, and play is the main content of their interactions.
• By middle childhood, 85% of children have a best friend and several good friends.
• Girls' self-ratings of their friendships are more intimate, and self-disclosure is more common.
• Girls also employ relational aggression more frequently than boys.

Cross-Gender Friendships

• Cross-gender friendships provide an insider's perspective on how members of the other sex think, feel, and behave.
• In early childhood, 30% of preschool children's friends are other-gendered, but this percentage declines through middle childhood to 5%.
• Cross-gender friendships are nearly non-existent in middle childhood.
• In adolescence, 25% of teenagers' friendship networks become mixed gender, and individuals have more and closer cross-sex friends.
• Other-gender friends are likely to be "secondary" rather than "best friends" throughout childhood.

Friendship Expectations

• Young children expect friendships to involve common interests and concrete reciprocities, mainly in play.
• Older children describe friends as sharing values and rules about loyalty and trust.
• Friends expect to spend time together, engage in constructive conflict resolution, and share interests.
• Adolescent friends expect shared interests, understanding, empathy, and intimacy, and similarity between themselves and their friends is increasingly important.
• Symmetrical reciprocities remain the major basis for friendships, and continued consensual validation and commitment are required for friendships to be maintained.

General Research Findings

• Family relationships in earliest childhood set the stage for relationships with peers.
• Early caregiving and attachment security are antecedents of harmony, responsiveness, and competence in peer interaction during childhood and beyond.
• Coercive mother-child relations may lead to aggressive behavior during childhood, both at home and outside.
• Good family relations in the earliest years do not necessarily predict friendship functioning in either early or middle childhood.
• Peer competence linked to early family relationships predicts having friends and friendship functioning in childhood.
• "Only" children are more likely to have imaginary friends than those who have siblings.
• Sibling relationships and friendships are different social contexts, especially in terms of conflict.
• Friendships in childhood "buffer" children from family vulnerabilities and stress.