Friendships Among Peers

Abstract

Alongside children’s reference persons in the family and school, it is friends who are the most important social group in their lives. Children meet their peers in the neighborhoods they live in, at school, perhaps when attending institutional daycare centers in the afternoons, and also in the clubs to which they belong. And where children interact with their peers, they can also build up friendships (Pupeter and Schneekloth 2010). In different phases of life, friendships take different forms and fulfil different developmental tasks. In early childhood, they particularly take the form of joint play, and they enable children to practice solving conflicts and controlling their emotions. In middle childhood, the focus is on being socially accepted by one’s peers and avoiding rejection; and an important task during this phase is to acquire rules for expressing emotions adequately. In adolescence, friendships help young people to explore and define themselves. In this phase, they develop an understanding of the role feelings play in social relationships (Parker and Gottman 1989, as cited in Oerter and Montada 1998). Numerous studies have confirmed the importance of stable friendships for not only emotional well-being but also social competencies and problem-solving abilities in children of all ages (Salvas et al. 2011). Friends can offer emotional support when stressed, while simultaneously serving as a source of cognitive development and knowledge acquisition (Prazen et al. 2011).