Having Friends, Making
Friends,
and Keeping Friends:
Relationships as Educational Contexts
Willard W. Hartup
Peer relations contribute substantially to both social and
cognitive development and to the effectiveness with which we
function as adults. Indeed, the single best childhood predictor
of adult adaptation is not school grades, and not classroom
behavior, but rather, the adequacy with which the child gets
along with other children. Children who are generally disliked,
who are aggressive and disruptive, who are unable to sustain
close relationships with other children, and who cannot establish
a place for themselves in the peer culture, are seriously at
risk.
The Conditions of Friendship
The essentials of friendship are reciprocity and commitment
between individuals who see themselves more or less as equals.
Interaction between friends rests on a more equal power base than
the interaction between children and adults. Some writers regard
friendships as "affiliative relations" rather than
attachments; nonetheless, young children make a large emotional
investment in their needs, and their relationships are relatively
enduring. The main themes in friendship relations-affiliation and
common interests-are first understood by children in early
childhood. Among preschool and younger school aged children,
expectations for friendship center on common pursuits and
concrete reciprocities. Later, children's views about their
friends center on mutual understanding, loyalty, and trust.
Children also expect to spend time with their friends, share
their interests, and engage in self-disclosure with them. Friends
have fun with one another; they enjoy doing things together; and
they care about one another. Although school aged children and
adolescents never use words like empathy or intimacy to describe
their friends, in their thinking, these constructs distinguish
friends from other children.
Friendship Functions
Friendships are emotional resources, both for having fun and adapting to stress;
cognitive resources for problem-solving and knowledge
acquisition; contexts in which basic social skills (for example,
social communication, cooperation, and group entry skills) are
acquired or elaborated; and forerunners of subsequent
relationships. Above all, friendships are egalitarian. They are symmetrically or
horizontally structured, in contrast to adult-child relationships, which are
asymmetrically or vertically structured. Friends are similar to each other in
developmental status, engaging each other mostly in play and socializing.
Friends as emotional resources. As emotional
resources, friendships furnish children with the security to strike out into new
territory, meet new people, and tackle new problems. Friends set the emotional
stage for exploring one's surroundings, not unlike the manner in which
caretakers serve as secure bases for the young child. These relationships also
support the processes involved with having fun. Researchers have found that the
duration and frequency of laughing, smiling, looking, and talking are greater
between friends than between strangers, and that friends mimic one another more
extensively. Friendships may buffer children and adolescents from the adverse
effects of negative events, such as family conflict, terminal illness, parents'
unemployment, and school failure. Some studies suggest that friendships ease the
stress associated with divorce, though in different manners for boys and girls.
School-aged boys turn readily to friends, seemingly to distance themselves from
the troubled household. Girls, however, enter into friendships but need their
mother support.
Friends as cognitive resources. Children
teach one another in many situations and are generally effective
in this activity. Peer teaching occurs in four main varieties:
Peer tutoring is the didactic transmission of information from
one child to another, ordinarily from an expert to a novice.
Cooperative learning requires children to combine problem-solving
contributions and share rewards.
Peer collaboration, in contrast, occurs when novices work
together on tasks that neither can do separately. Peer modeling
refers to information transferred by imitation. It has yet to be
determined whether friends are better tutors than non-friends or
the manner in which friendship cooperative learning and modeling.
Peer collaboration among both friends and non-friends has been
studied more extensively. One would expect friends to share
motives and develop verbal and motor scripts that enable them to
combine their talents in achieving their goals. And indeed,
recent studies show that collaboration with friends results in
more mastery of certain tasks than collaboration between
non-friends. Friends talk more, take more time to work out
differences in their understanding of game rules, and compromise
more readily than non-friends do. This evidence suggests that
friendships are unique contexts for transmitting information from
one child to another. Friendship and social skills. Considerable
evidence shows that both cooperation and conflict occur more
often in friendships than in other contexts. Preschool children
engage in more frequent cooperative exchanges with their friends
than with neutral associates or with children whom they don't
like. Conflicts occur more often between friends than with
non-friends, but friends emphasize disengagement and equity in
conflict management to a greater extent than non-friends do.
Research corroborates the notion that children's relationships
with their friends support cooperation and reciprocity and
effective conflict management. Friendships are thought to be
templates for subsequent relationships. While new relationships
are never exact copies of old ones, the organization of behavior
in relationships generalizes from old ones to new ones. Smoothly
functioning friendships have been shown to rub-off on
relationships between preschool children and their younger
siblings.
Friendship Experience and Developmental
Outcomes
Relatively few investigators have actually sought to verify
the developmental significance of friendship. The issue is
certainly complicated. Close relationships may support good
adjustment and its development, but, alternatively, well-adjusted
children may simply be better at establishing friendships than
poorly adjusted ones. Nevertheless, studies show that friendships
forecast good adjustment during the early weeks of kindergarten,
and that making new friends changes children's adjustment in
positive directions during the school year.
Outcomes, however, may depend on the nature of the
relationship. Friendships are not all alike. Some are secure and
smooth-sailing; others are rocky with disagreement and
contention. New evidence shows that these differences spill over
into school adjustment. Students whose friendships are marked by
conflict and rivalry become progressively disruptive and
disengaged. However, close relationships are unlikely to
contribute to everything. While emerging evidence strongly
suggests that having friends, making friends, and keeping them
forecasts good developmental outcomes, it is unlikely that these
results can be attributed exclusively to such relationships. On
the contrary, friendship may contribute more to certain
adaptations, such as positive self-attitudes or self-regard, than
to social skills broadly conceived. Friendship may also
contribute more to relationship functioning (for example, with
siblings, other friends, or romantic partners) than to being
generally well-liked.
Whether friends are necessities in child and adolescent
development remains uncertain. Should friends not be available,
other relationships may be elastic enough to serve the friendship
functions enumerated earlier. Children with friends are better
off than children without friends, but if necessary, other
relationships may be substituted for friendships. Consequently,
friendships are best viewed as developmental advantages rather
than developmental necessities, and the current evidence
concerning friendships as educational contexts should be read in
this light.
Editor's Note: This is the first in a series of three
ERIC/EECE digests that focus on children's peer relationships as
educational contexts. These digests are adapted from articles
that originally appeared in the Fall 1991 (Vol. 19, No.1) issue
of the Early Report to the University of Minnesota's Center for
Early Education and Development.
For More Information
Hartup, Willard W., and Moore, Shirley G. "Early Peer
Relations: Developmental Significance and Prognostic
Implications." Early Childhood Research Quarterly 5 (March,
1990): 1-17.
Hartup, Willard W., and Laursen, Brett. Contextual Constraints
and Children's Friendship Relations. ERIC Document number ED 310
848.
Katz, Lilian G. and McClellan, Diane E. The Teacher's Role in
the Social Development of Young Children. Urbana, IL: ERIC/EECE,
1991. ED 331 642.
Ladd, Gary W. "Having Friends, Keeping Friends, Making
Friends and Being Liked by Peers in the Classroom: Predictors of
Children's Early School Adjustment?" Child Development, 61
(August, 1990): 1,081-1,100.
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Fall 1991