How we raise young children is one of today's most highly personalized and sharply politicized issues, in part because each of us can claim some level of "expertise." The debate has intensified as discoveries about our development-in the womb and in the first months and years-have reached the popular media. How can we use our burgeoning knowledge to assure the well-being of all young children, for their own sake as well as for the sake of our nation? Drawing from new findings, this book presents important conclusions about nature-versus-nurture, the impact of being born into a working family, the effect of politics on programs for children, the costs and benefits of intervention, and other issues. The committee issues a series of challenges to decision makers regarding the quality of child care, issues of racial and ethnic diversity, the integration of children's cognitive and emotional development, and more. Authoritative yet accessible, From Neurons to Neighborhoods presents the evidence about "brain wiring" and how kids learn to speak, think, and regulate their behavior. It examines the effect of the climate-family, child care, community-within which the child grows.

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From Neurons to Neighborhoods: The Science of Early Childhood Development

The chapter begins with a distinction made between the interactions children have with peers, the relationships they form with peers, and the groups and networks within which peer interactions and relationships occur. From this conceptual overview, a review of relevant theories is presented. Thereafter, a developmental perspective of peer interactions, relationships, and groups is presented covering the periods of infancy, toddlerhood, early childhood, middle childhood, and adolescence. Subsequently, methods and measures pertaining to the study of children's peer experiences are described. Next, we examine factors that may account for peer acceptance and rejection as well as qualitatively rich and poor friendships. Among the factors discussed are included temperament (biological factors), sex of child, parenting, parent-child relationships, and culture. The chapter concludes with a discussion of the extent to which individual differences in peer acceptance, rejection and friendship (prevalence and quality) predict adaptive and maladaptive developmental outcomes and a suggested agenda for future research.


Keywords:

friendship;
peer interactions;
peer relationships;
peer rejection;
social acceptance;
social competence

Peer Interactions, Relationships, and Groups

Considerable evidence tells us that ?being liked? and ?being disliked? are related to social competence, but evidence concerning friendships and their developmental significance is relatively weak. The argument is advanced that the developmental implications of these relationships cannot be specified without distinguishing between having friends, the identity of one's friends, and friendship quality. Most commonly, children are differentiated from one another in diagnosis and research only according to whether or not they have friends. The evidence shows that friends provide one another with cognitive and social scaffolding that differs from what nonfriends provide, and having friends supports good outcomes across normative transitions. But predicting developmental outcome also requires knowing about the behavioral characteristics and attitudes of children's friends as well as qualitative features of these relationships.

The Company They Keep: Friendships and Their Developmental Significance

To consider friendships and their significance through the life course requires, first, differentiation of deep structure (i.e., reciprocity) from surface structure (i.e., the social exchange) and, second, assessment within a multifaceted framework that simultaneously emphasizes having friends, the identity of one's friends, and relationship quality. Having friends is correlated with a sense of well being across the life span, but developmental outcome also depends on the identity of one's friends as well as the quality of one's relationships with them. Greater attention needs to be given to the manner in which friendships differ from one another, continuities and changes across major developmental transitions, and differentiation of developmental pathways through which friendship experience contributes to individual outcome.

Friendships and adaptation in the life course.

The company they keep : friendships and their developmental significance

The purpose of this study was to assess the extent to which preferential personal attraction was associated with behavioral similarity among newly acquainted children. Participants included 69 focal children, selected from a sample of 236 7-year-old children who met, for the first time, in same-sex quartets (n = 59) for a free-play session. Within each of these quartets, a "discriminating child" was identified; this child expressed a clear preference for one of his or her playmates over one other of her or his quartet playmates. Preference was determined sociometrically after the children became acquainted during free play. The results indicated that "discriminating" children were more behaviorally similar to preferred playmates than to nonpreferred playmates both in terms of cognitive play style and social participation. Implications of the findings are discussed in terms of the relation to the acquaintanceship process.

"Birds of a Feather ...": Behavioral Concordances and Preferential Personal Attraction in Children.

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"Birds of a Feather ...": Behavioral Concordances and Preferential Personal Attraction in Children.