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Close Relationships In Children

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Close relationships among both younger and older children are usually described in terms of harmonious interaction, common interests, and social support. Friends are believed to come together and maintain their relationships on the basis of common ground and expectations that cost-benefit ratios will be generally favorable in their interactions. Children's friendships began to be studied at about the same time that developmental psychology was emerging as a separate discipline: W. S. Monroe (1899), an American, published a seminal study of children's friendships at the close of the 19th century dealing with children's expectations about their friends, what is valued in these relationships, and the organization of clubs and gangs. For example, …show more content…

Finally, associating with antisocial friends increases a child's antisocial behavior more than contact with nonaggressive friends, especially among children who are themselves aggressive and rejected (Dishion, 1990). Dyadic processes have been shown to depend on the characteristics of the children involved in the exchange. Some of the differences in children's development that are traceable to characteristics of their partners may emanate from modeling or reinforcement of the normative behavior that the partners manifest.Among 4-year-olds, however, the word "friend" is frequently used, and about three quarters of children at this age are involved in friendships, as indicated by the amount of time they spend together as well as the reciprocal and affective nature of their interaction (Howes, 1983). Some of the differences in children's development that are traceable to characteristics of their partners may emanate from modeling or reinforcement of the normative behavior that the partners …show more content…

On the other hand, two children who "do not like one another at all" are almost certainly involved in a relationship that can be called antipathetic. These rates exceed the number of children who would mutually nominate one another by chance on a sociometric test (Abecassis et al., 2002) and also exceed the percentage of children ordinarily found to be socially rejected by their classmates. We do not know, however, whether the mutual antipathies identified in these studies by sociometric methods are recognized by the children as reciprocated rejection or whether they are regarded as relationships at all. Although we may possess a stable estimate of the incidence of mutual antipathies in middle childhood, we can say almost nothing about their salience to the children themselves. Whether young children involved in mutual antipathies are similar or different from one another compared with "neutral" companions is not

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