Making Sense of Social Development

Dorothy Faulkner, Karen Littleton, Martin Woodhead

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781136223662
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

This book explores children's social relationships in and out of the classroom. Chapters focus on the growing importance of children's friendships and how these influence social participation and development later on in life. Issues such as peer rejection, bullying and adolescent development are analysed from both psychological and sociological perspectives. The book concludes with a re-examination of cultural concepts of childhood, child development and the nature of children's autonomy.

Part I

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A world apart?

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Chapter 1

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Children’s friendships and peer culture*

James Youniss

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Introduction

The ideas for this chapter begin with a disparity between the literature on children’s friendship and peer culture and the literature on adults’ social networks and social support. Over the past 15 years, studies of friendship and peer culture have evolved into a fairly coherent view regarding the social construction of the individual, or self, through interpersonal relationships. Children construct themselves in collaboration with peers and friends as well as parents. In the process, they come to realize the necessity of taking account of others’ ideas and of reaching consensus with them. Within friendship, children also recognize the normativeness of the principle of reciprocity and understand that personal resources can be shared for mutual benefit. This leads ultimately to a moral sense of interpersonal responsibility and mutual concern (e.g., Corsaro & Eder, 1990; Damon, 1988; Youniss, 1981).

The literature on adult networks and support is grounded in a different set of premises about the individual and interpersonal relationships. Individuals are pictured as independent agents who adapt to reality by using whichever resources they personally have and can elicit from others. This viewpoint seems akin to the old Parsonian version of the adaptive individual in the era of modernity (Parsons & Bales, 1955; Smith, 1980). There is irony to the fact that some of the first studies of networks done by sociologists were generated, in part, to challenge this Parsonian viewpoint (Smith, 1980). Fischer (1982), Wellman (1979), and others attempted to show that contemporary adults living in urban settings in industrialized nations did not view themselves as independent, rational agents whose relationships with others were chiefly strategic. Rather, these persons had and valued close, noninstrumental relationships in which the parties knew and cared for each other, even for the sake of mutuality itself.

Psychological researchers seemed to have picked up the sociologists’ findings on networks and support without taking account of their theoretical point of departure. They saw the importance of networks as a means of support but depicted the network members much like figures in Parsonian modernity. For many theorists, getting into a network and being able to elicit support were construed as social skills that differ across individuals. From an individual difference perspective, these skills are similar to traits. From a social learning stance, skills can be taught to individuals to enhance their social prowess and personal efficacy. And, this position fits with a prevailing ideology that psychological subjects are, at their root, self-supporting individuals (Woolfolk & Richardson, 1984).

The goal of the present chapter is to initiate a discussion that will help bridge these two outlooks. The chapter begins with a sketch of children’s and adolescents’ descriptions of friendship. It is shown that the structure of this relationship introduces children to their responsibility and dependence in social construction, because friendship is founded on reciprocity. Next, the chief theoretical concepts that these descriptions imply are identified and discussed. Focus is given to concepts of interaction, cooperation, and mutual understanding. Next, studies that have identified basic elements of peer culture are reviewed. It is shown that, for children and adolescents, peer culture is highly organized by rules that are designed to insure orderly interaction and to enhance mutual understanding. It is shown also that peer culture need not isolate adolescents physically from adults or separate them by way of interactive norms. The last point is elaborated with reviews of findings on adolescent employment and adolescent altruistic activities in their communities. In conclusion, it is proposed that the data from children and youth encourage consideration of the developmental and ideological implications that separate these two areas of study. It is interesting to consider the kind of adult that could be put into our network and support theories if we paid serious attention to the psychological individual who developed into an adult through children’s and adolescents’ friendships and peer culture.

The roots of reciprocity and mutual understanding

This section of the chapter uses illustrations from our past research on parent–child and friendship relations. Our initial findings came from stories 6- to 12-year-old children generated when asked to tell us how they would show kindness or unkindness to a friend (Youniss, 1980; Youniss & Volpe-Smollar, 1978). The typical story of the youngest children told of one friend sharing a material item or playing with another friend. The kind friend mainly shared food or toys, played, or invited another child to play. Older children told similar stories but qualified them by positing a state of need in the friend to whom kindness was expressed. For instance, one friend shared his lunch with another when the latter forgot to bring lunch to school and was hungry. Or, one friend invited another to her house when the other was lonely and needed to be cheered up.

We initially explored analytic schemes for sorting stories into units of costs and benefits. This approach treated the children as individual actors who were more or less altruistic in sharing resources to help others. It soon became evident that this approach failed to capture the gist of children’s intent, which was clear from their accounts of reciprocity. For instance, when asked what they might do after a friend let them ride their bike, younger children said they would let the friend play with their new toy or give the friend some of their potato chips. Such answers depicted a literal form of reciprocity in which one kind action was returned for another. When older children were asked the same question, they answered in a more complex fashion. For instance, one boy said that his friend, who was sick and in the hospital, was not at that time in a position to do anything except to express appreciation. He said, however, that the sick boy would think to himself that were this friend ever sick or in need of some sort, he would return the kindness in an appropriate way.

These stories indicated that children did not think about kindness as a trait of the individual friends; instead they thought of the persons as interdependent and ready to offer help when needed. Further, children did not think of the acts as discrete events, but viewed them as links in an on-going series, with each connected to prior acts and having implications for future acts. Letting a friend ride one’s bicycle was reciprocal to the friend’s having let one read his new book or share candy. It also implies that sharing will continue in the future. Showing sympathy to a sick friend was reciprocal to that friend’s previous expressions of sympathy as well as to expected future expressions. Children imagine that they might switch roles between being in need and being able to help. This insight undermines a cost-gain model, because if friends are reciprocally related, the long-run result is mutual gain and interdependence.

This point became even more evident when we asked children about unkind acts. Younger children told stories in which negative reciprocal acts were exchanged literally. When one friend hit another, the other retaliated by hitting back. In older children’s stories, the nature of unkindness changed, since they said that unkindness consisted in omission rather than direct nega-tive acts. For instance, one girl told a story in which her friend had missed several days of school due to illness. When she recovered and returned to school, she needed to make up work in order to pass a test. Unkindness occurred when her friend failed to help, even though she understood the friend’s need for assistance.

It seems clear that failing to help can be unkind only if children feel they are obliged to help. In any typical classroom there must always be someone in need of help. If every child were expected to respond to the need of every other child, most children would live in a constant state of “unkindness.” If, on the other hand, the obligation to help were restricted, then omission would be unkind but within their relationship. In friendship, the obligation to help is incurred through reciprocity, which is the principle on which the relationship is based. Peers who are not in a reciprocal relationship need not feel obliged to help all others in need. But friends do.

These data suggested that children assign specific meanings to actions because they understand the terms of relationships. Visiting a sick friend can be understood as part of a continuing series of actions in which the roles of being in need and being able to help were previously reversed and are potentially reversible in the unstated future. At any moment, circumstances might place one or the other friend in either role. What distinguishes friends from peers in general, therefore, is mutual obligation and interdependence, which develop through reciprocity.

An epistemology grounded in interactions and relationships

Consistent data from several samples of children led us to explore the implications for theories of knowledge. At the time, major theories depicted children as constructing reality by means of individual reflective activity. The general model pictured children as acting on objects, withdrawing to private reflection to form hypotheses, and then acting again to test their schemes. The data from friendship suggested a need to shift from this position to a view in which construction occurred socially as children interacted over time in relationships, jointly reflected on one another’s ideas, and subsequently sought mutuality in the understanding of reality. Three major aspects of this view will now be discussed: (a) Interaction is the basic unit in which knowledge is constructed. Individual action is insufficient for ordering social reality; each action invites an action from another person, so both must be taken into account, (b) The distinguishing feature of social construction in friendship is cooperation. Friends do not simply act for individual interest but help one another make cognitive and personal progress, (c) Cooperative co-construction is designed to achieve mutual understanding. Knowledge is not just for oneself but is equally directed toward another person’s understanding. Friends do not continually have to define situations for one another, but share common meanings that they carry forward in their relationship.

In seeking a general theory in which to place the above data, we rediscovered Piaget’s (1932/1956) analysis of cooperative social construction, which was being rediscovered by others as well (e.g., Chapman, 1986; Damon, 1977: Furth, 1980). Piaget provides a basic epistemology in which individuals jointly seek to order reality through interaction and mutual reflection. He proposes that knowledge begins in and consists in material and mental action. He notes that children’s actions engage other persons and induce actions from them. Because children seek order in actions, they must take account of the amendments and revisions that others make with their actions and reactions.

Each part of an interaction potentially provides instructive feedback to other parts, which is analogous to negative feedback in Piaget’s classic description of detour. When a child’s routine course of action meets a roadblock, the child is thwarted and must devise another action that takes account of the blockage. The original routine is altered, and a new scheme that takes account of the blockage needs to be constructed. The social domain provides any number of comparable instances, such as when a child’s intended actions are resisted by disparate intentions from other persons. It is obvious that the child’s task of rendering order demands that interactions, not just the self s own actions, be the center of attention.

This small but essential addition changes construction from an individual to a social process. This is illustrated nicely by a kindness story from a 12-year-old female who denned a friend as “someone who helps you understand how you feel.” She told of a fight with her family and going to a friend to express her confusion. When she told her friend what happened, her friend said she also had fights with her parents about similar issues. On finding this common ground, the two discussed the usefulness of various strategies for dealing with teenager-family conflicts and helped one another understand their feelings.

Cooperation is the chief component that distinguishes co-construction in friendship. It gives co-construction a specific direction it might not otherwise have. One can argue that friendship would not be possible unless children agreed to cooperate. Recall that young children’s accounts of kindness and unkindness were marked by the literal use of reciprocity. Such a practice is inadequate for forming or sustaining a friendship because it is destabilizing. If each child is able to replicate the actions of the other, any negative act is apt to lead to retaliation, which would start an infinite regress. Similarly, any statement of an opinion by one friend could lead to a counterstatement, and so forth, which would result ultimately in stalemates as both friends expressed their respective views. Without agreement to cooperate, there is no sure means for breaking the impasse.

While peers practice reciprocity with literal tit-for-tat, friends agree to guide their relationship by the principle of reciprocity. When faced with a potential stalemate, such as in disputes about rules for a game, friends can step back and agree that in order to resolve their differences fairly, both should express their views, but both should also listen to the other’s views. Only then can they hope to reach a compromise in a fair manner. The specific procedures that mediate cooperation have to be learned through mutual negotiation of the many challenging moments that come up in any normally variegated relationship (Oswald, 1992). With two active minds seeking to order reality, negotiation is mediated by procedures such as discussion, debate, compromise, argument, and majority rule.

A social system that includes co-construction and cooperation logically leads to a third aspect of mutual understanding. In most standard accounts of cognition, the goal is to explain how children construct valid versions of reality in which concepts match objects. Piaget’s (1932/1956) account argues differently that in social and moral domains, validity depends on achievement of mutual understanding through normative procedures. This requires that the two or more cooperating individuals use fair procedures to talk out respective viewpoints so that each listens to the other and each expresses a viewpoint to the other. Validity depends on reaching consensus through procedural norm rather than through asserting truth or invoking external authority.

It is now suggested that studies of children’s friendships offer new concepts for approaching the topics of networks and support. Friendships are parts of most social networks. Further, mutual support is inherent to friendship. Friends rely on one another for exchange and feedback in interpreting everyday events. Friends depend on each other for construction of emotional expressions and ideas. Friends believe that the material, emotional, and intellectual resources they possess ought to be used for one another’s benefit. They feel obliged to share since they comprehend that the roles of being in nee...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of figures
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Part I A world apart?
• Part II Conflict and cooperation
• Part III Moral development in context
• Part IV Negotiating competence
• Index