Context and closure in children’s friendships: Prevalence and demographic variation

Abstract

Third-grade children (N = 404) and their mothers completed questionnaires and participated in interviews designed to identify children's friendships across the multiple contexts of their lives and to determine the strength of parent-to-parent relationships for these friendships (social network closure). Hierarchical linear modeling procedures were used to evaluate links between friendship context and strength of closure relationships. Closure relationships were stronger when friendships were maintained within the contexts of neighborhood, church, extracurricular activities, relatives-as-friends, and family friends, and when friendships were maintained across multiple social contexts. Lower socioeconomic status mothers were particularly likely to report higher levels of closure within the contexts of neighborhood and relatives-as-friends. KEY WORDS: children, closure, context, friendships, HLM, social networks Article: Developmental research has long recognized the importance of both parents (Parke & Buriel,1998) and peers (Bukowski, Newcomb, & Hartup, 1996; Rubin, Bukowski, & Parker, 1998) as influences on children's development and well-being. Yet researchers have traditionally failed to recognize the complexity with which such influences may be intertwined, as well as nested within the multiple contexts of children's lives. Parents play an active role in monitoring and guiding their children's relationships with peers both directly and indirectly, by way of the social connections they maintain with other parents and adults who have contact with their children (Ladd, 1992). The extent of this involvement is dependent in part on the social contexts (e.g., school, neighborhood, child care setting) in which children maintain friendships, as well as the extent and types of interactions parents have with the parents of their children's friends.

Managing Children’s Friendships Through Interparental Relationships: Roles of Ethnicity and Friendship Context

“…African American children are more likely than European American children to maintain friendships with same‐age relatives, whereas European American children are more likely to maintain friendships within the contexts of school, neighborhood, child care, and extracurricular activities. Economic advantage is linked with more friendships within school, neighborhood, and extracurricular activities and fewer within the context of relatives as friends (Fletcher, Troutman, Gruber, Long, & Hunter, 2006). Middle‐class parents are more likely to structure children’s leisure activities and to cultivate social connections outside the extended family (Lareau, 2002).…”

“…Subcodes added to the designer category focused on identifying the social ecologies that might be entered into by mothers with the intent of locating potential friends for their children. In this case, ecologies were identified with reference to empirical work (Fletcher et al, 2006) that has identified seven distinct contexts of children’s friendships: school, neighborhood, child care, place of worship, extracurricular activities, relatives as friends, and children of family friends. Codes for the remaining maternal management strategies were developed in an emergent fashion from mothers’ descriptions of their involvement experiences.…”

“…Finally, because of our own interest in the contexts of children’s friendships, we developed codes for the contexts in which specific friendships were maintained. Friendship context codes were developed a priori (Fletcher et al, 2006) but were consistent with mothers’ descriptions of the social locations in which children’s friendships were formed and maintained.…”

Race, Class, and Religious Differences in the Social Networks of Children and Their Parents

“…Based on a review of ethnographic studies, Jarrett (1990) highlighted community-bridging strategies that urban poor families engaged to support upward mobility; one of these strategies was to bridge to networks that were not impoverished and were not located in poor neighborhoods. Parents may also limit the development of social network closure in impoverished neighborhoods as a strategy to protect their children from risks associated with living in these neighborhoods (Brody, 1990; Caughy et al, 2003).Places of worship are an important context within which children develop friendships and parents cultivate closure relationships (Fletcher, Troutman, Gruber, Long, & Hunter, 2006;Glanville et al, 2008;Smith, 2003). Smith examined the associations between religious involvement and the development of social network closure.…”

Context and companionship in children’s short-term versus long-term friendships

“…Friendships in contexts not including parents (school, child care, and extracurricular activities) likely decrease the likelihood that a friendship will be long term. Although no work has examined associations between friendship contextual variety and friendship duration, work focusing on the number of friendship contexts and interparental relationships (Fletcher et al, 2006b) suggests that more contexts increases the odds that a friendship will be long term.…”