Friendships During Adolescence

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Friendships During Adolescence

• Friendship and self-esteem
• Friends are a significant source of who the
  adolescent is and what s/he is all about.
  
• Friends become mirrors of who the adolescent is
  and provide feedback regarding what is acceptable
  and what is not.
  
• Same sex friends affirm an adolescents sense of
  self by being real with one another.

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Friendships During Adolescence

• Adolescents can imagine themselves as other than
  they are with friends, rehearse new roles, set
  goals, and plan how to attain these ideal-self
  images.
• Adolescents with high ideal-self images are
  better adjusted, more reflective, do better in
  school, tolerate frustration better, and are more
  resilient to stress.

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Friendships During Adolescence

• How positive adolescents feel about themselves
  affects their relationships with others. The
  quality of the relationships improve, and this
  creates more positive feelings about self.
• Adolescents who feel inadequate about themselves
  find it difficult that others could like them.

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Friendships During Adolescence

• Knowing about an adolescents level of self-esteem
  tells us about the quality of the persons
  relationships (friendships that are intimate and
  satisfying) with others.
• Social competency contributes to intimacy,
  promotes personal well-being, and affects the
  quality of friendships.

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Friendships During Adolescence

• Adolescents who remain close to their parents
  report being satisfied with themselves and have
  closer relationships to friends.
  
• What contributes to good relationships with
  parents is also relevant to relationships with
  friends good social skills, sharing power,
  cooperating, and negotiating differences.
• Adolescents are happiest and the most relaxed
  with friends.

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Changes in Friendship with Age

• Preadolescents spend time comparing themselves to
  others. Being accepted is a central concern so
  peer reactions are important sources of
  self-esteem and self-definition.
• Fear of rejection, ridicule, and jockeying for
  position in friendships, characterizes this age
  group.
  

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Changes in Friendships with Age

• Most preadolescents mention trust as the most
  important issue in friendship.
  
• The characteristic mode of interaction during
  this age is gossiping.
  
• Gossiping discloses the attitudes and beliefs
  that are central to the peer group and reflect
  the basis for acceptance or rejection by the
  group.

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Changes in Friendship with Age

• Gossiping affirms the norms of the group and
  communicates the message that they must adhere to
  these norms.
  
• Mutual disclosure and affirmation of group norms
  through gossip allows preadolescents to reaffirm
  their membership in the group helping to solidify
  their position and protecting against rejection.

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Changes in Friendships with Age

• Gossip also serves another function, to allow
  exploration of peer attitudes (in a low risk way)
  in areas where they are unclear or lack norms,
  without actually committing to a position.
• Gossip often involves well known older
  adolescents, or popular figures such as movie
  stars or rock stars.

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Changes in Friendships with Age

• Preadolescents are learning which emotions are
  appropriate for them and what rules exist for
  displaying these. They monitor feedback to gain
  information about social competence.
• The best guideline for expression is to avoid
  sentimentality, especially with friends. Be
  rational, cool, and in control.

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Changes in Friendships with Age

• Adolescents friendships reflect different
  concerns which relate to who they are and what
  they will be in life.
  
• Friends get together to discuss what has happened
  each day, such as remarks of classmates,
  teachers, and parents.
  
• The successes and failures of the day talked
  about, taken apart, analyzed, and reanalyzed.
  

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Changes in Friendships with Age

• Rather than seeing themselves to present
  circumstances, adolescents can think abstractly
  and see beyond todays reality to tomorrows
  possibilities.
• Adolescents are qualified to help each other
  through these indecisions with genuine concern
  and see this as an obligation of friendship.

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Changes in Friendships with Age

• When adolescents are with friends they are most
  likely to talk about themselves rather than
  gossip as preadolescents do.
  
• Self-disclosure is the primary way by which they
  discover themselves. Self- disclosure is the
  intimate sharing or exchange of thoughts,
  feelings, and undisclosed aspects of the self
  with another person.
• Self-disclosure takes a different form in
  adolescence than in preadolescence.

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Changes in Friendships with Age

• Adolescents respond to self-disclosure with an
  honest examination of the issues.
  
• Among adolescents, disclosures are problems to be
  addressed and solved.
  
• Adolescents begin to master the rules of
  emotional display and are comfortable expressing
  a range of emotions but still need to refine the
  impact of emotions on their relationships. Many
  conversations are about losing control of an
  emotion.

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Friendship Patterns

• The major activity of girls friendship is
  talking.
  
• Boys development emotional closeness through
  sharing experiences, such as sports.
  
• Same-sex friendships become more intimate and
  affectionate with and become sources of emotional
  support in middle and late adolescence.
  
• The number of friends increases in adolescence
  and the number of friends that mothers do not
  know increases dramatically.

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Friendship Patterns

• Early adolescence- during this time friendships
  focus on activities that bring friends together.
  
• When asked what is important in a friend, early
  adolescent girls talk about the things they do
  together and focus less on personality or
  emotional relevance.

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Friendship Patterns

• Early adolescent boys are almost exclusively with
  friends of the same sex.
  
• Boys spend less time talking about feelings and
  more time sharing activities that will cement the
  friendship.
  
• Boys consistently rate their friendships as lower
  in intimacy than girls at this age.

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Friendship Patterns

• Middle adolescence- friendships at this time
  focus on security. Girls want to trust their
  friends. Superficial qualities disappear and
  emotional sharing and mutuality evolve.
• Personal qualities of friends become very
  important, with being able to confide and trust
  in friends not to talk behind your back or
  disclose secrets as most common concerns for
  girls.
• Most girls begin to date in mid-adolescence which
  can be a source of tension with friends.
  

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Friendship Patterns

• Girls experience more conflict with their friends
  than boys when moving to opposite sex
  relationships. Conflict centers around fears of
  disloyalty and competition.
• Very few girls establish close friendships with
  boys at this age, friendships with other girls
  are still more important for the majority.

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Friendship Patterns

• Anxieties about friendships peak in
  mid-adolescence.
  
• The most common anxieties reflect more general
  changes adolescents are experiencing.
  
• Midway through puberty, they are renegotiating
  relationships with parents, facing a larger, more
  impersonal school setting, and beginning to
  date.
• The emotional support of friends is important
  and anything that threatens that support causes
  anxiety.

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Friendship Patterns

• In mid-adolescence, boys are looking for friends
  with whom they can do something enjoyable
  together such as an activity.
  
• Boys want someone who is easy to get along with
  and who enjoys the same things that they enjoy.
  
• Boys do not disclose as much or as early as girls
  but they still expect a friend not to squeal on
  them regarding things they have done together.

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Friendship Patterns

• Late adolescence- Girls focus on personalities
  and intimacy continues to grow. Girls at this
  time, have stable identities and better social
  skills.
• They tolerate individuality in friends better
  than previously and accept friends for who they
  are.
  

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Friendship Patterns

• In late adolescence, boys same sex friends
  continue to be more important to them than
  friendship with girls.
  
• Differences between generations is only one of
  timing. The sequence happens earlier for
  adolescents today perhaps because of the secular
  trend.

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Friendship Patterns

• Peer interactions are quite similar for both
  sexes during adolescence.
  
• When adolescents get together, they are most
  likely to be with one or two of their friends.
  
• One sex difference is that boys tend to remain
  friends longer than girls, 4 ½ years versus 3
  years. The intensity and intimacy of girls
  friendships may be more difficult to maintain
  over longer periods of time.

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Friendship Patterns

• Interethnic friendships- most friendships among
  adolescents are with peers of the same ethnic and
  cultural backgrounds.
  
• Adolescents are likely to have friends who live
  in the same neighborhood, go to the same school,
  and share other commonalities.
  
• In ethnically mixed neighborhoods, friendships
  are close but time spent together is not as
  frequent among friends who are from different
  ethnic groups as among friends from the same
  group.

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Friendship Patterns

• Several conditions are possible for friendships
  to form between adolescents from mixed ethnic
  groups, in classes where students work together
  in small groups, in classes where academic
  competition is de-emphasized, in classes where
  learning is the focus.
• The more positive adolescents feel about their
  own ethnic group, the more positive their
  attitudes toward other ethnic groups.

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Friendship Patterns

• Enculturation is the acquisition of norms of
  ones ethnic group. Where acculturation is the
  acquisition of norms of the larger society.
  
• The norms of their group shape adolescents
  expectations and reactions to others. Mexican
  American adolescents stress group affiliation,
  interdependence, cooperation, and have a clear
  hierarchy in the family. The African American
  culture places greater emphasis on individualism
  and independence and allows for more egalitarian
  relationships within the home .

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Friendship Patterns

• Because of differing enculturation experiences,
  these adolescents from different ethnic
  backgrounds react differently to social
  situations. Discuss the examples on pp. 338-339
  of misunderstandings that are possible between
  ethnic groups because of their background.

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Friendship Patterns

• Peer groups assume importance in adolescence for
  several reasons peers provide needed emotional
  and social support while adolescents are gaining
  independence and autonomy adolescents learn
  social skills from peers that they would not
  learn from parents or teachers peers reinforce
  and reward each other with acceptance,
  popularity, and status.

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The Peer Group

• Types of social groups a number of close
  friends in a small group is called cliques.
  These friendship groups are usually made up of
  the same sex and age friends, who are usually in
  the same class in school,share the same ethnic
  background, and live relatively close to each
  other. Ones best friend is usually in the same
  clique.

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Peer Groups

• Cliques are the most common type of social group.
  
  
• Liaisons are adolescents who are socially active
  and have friends in a number of cliques but so
  not themselves belong to the clique. These
  students serve to bring the groups together and
  create common channels of communication.

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Peer Groups

• Isolates are adolescents who have few friends and
  have few links to other adolescents in the social
  network.
  
• A crowd is a larger group and is more impersonal
  and usually numbers around 20.
  
• Not all members of a crowd are close friends but
  they feel relatively comfortable with each other.
  Several cliques can make up a crowd.

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Peer Groups

• The functions of cliques and crowds differ.
• Crowd events provide settings to try out new
  social skills while clique activities provide
  feedback about the success of those social
  skills. The crowd activities are events on the
  weekends, while clique activities are coaching
  sessions during the week where more skilled
  members use reflection and teaching to help less
  skilled members gain ideas about social
  maneuvers.

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Peer Groups

• An important purpose of crowds is to help
  adolescents move from same-sex to mixed- sex
  relationships.
  

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Peer Groups

• Developmental changes occur with peer groups.
  Belonging to groups is most important during
  early and middle adolescence.
  
• Late adolescents are comfortable with the
  opposite sex and crowds disintegrate into loosely
  grouped cliques and couples.

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Peer Group

• Popularity all crowds are not equal, some are in
  high regard and are prestigious. All students
  know what it takes to be a part of the leading
  crowd, for boys its being good at sports, for
  girls its being a social leader.
• Adolescents receive constant reminders at school
  of their status, who sits together in the
  cafeteria, who is allowed to cut in front of the
  line, who belongs to which clubs and activities.
  Pecking order is constantly confirmed.

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Peer Group

• Popularity- research on popularity indicates that
  for boys, being good at sports and for girls
  being a social leader and a leader of school
  activities are important factors. In addition
  both physical attractiveness (but only at the
  extremes), personality characteristics such as
  enthusiasm, friendliness, and being comfortable
  with oneself relate to being popular. Academic
  achievement plays some part although it is hard
  to interpret.

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Peer Group

• Social Competence is important for popularity.
• 1st component is assessing the situation to see
  whats going on and adapting ones behavior
  accordingly.
  
• 2nd component is responding appropriately to
  others behavior.
  
• 3rd is adopting a process approach to
  relationships, recognizing that relationships
  take time.

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Peer Group

• Dating

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Adolescents, Parents, and Peers

• Conformity
• Values and peer pressure
• Deviant behavior and peer pressure
• The generation gap is it widening?