Correlates and antecedents of preschool children's friendship relations: An examination of emotion regulation, social understanding, and family relationships.

Abstract

This two-part report examined the correlates and antecedents of preschool children's friendships. Part 1 concurrently examined children's social understanding and emotion regulation as correlates of friendship relations at age 4. Forty-nine 4-year-old children and their friends visited the laboratory playroom. Child-friend dyads were videotaped during a 20-minute free play and a 5-minute sharing task. Each child's understanding of emotion and false belief was assessed, and dyads were videotaped in a modified Disappointment Paradigm from which children's regulation of emotions and behavior were coded. Intercorrelations among the dyadic measures revealed two dimensions of friendship: friendship quality and conflict. Children's individual behavior was associated with the two friendship dimensions in a differentiated manner. As expected, children's emotion regulation and social understanding were associated with more positive and less negative aspects of friendship relations. Patterns of associations differed by interactive context, with the sharing task eliciting individual differences in conflict and negative behavior, in particular. Children's individual behavior toward friends tended to mediate associations between their emotion regulation and the dyadic friendship dimensions. Part 2 examined how the mother-infant and father-infant relationships at age 1 were related to children's interactions with friends at age 4. Children's social understanding and emotion regulation were also examined as mediators of family-friend linkages. A subsample of children (N = 30) and their parents from Part 1 participated. These families had previously participated in a short-term longitudinal study in which mother-infant and father-infant attachment and parenting behaviors were assessed. As hypothesized, when mothers and fathers were more sensitive during interaction with their infants at age 1, children were more responsive toward their friends at age 4. In addition, children who displayed resistant attachment behavior with mothers engaged in more conflict with friends, whereas avoidant attachment behavior with mothers was associated with less conflict. Little evidence of mediation was found, although children's attachment security with mothers and fathers was related to greater false belief understanding, and parental behavior was related to aspects of children's emotion regulation. Results are discussed in terms of how mothers and fathers contribute to different facets of children's friendship relations.