Answer Both Questions Separately: Middle Childhood

Middle Childhood
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October 8, 2017
What role does the family play in a child’s relationship with peers during middle childhood? How do parents foster or inhibit friendship formation for their children? What are some important distinctions between parent-child and peer relationships at this period of life? Are friends at this point of your life more similar or different than you parents?
While the role of parents are crucial throughout the whole childhood of a child, the significance of this in terms of the child’s development transitions over time. During early childhood studies have found out that the importance of parents and guardians are much crucial for the social, emotional, and psychological development of the child CITATION Hay05 \l 1033 (Hay, 2005). However, studies also said that as the children grow up, their development becomes more dependent towards their interaction with their peers. This opens up the question regarding the utmost importance of the parents in a child’s relationship with his peer groups in different stages of his life.
According to Zembar (2010), “in middle childhood, 30% of a child’s social interactions involve peers, compared to 10% in early childhood” CITATION Zem10 \l 1033 (Zembar, 2010). What this shows is that there exist a transition from the child’s dependency from its caregivers for social interaction towards its peer groups, which are usually those from his/her same age group. Before, it was generally believed that peer relationships is important as early as a child’s early childhood stage. Nonetheless, Hay (2005), said that even in early childhood stages children sometimes experiences some problems with interacting with their peers. Usually this could be seen in anti-social behavior from the kid or even those coming from other memberrs of the group, which prevents the child from integrating with other and becomes more dependent on their parents and guardians for socialization. Thus, this makes the role of the parent very important because they provide the interaction that is needed by the kid in order to develop their social and emotional capacities. Based on recent studies, however, this type of parent-child socialization poses some problems especially if the adult is incompetent or socially irresponsible since the actual integration after this phase would be less forgiving that what they would naturally teach.
Aside from this the importance of the parents in terms of the child’s socialization, also have some indirect but valuable effects on the kid himself. An example of this indirect effect is that the fact that some researches have concluded that “size and density of adolescents’ networks has been related to parents’ friendship networks—especially mothers’—perhaps due to the influence of social learning” CITATION Zem10 \l 1033 (Zembar, 2010). Thus, the parents capability and opportunities to socialize with others affects the children’s social development by providing new avenues of socializing with other children and developing “friendships” with his peers. According to Zembar (2010), developing this friendships in the late part of early childhood until the early stages of middle childhood is important because it is linked to “social developmental outcomes, also called social provisions” CITATION Zem10 \l 1033 (Zembar, 2010)
From this, it could now be seen that there exist a significant difference in between the parent-child and the peer relationships during the stages of middle-childhood. As stated by Hay (2005), it is during this stage when the parents socialization are more “forgiving” since they compensate for the difficulties and anxieties that social interaction delivers towards one’s peer groups CITATION Psynd \l 1033 (PsychologyCampus.com, n.d.). More specifically, this process of compensation happens when a parent tries to deliver positive reinforcement towards the child who has received negative reactions from his/her peers. While the parent might act to console the child or to defend him from these negative repercussions, this also develops the sense of self-esteem and confidence that he/she would need in the future. Even in some of the studies done about this process of compensation, it was found out through a longitudinal examination that the role of parenting process and the mitigation of child behavior is definitely important to mitigate the possible adverse effects of “peer rejection” such as the degradation of self-esteem and development of negative thinking CITATION Dis90 \l 1033 (Dishion, 1990).
Lastly, according to Dishion (1990), these fact that have been found out reagarding the importance of the parents and the parenting process as support groups dishes out the need for more studies in areas of childhood development. More specifically, these studies must be dedicated towards the intervention processes and the partical application that could be taught to parents or even creaft new policies in order help their children to develop good social skills a...