ABSTRACT
Critical transformations occur in children’s relationships to their social and physical world between 4 and 8 years of age. Most 4-year-olds possess considerable language mastery, an impressive array of social and physical concepts, and rudimentary and preoperational thinking skills. They have acquired sufficient levels of social competence and abilities to regulate attention, affect, and activity to sustain child-child social interactions, nurture budding friendships, and engage in prolonged play episodes alone or with others. Children gradually integrate the parent-child socialization system with the peer socialization system, and the social ecology of home and family increasingly meshes with the cultures of child care and school, neighborhood, and community.
