ABSTRACT
Most girls and boys care deeply about fitting in and getting along during the middle childhood years, especially with their same gender peers. Many desperately want to have someone to play with or to talk to at recess, to sit with at lunch, to choose them first for teams, and to support them when they feel left out or excluded. Forming and maintaining high quality peer relationships in middle child hood requires considerable skill in emotion regulation, particularly in coping with anger in peer interactions. Girls and boys may differ in the strategies they employ for managing anger in their peer interactions, both as a result of differential socialization by parents and authority figures, but also because girls and boys play predominantly with peers of the same gender, at least at school Because girls and boys most often play in separate peer groups, some have argued that they grow up in dif ferent worlds and socialize one another in distinct ways (see Maccoby, 1998, for a powerful account of Two Worlds Theory).
