Parenting and the Development of Children's Peer Relationships

Before the 1980s, the idea that the family and peer systemsmight operate as interrelated socialization contexts, each affecting the other, received very little empirical attention. This oversight was, in part, attributable to investigators’ tendencies to construe the family and peer systems as separate rather than interlocking domains. However, in the last two decades, a paradigm shift occurred because researchers began to search for the origins of children’s peer competence within the family (see Ladd, 1999) and embraced tenets from ecological theory that hold that the family and the peer culture operate as interconnected contexts within larger social systems (see Bronfenbrenner, 1986). Out of this shift grew the hypothesis that families and peer groups are linked via bidirectional pathways such that families influence children’s peer relationships and vice versa (Ladd, 1992; Parke and Ladd, 1992).