Theoretical Foundations of Children’s Friendships in Culturally Diverse Classrooms

One of the significant challenges facing those who study children’s friendships is how to avoid the invidious trap of homogenizing friendships within children’s broader social participation experiences. Many definitions of children’s friendships which attempt to tease out the parameters of the phenomena abound in the relevant literature. Hartup (1983), a leading developmental psychologist, distinguished the semantic difficulties in using the word peer to denote ‘equal standing.’ He discussed that: (i) equivalences in chronological age does not mean equivalences in other attributes (for example, intellectual abilities, social

skills, and physical beauty), and (ii) that psychologists may have overemphasized these experiences in their theories of socialization.