Problem in Peer Relationship leads to Family Stress, Insensitive Child rearing and Coercive Discipline

In middle childhood, the society of peers becomes an increasingly important context for development. Peer contact, contributes to perspective taking and understanding of self and others. These development, in turn, enhance peer interaction, which becomes more prosocial over the school years. In line with this change, aggression declines, but the drop is greatest for physical attacks. By the end of middle childhood, children display a strong desire for group belonging. They form peer group, collectives that generate unique values and standards for behavior and a social structure of leaders and followers. Peer group organize on the basic of proximity (being in the same classroom) and similarity in sex, ethnicity, and popularity. As children develop associations, the codes of dress and behavior that grow out of them become more broadly influential. At school children who deviated are often rebuffed. “kissing up” to teachers, wearing the wrong kind of shirt or shoes, and tattling on classmates are grounds for critical glances and comments. These special customs bind peers together, creating a sense of group identity. Within the group, children acquire many social skills-cooperation, leadership, experiences, children experiment with and learn about social organizations. 

The beginning of peer group ties is also a time when some of the “nicest children begin to behave in most awful way”. Relational aggression-gossip, rumor spreading, and exclusion rise among girls, who (become of gender-role expectations) express hostility in subtle, indirect ways. Boys are more straight forward in their hostility toward the “out group”. Overt aggression in the form of verbal insults and pranks-toilet-papering a front yard or ringing a doorbell and running away- occurs among small group of boys, who provide temporary social support for these mildly antisocial behavior.

Unfortunately, peer groups often direct their hostilities toward their own members, excluding no-longer “respected” children. These cast-outs are profoundly wounded, and many find new group ties hard to establish. Their previous behavior, including expressed contempt for outsiders, reduces their chances of being included elsewhere. Excluded children often turns to other low status peers for group belonging. As they join group of children with poor social skills, they reduce their opportunities to learn socially competent behavior.

Whereas peer groups provide children with insight into larger social structure, one-to-one friendships contribute to the development of trust and sensitivity. During the school years, friendship becomes more complex and psychologically based. Friendship is just not a matter of engaging in the same activities. Instead it is mutually agreed on relationship in which children like each other’s personal qualities and respond to one another’s needs and desires. 

School age children state that a good friendship is based on act of kindness that signifies that each person can be counted on to support the other. Consequently, older children regard violation of trust, such as not helping when others need help, breaking promises, and gossiping behind the other’s back, as serious breaches of friendship.

 Friendship remain fairly stable over middle childhood: most last for several years. Through them, children learn the importance of emotional commitment. They come to realize that close relationships can survive disagreements if friends are secure in their friends liking for one another. As a result, friendship provides an important context in which children learns to tolerate criticism and resolve disputes. Yet the impact that friendship have on children’s development depends on the nature of those friends. Children who bring kindness and compassion to their friendships strengthen each other’s prosocial tendencies. When aggressive children make friends, the relationship often magnifies antisocial acts. The friendships of aggressive girls are high in exchange of private feelings but full of jealousy, conflict, and betrayal. Among boys, aggressive friend’s talk contains frequent coercive statements and attacks. These findings indicate that the social problems of aggressive children operate within their closest peer ties.

Researchers usually assess peer acceptance with self-report measures that ask classmates to evaluate one another’s likability. Children’s responses reveal four different categories: popular children, who get many positive votes; rejected children, who get actively dislikes; controversial children, who get a large number of positive and negative votes; and neglected children, who are seldom chosen, either positively or negatively.

Peer acceptance is a powerful predictor of psychological adjustment. Rejected children, especially, are unhappy, alienated poorly achieving children with low self-esteem. Peer rejection in middle childhood is also strongly associated with poor school performance, dropping out, antisocial behavior, and delinquency in adolescence and with criminality in young adulthood. School age children with problems in peer relationships are more likely to have experienced family stress due to low income, insensitive child rearing, and coercive discipline.

What causes one child to be liked and another to be rejected?

Popular children and kind and considerate, a few are admired for their socially adept yet belligerent behavior. The large majority are popular-prosocial children, who combine academic and social competence. In contrast, popular antisocial children largely consist of “tough” boys who are athletically skilled but poor students. Although they are aggressive.

Rejected children show a wide range of negative social behaviors. The largest subgroup rejected-aggressive children, show high rates of conflict, hostility, and hyperactive, inattentive, and impulsive behavior. In contrast, rejected-withdrawn children are passive and socially awkward. These timid children are overwhelmed by social anxiety, hold negative expectations for how peers will treat them, and are very concerned about being scorned and attacked. Because of their inept, submissive style of interaction, rejected-withdrawn children are at risk for abuse of bullies. Controversial and neglected children are hostile and disruptive, but also engage in positive, prosocial acts. They have qualities that protect them from social exclusion. As a result, they appear to be relatively happy and comfortable with their peer relationships. Most surprising finding is that neglected children are usually well adjusted. They do not report feeling especially lonely or unhappy, and when they want to, they can move ahead to other paths to emotional well-being besides an outgoing, gregarious personality style.

Helping rejected children. A variety of interventions exist to improve the peer relations and psychological adjustment of rejected children. Coaching modeling, reinforcing positive social skills, cooperate in games, and respond to another child with friendly emotion and approval. Combining social skills training with other treatments increase their effectiveness. Rejected withdrawn children, on the other hand, are likely to develop a learned-helpless approach to peer acceptance. They conclude after repeated rebuffs, that they will never be liked. Both types of children need help attributing their peer difficulties to internal changeable patterns.

Finally, because rejected children’s socially incompetent behavior often originates in a poor fit between the child’s temperament and parenting practices, interventions that focus on the child may not be sufficient. If the quality of parent-child interaction is not changed, children may soon return to their old behavior patterns.

Peer relationships are more likely to affect adulthood in regards to their family life, work life and day-to-day life discipline.