Friendships with Peers:  Needs and Developmental Tasks

            Friendships with peers can be seen as behavior that is organized around the striving to fulfill particular social needs such as companionship, acceptance, and intimacy or status (Buhrmester, 1996).  An assumption of this theoretical formulation is that if social strivings fail to supply the needed provisions, people experience varying levels of distress and maladjustment. But Buhrmester (1996) proposes three different contexts which shape the provision of needs.

First, the social network of a child provides a context for need fulfillment.  In addition to attachment relationships to caregivers, children have peer relationships, relationships with teachers and school staff, and relationships with extended family members.  Weiss (1974) emphasized that any one social need can be addressed through relationships with different people in the social network of the child.  However, different types of relationships are suited or specialized for meeting particular social needs.  For example, attachment figures are more effective at supplying needs for nurturance, while friendships are more effective in meeting needs for companionship. During early and middle adolescence, the relative importance of friends as confidants increases, while dependence on parents decreases (Buhrmester, 1996).  This conclusion is based on research using the Network of Relationships Inventory (Furman & Buhrmester, 1985) and is roughly consistent with more speculative models of child development such as those proposed by Sullivan (1953) and Erikson (1968).

This leads to a second context of change for friendship: age.  Sullivan (1953) proposed that preadolescents experience an increased need for interpersonal intimacy.  Erikson emphasized the striving of adolescents to address their need for identity.  Buhrmester (1996) correctly observes that while Erikson speaks more of developmental “tasks” appropriate to an age or phase, it amounts to being a need, since the child’s social activities and strivings are centered around his or her need to resolve the conflict of that phase.

Gottman and his colleagues (Gottman & Mettetal, 1986; Parker & Gottman, 1989) studied the thematic content of children’s conversations with friends and found that early adolescents were most concerned about self-exploration and self-definition involving self-disclosure and problem solving among friends.  They found that young children expressed themes of needing to maximize excitement and entertainment through coordinated play.  During middle childhood, the major concerns appeared to be inclusion by peers, avoidance of rejection, and self-presentation as found in the main themes of gossip between friends.  As Buhrmester observes, these findings appears to confirm Sullivan’s view of the most prominent need sought after in early adolescent friendships:

It is interesting to note that these findings closely parallel, in many respects, Sullivan’s account of emerging social needs.  The progression from play modulation, to inclusion by peers, to self-exploration is very similar to Sullivan’s description of the emerging needs for co-participation in play, peer-group acceptance, and intimate exchange, respectively (Buhrmester, 1996, p. 165).

            The third context for changing needs among adolescents is gender.  According to Buhrmester (1996), in the daily interactions of adolescents with same-sex friends, girls have a higher number of same-sex interactions, a greater number of interactions with a best friend, greater self-disclosure when interacting with a best friend, and perceived more emotional support when interacting with a best friend.  Buhrmester speculates that girls perceive greater communal needs and boys perceive greater needs for personal power.  Such gender differences in concerns can be both a cause and an effect of gender differences in the features of friendships.  For example, a girl may engage more than a boy in self-disclosure with a friend, because her communal needs are more salient than her status-oriented needs.  Greater self-disclosure may, in turn, make her communal needs more important to her.  While this line of thought is largely speculative, it suggests that differing needs in friendships may influence what kinds of losses and life difficulties may lead to depression for each gender.