Friendship is a relationship of mutual affection between people, yet it functions as an invisible architecture that supports the entire structure of human society. Unlike family ties, which are often dictated by blood, or professional associations, which are bound by contract, friendship is a voluntary choice that requires constant maintenance. It is a stronger form of interpersonal bond than an acquaintance or a classmate relationship, distinguished by the willingness to engage in a positive and supportive role to one another. This bond has been studied across academic fields including communication, sociology, social psychology, anthropology, and philosophy, revealing that certain features are common to many such bonds. These features include choosing to be with one another, enjoying time spent together, and the ability to engage in a positive and supportive role. The line between friendship and other relationships is often blurred, as seen in the concept of the friend zone, which describes someone restricted from rising from the status of friend to that of lover, or in the case of friends with benefits, where the distinction between romantic and platonic affection becomes indistinct.
The Developmental Stages of Trust
The understanding of friendship by children tends to be focused on areas such as common activities, physical proximity, and shared expectations. Such friendships provide an opportunity for playing and practicing self-regulation, serving as a training ground for future social interactions. Recent work on friendship in young children investigated the cues they use to infer friendship, revealing that young children use cues such as sharing resources, like snacks, and sharing secrets, especially in older adolescents, to determine friendship status. When comparing cues of similarity in food preference or gender, propinquity, and loyalty in adolescent children, younger children rely on similarity in gender or food preferences but more so propinquity to infer friendship while older adolescents rely heavily on propinquity to infer friendship. As children mature, they become more reliant on others, as awareness grows. They gain the ability to empathize with their friends, and enjoy playing in groups. They also experience peer rejection as they move through the middle childhood years. Establishing good friendships at a young age helps a child to be better acclimated in society later on in their life. Based on the reports of teachers and mothers, 75% of preschool children had at least one friend. This figure rose to 78% through the fifth grade, as measured by co-nomination as friends, and 55% had a mutual best friend. About 15% of children were found to be chronically friendless, reporting periods of at least six months without mutual friends. Friendships in childhood can assist in the development of certain skills, such as building empathy and learning different problem-solving techniques. Coaching from parents can help children make friends, with Eileen Kennedy-Moore describing three key ingredients of children's friendship formation: openness, similarity, and shared fun. Parents can also help children understand social guidelines they have not learned on their own. Drawing from research by Robert Selman and others, Kennedy-Moore outlines developmental stages in children's friendship, reflecting an increasing capacity to understand others' perspectives: I Want It My Way, What's In It For Me, By the Rules, Caring and Sharing, and Friends Through Thick and Thin.