Children's friendships - A skill for life

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Sue Buckley

Abstract - Most of us are social animals, relationships with other people are extremely important to us, from the friendly word with a shop assistant, to the friends at work or at the club, to the close lifelong bonds with family and partner. The ability to get on well with others of all ages, in close and less close relationships will influence a child's progress through school and into adult life. Indeed, it can be argued that being socially competent, and therefore a person who is valued as a friend, workmate or partner, is more important for happiness and well-being as an adult than being particularly clever or talented.

Keywords - Down Syndrome, Friendship, Social skills, Peer interaction
Introduction

Most of us are social animals, relationships with other people are extremely important to us, from the friendly word with a shop assistant, to the friends at work or at the club, to the close lifelong bonds with family and partner. Everyday we need to know how to get on with other people, to understand them and to conduct our contacts in a successful manner, including knowing how to handle conflict when we disagree. Getting on when we like one another and agree about how to proceed is easy, our social skills really come in to play when we have to negotiate disagreements, especially if the issue has hurt our feelings. Children begin to learn to understand other people and their behaviour from the first days of life and by the end of their first year are usually quite skilled at influencing others, especially parents!

However most of this early experience involves getting on with adults in the family and then with older brothers or sisters. It is only outside the family as children join play groups that they begin to gain experience of getting on with children of their own age. The ability to relate successfully to age mates is going to be very important for every child’s experience of school. The ability to get on well with others of all ages, in close and less close relationships will influence a child’s progress through school and into adult life. Indeed, it can be argued that being socially competent, and therefore a person who is valued as a friend, workmate or partner, is more important for happiness and well-being as an adult than being particularly clever or talented.

Michael Guralnick, of the University of Washington, Seattle, USA has been studying the development of social skills in children with developmental delays for a number of years, particularly in the pre-school age group. He has carried out many studies and published many articles on the topic. He is particularly keen to emphasise the importance of helping children to become socially competent as well as helping them to develop motor, language and cognitive skills, the latter being the areas focused on in most pre-school intervention programmes. In a recent article he says

Understanding and promoting the social competence of young handicapped children may well be the most important challenge to the field of early intervention in the decade of the 1990’s.
Pre-school social skills

Children begin to demonstrate their social skills in a variety of ways. The kind of social tasks that face a young child in a play group include knowing how to join a group who are already playing, being able to join in co-operative play, being able to share and to negotiate turns with toys or in games, knowing how to resolve conflict and to control feelings and knowing how to make and keep friends. Research has demonstrated the importance of these skills for ordinary children. Co-operative play provides opportunities for children to develop their language and communication skills and they tend to develop more sophisticated play than when playing alone. In addition to these benefits for their cognitive development, having good social skills at the pre-school age predicts good adjustment later while having poor social skills at this age may lead to continued difficulties with personal relationships.
Social skills and disability

Michael Guralnick and his colleagues have studied some 300 children with developmental delays in a variety of social situations. They have consistently found that children with mild to moderate disabilities lag behind their peers in developing good social skills at the 3 to 5 year old stage. Most delayed children find difficulty in engaging in group play with more than half engaging in no group play at all but continuing to play alone. Many of the children are not able to extend their interactions with other children beyond a simple two part exchange of question and answer, they are not able to keep the conversation going beyond this. They are also less able to initiate interactions and direct other children or use them as resources. The delayed children find it more difficult to establish and sustain reciprocal friendships, though they are just as keen to do so and can identify just the same preferences for friends as other children. They may experience more situations of conflict when they do not co-operate or respond in the way their playmate is demanding. Some 10% of ordinary children show the same degree of difficulty in establishing good social skills at this age.
Competent friends

However, the Washington research has shown that the social skills of children with disabilities are influenced to a considerable extent by the situation in which they are playing. From many studies the results are the same. The most significant factor is the proportion of ordinary children in the play group. Children with disabilities show much more social competence when they are playing with typically developing children of the same age than when playing with other delayed children.

In these mainstream settings, the delayed children:

* - are more socially interactive and engage in play at a higher cognitive level
* - engage in more than twice as many social interactions
* - successfully gain the attention of other children twice as often
* - attempt to use other children as a resource 6 to 7 times more often
* - are more likely to refuse to respond to other children
* - show many more attempts to negotiate and to resolve conflict, both very important social skills
* - prefer to play with non-disabled peers and model their more advanced behaviours.

Same-age friends

When 4 year old children with mild to moderate delay were playing with typical four year olds their play and social behaviour was more advanced than when playing with typical 3 year olds, even though they were at the same developmental level as the 3 year olds. When the social play of pairs of children is observed, pairing a delayed child with a non-delayed child leads to far higher levels of social play than that observed if the delayed child is paired with another equally delayed child. The delayed children preferred to play with children who were the same chronological age suggesting age appropriate interests and awareness. These findings suggest that children with disabilities should not be placed with younger children in school and pre-school, they should be with their own age group.

The researchers have observed that the non-handicapped children take responsibility for organising play and maintaining it when it is flagging so compensating for the difficulties that the delayed children may have. The delayed children prefer non-delayed playmates so choose to play with the competent children in the group and model their behaviour. By 4 years of age, the non-delayed children showed an ability to adapt their behaviour and to adapt their speech in order to include and communicate effectively with the delayed children. While the 4 year olds were adapting to the delayed children’s needs, they were not doing so to the extent that adults do, so providing an important stepping stone towards the demands of ordinary interactions.The benefits gained by the delayed children were maintained if they continued to play in integrated settings but were lost if they returned to segregated settings with only other delayed children as playmates. The gains were also lost to some extent during holiday breaks, perhaps because of little opportunity to play with ordinary children during this time.
Guralnick’s views

Clearly this work has very important implications. I was able to hear Michael Guralnick talk about these studies and answer questions about his work in Orlando at the International Congress on Down’s Syndrome last August. He stressed the importance of providing places for all children in community mainstream play groups and nurseries since these studies clearly demonstrate the benefits. He went on to point out the need to train staff in order to make the most out of the opportunities offered in these settings, as play situations can be deliberately set up between delayed and non-delayed children and developed in a number of ways. He also emphasised the importance of the first 3 years of life in laying appropriate foundations for later social competence. Research has shown that children’s ability to establish successful friendships and play relationships with other children of their own age is influenced by their experience of forming relationships within their own families. Children who have experienced warm, loving and secure relationships within the family are well-equipped to feel confident in forming relationships with others outside the family.
Implications from birth
- for services

This has implications for the services which provide support to families in the first 3 years. Michael Guralnick pointed out that services have tended to focus on helping the child to progress, particularly in the areas of motor, language and cognitive development and that perhaps more attention should be given to the quality of the relationships being established between the child and family members. In his view, there is a danger that the emphasis placed on teaching skills in many early intervention programmes can actually have an adverse effect on parent-child relationships unless we are careful and sensitive to the issue. In addition, he drew attention to the disrupting effect that the demands of therapy may have on families, preventing them from having sufficient ordinary quality time to spend playing with their children and also limiting the time that they can spend with friends and at toddler groups, so limiting the early social opportunities for their children. In their studies, the social networks of the delayed children in the 2nd and 3rd years of life were significantly smaller than those of their peers. This will result in less opportunity to develop social competence and could explain some of the delay seen at 3 and 4 years.
- for parents

It is also likely that parents may actually be too helpful in supporting their children’s interactions with them by compensating for their difficulties too skilfully. This will deny the children the opportunity to learn to do better for themselves. When they first meet young children of their own age, these ordinary children will not compensate in the way parents do, so the children with a disability will be faced with a new and difficult challenge.

There are clearly some very important issues here for parents and for pre-school teachers to think about. Children’s social confidence and competence grow from feeling safe, secure, loved and valued from the first weeks of life. They are built on the foundation of successful relationships in the family, where children learn to understand feelings, to be kind and caring and to control anger and inappropriate behaviour. From this important start in the family, all children need a wide range of opportunities to mix with other children and adults in a variety of ordinary, mainstream settings in their local community if they are to become socially confident and competent adults.
Further reading

1. Guralnick M J (1990) Social competence and early intervention Journal of Early Intervention 14 (1) 3-14
2. Guralnick M J (1991) The next decade of research on the effectiveness of early intervention Exceptional Children 58 (2) 174-183
3. Guralnick M J & Groom J M (1988) Peer interactions in mainstreamed and specialised classrooms: a comparative analysis Exceptional children 54 (5) 415-425