Doing friendship during the second year of life in a Swedish preschool

Abstract

A number of studies within early childhood education and care indicate the importance of social competence. This article focuses on how friendship is created among very young children in Swedish preschools. The study was carried out within a toddler unit with 15 children. Six 1-year-old children, three girls and three boys, were observed during nine months. The ethnographic method follows a phenomenological tradition with participatory observations, including field notes, photos and video recordings. The findings show how young toddlers create friendships: 1-year-olds monitor and pay attention to individual peers, displaying intentionality and agency by spontaneously greeting their peers, by offering play invitations, and by helping peers. Mutual awareness, joint attention, shared smiles, coordinated locomotion, as well as other types of synchronized actions are parts of non-verbal elements in emerging friendship. One pedagogical implication of this study is to take young children's friendship into account when putting together preschool groups.