Friendship and Romantic Relationships During Early and Middle Childhood

Eleonora Cannoni,Anna Silvia Bombi

doi:10.1177/2158244016659904

Abstract

Ideas about romantic relationships have been studied in adolescents. This article extends this study to younger children. We asked two hundred seventy 5- to 11-year-olds to draw “two children who have a romance” and “two children who are friends,” and we subsequently interviewed each participant about the characters’ relationships. The drawings were coded with three scales of Pictorial Assessment of Interpersonal Relationships (PAIR), an instrument by Bombi, Pinto, and Cannoni. Interviews were categorized by the characters’ age and identity and by the distinguishing features of romance and friendship: location, intimacy, activity, personal characteristics, and emotions. Scale scores were compared with variance analyses, whereas the categories frequencies were submitted to chi-square. Results showed that all participants were able to distinguish the two relationships, even if the descriptions increased in detail with age. Girls provided more information than boys about romance, but were less inclined to talk about their own romantic experiences.

Highlights

The development of peer relationships during early and middle childhood has been extensively studied, both at a group level (e.g., Gifford-Smith & Brownell, 2003; Hay, Payne, & Chadwick, 2004) and at a dyadic level, with siblings (e.g., Dunn & Kendrick, 1982) and friends (e.g., Berndt, 2004; Bukowski, 2001)
In a study conducted by these scholars with 336 children and adolescents 4 to 18 years old, none of the participants found it difficult to understand the terms “boyfriend” or “girlfriend,” to remember children in their entourage who had a partner of this sort or to name a peer of the opposite sex they would like for a romantic engagement
The partners’ ages were as highly correlated for romance as for friendship, and the Value Disparity was only tendentially higher for romantic partners. The fact that this disparity was due to a higher valorization of the female figure with respect to the male figure, and that this happened in those FDs including a boy and a girl, make it unlikely that the tendential Value Disparity should be attributed to the romantic relationship per se

Summary

Introduction

The development of peer relationships during early and middle childhood has been extensively studied, both at a group level (e.g., Gifford-Smith & Brownell, 2003; Hay, Payne, & Chadwick, 2004) and at a dyadic level, with siblings (e.g., Dunn & Kendrick, 1982) and friends (e.g., Berndt, 2004; Bukowski, 2001). To assess the extent to which passionate love was present at the various ages, the authors devised the Juvenile Love Scale, an instrument subsequently included in the Handbook of Sexuality-Related Measures (3rd ed.; Fisher, Davis, Yarber, & Davis, 2011) that requires rating the subject’s agreement with sentences such as “I’d feel bad if I thought that [name of subject’s girlfriend or boyfriend, real or desired] liked somebody else better than me” and “When [name] is around I really want to touch him/her and be touched.” Using this scale, the authors found that the intensity of love in younger participants was comparable with that of the older participants; girls older than 6 years tended to receive higher scores than boys To assess the extent to which passionate love was present at the various ages, the authors devised the Juvenile Love Scale, an instrument subsequently included in the Handbook of Sexuality-Related Measures (3rd ed.; Fisher, Davis, Yarber, & Davis, 2011) that requires rating the subject’s agreement with sentences such as “I’d feel bad if I thought that [name of subject’s girlfriend or boyfriend, real or desired] liked somebody else better than me” and “When [name] is around I really want to touch him/her and be touched.” Using this scale, the authors found that the intensity of love in younger participants was comparable with that of the older participants; girls older than 6 years tended to receive higher scores than boys

Methods

Results

Discussion

Conclusion