Keeping and Making Friends: Italian Children's Transition from Preschool to Elementary School

Abstract

In this paper we investigate friendship processes in a group of Italian children in their last year of preschool and during their transition to one of four first grade classrooms. We found that in the preschool the children and their teachers collectively had produced a highly integrated community that was evident in the lack of status differentiation in the peer culture. Despite some gender separation in the children's play contacts, this division was not nearly as highly developed as found in previous studies in the United States. In the first grade classrooms and peer cultures we saw similarities, extensions, and divergences in peer relations and friendship processes in relation to the preschool. We discuss the implications of these findings for friendship processes among youths and adults; we make a general argument for an interpretive approach to friendship that stresses how agency and temporal and structural factors are interrelated in the development and maintenance of friendships.