Attachment and Friendship Predictors of Psychosocial Functioning in Middle Childhood, and

Links between children’s relationships with their parents and with their peers have received significant theoretical and empirical attention in the past 15 years. This focus has grown, in part, from peer researchers seeking out meaningful answers about why some children are socially competent and engaged with their peer group in positive ways, while others display maladaptive behaviors and have significant difficulties with their peers. At the same time, researchers identifying individual differences in early parent-child relationships have searched for meaningful developmental sequelae of these differences beyond the social world of the family. These merging interests have resulted in considerable attention to the links between the child-parent and child-peer systems (Ladd, 1992). ATTACHMENT, PEER RELATIONS, AND FRIENDSHIP Although there are numerous ways in which relationships with parents may influence relations with peers, our focus in the present report is based on premises drawn from attachment theory. According to attachment theory, the child who receives responsive and sensitive parenting from the primary caregiver forms an internal working model of that caregiver as a trustworthy and dependable source of care when it is needed, as well as a model of the self as someone who i