PSYCH 355 Lecture Notes - Lecture 12: Homosociality, Family Values, Psych
5 Apr 2017
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Document Summary
Social relationships have a predictable developmental progression throughout childhood and adolescence: children engage in two types of social relationships. Vertical relationships with older individuals to whom they are subordinate. Horizontal relationships occur between peers of relatively equal social power. These are reciprocal relationships which provide the context for developing social skills and mastery of themes like cooperation, competition, and intimacy. Adolescents have both vertical and horizontal relationships: but american society is particularly age stratified because of the structure of schools and education. So most adolescents spend the majority of their time with similarly aged peers and peer relations become increasingly important for children and adolescents. Interaction with peers increases as children age so that by the time they are adolescents they are spending as much or more time with peers as with family. In early adolescence peer groups are typically sex segregated. By mid adolescence some teens begin to congregate in mixed sex cliques and a few kids begin dating.
