A Child's Relationship with Their Peers

One area of adjustment problems concerns the child's ability to gain acceptance by his peers. Again, so little systematic work has been done in this area that I have to fall back on my own observations with several groups of primary school children. I have found that there are certain rituals connected with gaining and accepted position in a peer group. These vary for the sexes. A boy seems to have to prove himself in a physical fight. He has to show that he can stand up for himself, but he must also demonstrate that he can control his strength so as to avoid excessive damage to his opponent. He is generally put to the test very soon after he joins the group.

Girls, on the other hand, are generally very friendly to each other at first, but I have often observed that a group of girls, who have played happily with each other for days, will suddenly reject one of their mates in a vicious manner and will only accept her again after she has shown that she can deal with this rejection. Generally this takes the form of someone saying,' I don't want to play with you.' This rejection will be taken up by other members of the group and she will only be accepted as members of the group and she will only be accepted as a member of the group again if she can show that she can find another group of girls to play with her.

This problem demands on a child. For example, the boy who stands up for a fight must unavoidably be aggressive, but not to the extent of really hurting the other child, and therefore needs a considerable amount of self-control to meet this challenge successfully. The same is true for a girl, who has to be able to care about being expelled by her friends and yet appear as if she does not care, the process are possibly far more complicated than these simple observations would suggest. What is important in the context of this discussion is that peer relationships provide an area of considerable stress to children of all ages.

The socialization process reinforced the sexual roles of the children since young. This is especially significant when they have reached the stage of puberty, where their sexual characteristics start to show up biologically. This change imposes stress to children particularly at that age.