Child Development, March/April 2001, Volume 72, Number 2, Pages 569–582

The Relations between Parental Friendships and Children’s Friendships:
Self-Report and Observational Analysis
Sandra D. Simpkins and Ross D. Parke

The relations between the quality of mothers’ and fathers’ friendships and that of their children’s friendships
was examined. One hundred twenty-ﬁve fourth-grade children (9 year olds) completed the Friendship Quality
Questionnaire. Observational measures of the target children playing with their self-selected friend were alsocollected. Mothers and fathers separately completed the Friendship Quality Questionnaire about their bestfriend. Results indicated that children’s self-reports and observational measures of friendship quality were nothighly correlated for girls, but were moderately associated for boys. The quality of mothers’ and fathers’
friendships was related to the quality of children’s friendships, but the nature of the relations with children’s
friendships differed for girls and boys. The implications of these ﬁndings for the socialization of friendshippatterns and the assessment of children’s friendships were noted.

INTRODUCTION
Most research on the familial correlates of children’speer relationships has focused on peer group acceptance (Ladd & LeSieur, 1995; Parke & Ladd, 1992).
Because the processes and outcomes characterizing
friendships are distinct from other measures of peercompetence, such as social acceptance, it is likely thatthe familial antecedents will differ as well (Bagwell,
Newcomb, & Bukowski, 1998). The focus of the current study was to explore the links between the quality of parents’ friendships and the quality of theirchildren’s friendships, as measured through both observational and self-report measures. This study was
exploratory because research on the links between
parents’ and children’s friendship qualities has only
recently begun. Furthermore, the correspondence between children’s behavior with a friend and perceptions of that friendship is also a relatively unresearched area. In addition to a review of relevant
empirical research, theory accounting for the links
between parents’ and children’s friendships is also
reviewed. Although the mechanisms of these theories were not tested in this study, it is important to set
this study within a larger theoretical framework for
future research.
The Links between Mothers’ and Fathers’
Friendships and Children’s Friendships
Parental friendships may inﬂuence children’s
friendships in a variety of ways. First, through observation of their parents’ interactions with their friends,
children may learn how to interact with friends, solve

conﬂicts, and utilize friends to deal with problems.
Second, adults who have close, supportive friendships
have more adequate parenting skills, especially understressful conditions (Cochran & Brassard, 1979; Hartup& Stevens, 1997). Friends provide parents with emotional and tangible support, help in childrearing, andserve as parenting role models (Cochran & Brassard,1979). The impact of these two processes is likely tovary with quality of the adult friendships; higher
quality, supportive friendships are expected to result
in better outcomes for parents and children than are
conﬂictual, troublesome friendships.
Little work has focused on the links between thequality of parents’ friendships and the quality and/or
quantity of children’s friendships. The exception is a
recent study that compared mother’s ratings of theirown best friendships with the quality of their children’s friendships (Doyle, Markiewicz, & Hardy,1994). Children of mothers whose best friends were interesting and had stimulating ideas were more likely tohave a reciprocal best friend and rated that friend as
more helpful and supportive. Children who experienced more closeness with their best friend had
mothers who reported having supportive friends. If amother felt less secure about her best friendship but
also rated that friend as interesting, her child was more
likely to have a reciprocal best friend. The Doyle et al.
study provided some preliminary evidence of how thequality of parental friendships is related to children’s
friendship quality, but this study was limited by its ex© 2001 by the Society for Research in Child Development, Inc.
All rights reserved. 0009-3920/2001/7202-0016

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Child Development

amination of only maternal friendships and its relianceon self-report measures of children’s friendships. The
current study extends this work by examining the relations between children’s friendships and the quality ofpaternal as well as maternal friendships. In addition,
the current study provides both observational and selfreport measures of children’s friendships. Each ofthese issues is discussed below.
Recent research suggests that fathers, as well as
mothers, play important roles in children’s social development, including their peer relationships (Lamb,
1997; Parke, 1996). However, the focus of prior work
has been on a variety of aspects of the father–childrelationship, such as the quality of attachment andthe father’s play style, in the development of children’s friendships, with little attention devoted tothe part played by the father’s own patterns offriendship with other adults (Youngblade & Belsky,1992). Prior studies of social networks offer some insight into the potential role of fathers’ friendships inthe development of children’s friendships. For example, Oliveri and Reiss (1987) found that the quality offathers’ friend networks, as assessed through social
networks, was more closely related to the relationship aspects of adolescents’ friend networks (e.g.,
feelings of closeness). In contrast, the structural aspects of mothers’ friend networks were more closely
related to the structure of adolescents’ friend networks (e.g., size, density). Other studies, however,found either no link or a negative relation between
fathers’ social networks and children’s social adjustment (Manetti & Schneider, 1996; Roberts, 1989),
which suggests that this issue needs further attention. Other ﬁndings suggest that fathers play animportant role in the regulation of children’s
emotions—a central ingredient in the maintenanceof close friendships (Gottman, Katz, & Hooven, 1997;
Parke, 1996). This prior work underscores the relevance of fathers and fathers’ friendships for understanding children’s friendship patterns, and suggeststhat the quality of both fathers’ and mothers’ friendships will be related to children’s friendship patterns. Another goal of the present study was to describe the differential relations between maternaland paternal friendships and children’s friendships.
Although it is expected that both mothers’ andfathers’ friendships are related to children’s friendships, prior work suggests that mothers and fathers
may have different patterns of relationships withsons and daughters. Both theory and empirical evidence suggests that same-gender relationships (i.e.,
mother–daughter, father–son) will be stronger thancross-gender relationships (i.e., mother–son, father–daughter). First, classical theories of identiﬁcation(Bronfenbrenner, 1960) would suggest that samegender associations are stronger. Similarly, empirical research suggests that fathers are more involved withsons, whereas mothers tend to be more involved with
their daughters during middle childhood (Crouter &Crowley, 1990) and adolescence (Harris & Margolin,1991). Moreover, earlier work suggests that fathers’
behaviors are especially likely to be related to boys’
peer relationships whereas mothers’ behaviors are
more closely related to girls’ peer relationships (Isley,
O’Neil, Clatfelter, & Parke, 1999; MacDonald & Parke,
1984; Youngblade & Belsky, 1992).
Measuring Friendship
Most research on the quality of children’s friendships has been based on children’s social cognitions
through the use of self-report (Berndt, 1981). Children’s perspectives on their own friendships are useful for evaluating certain aspects of the relationship(e.g., loyalty, disclosure, and closeness), as indicatedby the relations between self-reports of friendship
quality and a variety of social outcomes, such as loneliness and sociometric status (Asher, Parker, &Walker, 1996; Parker & Asher, 1993). In fact, some aspects of friendship may only be detectable throughthe use of children’s self-reports. For example, selfdisclosure, in which an individual shares personal,
private information or feelings, is probably more easily measured by children’s reports than by others’ observations. There are problems, however, with relying solely on children’s self-reports of friendship
qualities. First, children’s answers are dependent on
their verbal and cognitive skills (Siegal, 1991), which
may lead to a distorted report of the nature of the relationship. Second, self-reports of friendship may notreveal all aspects of the relationship (Parker & Gottman, 1989), such as the manner in which conﬂict is resolved or the cognitive sophistication during play exchanges (e.g., the quality of themes or the level of playorganization). Observational measures of friendshipmay reveal aspects of the friendship that are less accessible through self-reports.
Evidence for the assumption that self-report andobservational measures of friendship may be accessing different aspects of friendships comes from earlier reports that found only modest correlations between these two types of data. In studies using bothself-report and observational measures of the same
construct, correlations between the two sources ofassessment were not found either for children’s selfdisclosure (Hobart, 1987) or for their prosocial behavior (Berndt, 1986). This low concordance suggests that these two approaches may tap differentSimpkins and Parke

aspects of a friendship and underscore the need toutilize different methods to provide a more complete picture of a friendship. In the present study,
both self-report and observational measures offriendship were utilized to avoid the problems of apartial assessment of the children’s friendship. Because few observational measures of childhood
friend – friend interaction are available, another aimof the current study was to validate a new observational measure of friendship (the Observed Friendship Quality Scale) and compare observed behavior
to self-reported ratings of friendship quality. The
self-report questionnaire and observational measureassess similar and distinct aspects of a friendship.
Based on prior research (Berndt, 1986; Hobart, 1987),
it was expected that there would be low correspondence between self-report and observational measures assessing similar constructs (e.g., reported
conﬂict and observed negative behavior). Further,
the correspondence between different friendship
qualities assessed by the two measurement types(e.g., reports of validation of feelings and leading behavior) would also be low. Moreover, in light of thefact that there is greater correspondence between
sources of data that rely on similar methods (e.g.,
self-reports) than between data derived from different methods (e.g., self-reports versus observational
measures; Radke-Yarrow, 1989), it was expected thatparental self-reports of friendship would be morestrongly associated with children’s self-reports offriendship than with observation-based indices of children’s friendships.
This study was designed to test the following hypotheses: (1) the quality of parental friendships ispositively related to the quality of children’s friendships although there will be stronger relations between parents’ and children’s self-reports than between parents’ self-reports and observation-based
measures of children’s behavior; (2) both mothers’
and fathers’ friendship qualities are related to theirchildren’s friendship qualities, but the relations between children’s and parents’ friendships differ depending on gender of the parent; and (3) there is low
concordance between observation-based measures(the Observed Friendship Quality Scale) and selfreport measures (the Friendship Quality Questionnaire) of friendship quality.

METHOD
Participants
One hundred twenty-ﬁve 9-year-old children (67boys, 58 girls) from a public school district in the571

western portion of the United States participated inthis study.1 The children were ﬁrst evaluated in kindergarten using sociometric procedures. A range ofchildren were selected based on their sociometricdata. Letters regarding the overall project were sent to
the parents of these children requesting agreement toparticipate in the study.
Mothers’ ages ranged between 28 and 50 years (M 
35.86, SD  4.72); the mean age of fathers was 38.45
years (SD  5.57) with a range of 27 to 59 years. Abouthalf of the sample was non-Latino White (52.7% of
mothers, 50% of fathers) with Latino representing thenext largest group (39.5% mothers, 40% fathers). The
remainder of the sample was African American (3.9%mothers, 4.7% fathers), and unspeciﬁed (3.9% mothers,
4.7% fathers). Maternal and paternal education ranged
from 4 to 20 years (M  12.75, SD  2.56 for mothers;
M  13.32, SD  2.52 for fathers). The families’ income
levels ranged from $10,000 to over $50,000. The medianincome level was between $38,000 and $42,000.
In one of two visits to the laboratory, the target children brought a self-selected, same-gender friend.
Most of the dyads (95%) were not related. Although
the other 5% were cousins, both children in each dyadlabeled each other as friends. There were no mean differences between nonrelated and related friends.
Thirty-six percent of the dyads were in the same classroom at school; another 26% attended the sameschool. Sixty percent of the dyads lived within 1 mileof each other; 22% lived 1 to 5 miles apart. All of thechildren nominated each other as reciprocal friends.
Reciprocal friendship was measured by comparing
the target child’s and friend’s evaluation of the levelof their friendship: best friends, close friends, just afriend, or acquaintances. Nearly half of the friends
were non-Latino White (46%); 35%, Latino; 7%, African American; 2%, Asian American; and 9%, unspeciﬁed. Friends ranged between 7 and 12 years in age(M  9.50, SD  .87). Most of the friends were in

1 This study was part of a larger multiwave longitudinal
project; participants consisted of four different cohorts. Cohort 1
consisted of participants whose families started in the project when
the children were in kindergarten (n  48). Subsequent cohorts
were added to increase statistical power and to replace children
from speciﬁc sociometric categories who did not continue in the
study. Thus, a second cohort was added during the second year (n 9). The third cohort was added in the fourth year (n  4), and the lastcohort was recruited in the ﬁfth year (n  64). There were no meandifferences between the cohorts on the measures collected. To complement this study’s existing analyses and to further justify the inclusion of participants in the second and third cohorts, the resultswith and without data from these participants were examined. The
pattern of ﬁndings remained similar, but to maximize the sample
sizes, it was decided to retain all participants in the analyses.

572Child Development

fourth grade (75%) during the data collection with arange from second through seventh grade.
A pool of fourth-grade unacquainted peers wasused to validate the observational measure. These individuals attended schools and resided in different
cities from those of the target children. For the second
visit, one unacquainted peer from the unacquaintedpeer pool was randomly selected to participate. The
target child and unacquainted peer were always ofthe same gender and age (9 years old). The pool of 28
unacquainted peers included 13 boys and 15 girls.
Twenty of these children were non-Latino White, six
were Latino, one was Asian American, and one was
African American.

to bring home). The dyads were asked to agree on
each decision to try to elicit more dialogue from thechildren. These two trips (i.e., amusement park andcamping trip) were counterbalanced by the families’
identiﬁcation numbers. The planning activity lasted
for as long as the children needed to plan the trip. The
range was 5 to 25 minutes (M  15.5, SD  2.65).
In addition to the observational tasks, the target
children completed the Friendship Quality Questionnaire (FQQ) with a staff member. The target children’s
mothers also ﬁlled out a friend information form thatassessed general information about the target child’s
friend (e.g., how far away does the friend live?),which is summarized in the sample section.

ProcedureChild Measures

Each family completed two visits to a university
laboratory. During the ﬁrst visit, the target child,
mother, and father participated in various videotaped
tasks and completed questionnaires and interviews.
The parental measure of interest for this report, theAdult Friendship Quality Questionnaire, was completed during this visit. If the parents’ ﬁrst language
was Spanish, the Adult Friendship Quality Questionnaire was written in Spanish and a Spanish-speaking
staff member administered all the questionnaires andinterviews to those parents.
During the second visit, the target child, friend, andunacquainted peer participated in several videotaped
tasks. First, the target child and friend participated infree play and hand games. Next, the target child andthe unacquainted peer participated in free play andplanned a trip. The target child and friend werebrought together again to play UNO (a commercial
card game), plan a trip, and complete a discussion task.
Two tasks, free play and the planning activity, wereused in the analyses presented in this article, because
these segments evidenced the greatest variance in behaviors. In free play, each dyad was brought into aplayroom and instructed that they could play with anyof the toys for 5 minutes. The playroom contained acouch, a table with two chairs, and a bookshelf containing several toys, such as puppets, balls, two racquets,
and stuffed animals. In the planning activity, the twochildren sat across from each other at a table andplanned a trip to an amusement park or a camping trip
together. On the table was a list of items they needed toplan. The children had to agree on several aspects ofthe trip, including the destination, time, duration, andactivities during the trip (speciﬁcally, when to go,
where to go, how long to stay, what to do ﬁrst, three
things to eat, three things to do/three rides to go on,
and three songs to sing by the campﬁre/what souvenir

The FQQ. This questionnaire (Parker & Asher, 1993)
consists of 40 statements that characterize a friendshipor one’s friend. Each child rated how true each statement was for his or her friendship on a 5-point scale(0  not at all true, 4  really true). The target children’s responses were partitioned according to six subscales identiﬁed by Parker and Asher, with the following Cronbach s: disclosure, .90; help, .90; conﬂict, .85;
conﬂict resolution, .85; companionship, .85; and validation, .88.
The Observed Friendship Quality Scale (OFQS). Thisobservational measure, developed by Flyr, Howe,and Parke (1995), was used to evaluate two segments;
the free-play segment and the planning activity. The
scale consists of 17 individual and 10 dyadic codes.
The deﬁnitions of these codes are presented in the
Appendix. These behavioral codes were based on
several studies concerning children’s behavior withfriends (Conger & McLeod, 1977; Dishion, Patterson, &Griesler, 1994; Gottman, 1983; Parker, Levendosky, &Okun, 1993; Youngblade, Park, & Belsky, 1993). The
current scale represents the range of behaviors, affect,
and verbalizations examined in each of these studies.
Coders watched each segment three times to rate theone dyadic and two individual scales. The ﬁrst author
coded the entire data set. A trained undergraduate
coded 21% of the segments. Interrater reliability wascomputed on the segments coded by both people.2
Each child was rated on a 5-point scale (1  not at all

2 Training in use of the OFQS lasted 10 weeks. The ﬁrst author
and the trained undergraduate student met with the author of the
OFQS to go over the deﬁnition of each code and behavioral examples. After this ﬁrst step, the author and trained undergraduate
practiced using the scale on children’s interactions with friends
and nonfriends. After training, a new set of videotaped segments
was used for reliability.

Simpkins and Parkecharacteristic, 5  highly characteristic) on the following individual dimensions, with interrater reliability(Cronbach s as follows): (1) involvement with, interest in, attention to, talking with, and orientation toward peer, .73; (2) directs proactive behavior toward
peer, .57; (3) responds positively to initiations made bypeer, .78; (4) directs negative behavior toward peer, .85;
(5) responds negatively toward peer, .83; (6) is dominant or plays the role of leader, .81; (7) is controlled by
the peer and plays the role of follower, .80; (8) employssocial strategies to pursue goals, .83; (9) engages in angry coercion, .15; (10) engages in guilty coercion, .56;
(11) demonstrates positive affect and/or enthusiasm
and/or comfortableness, .86; (12) demonstrates negative affect, .80; (13) makes statements that provide important information about his/her character, .70; (14)displays aversive physical contact, .45; (15) demonstrates cognitive sophistication, .76; (16) engages inpositive fantasy play, .85; and (17) engages in negative
fantasy play, .91.
The dyadic ratings were based on the behavior of
the two children together. These ten dimensions
were also rated on the same 5-point scale indicating
how much each item characterized the dyad’s interactions. Cronbach s for interrater reliability on the
10 items were: (1) awareness of each other, actions
are positively linked, .76; (2) behavior is noncontingent, .74; (3) conﬂict, disagreement, or aversive interchanges, .86; (4) cognitive sophistication, .67; (5)physical proximity, .85; (6) competition, .91; (7) cooperation on tasks, .71; (8) discussion of private or
personal information, .89; (9) gossip, .89; and (10) attribution of feeling, motive, personality trait, or
opinion, mind-reading, .79.
Parent Measures
The Adult Friendship Quality Questionnaire wasadapted from the FQQ developed by Parker andAsher (1993); some of the questions were reworded
for age appropriateness. Both mothers and fathers
were asked to think of a speciﬁc best friend when responding to the questionnaire, but were instructed to
exclude their spouse as the best friend. As with thechild version, the parents rated how true each statement was on a 5-point scale (0  not at all true, 4 really true). Parker and Asher’s six subscales were usedwith the mothers’ and fathers’ friendship questionnaires. Cronbach s indicating reliability of the subscales for mothers (M) and fathers (F) were: disclosure, M  .86, F  .80; help, M  .76, F  .77; conﬂict,
M  .66, F  .73; conﬂict resolution, M  .72, F  .77;
companionship, M  .85, F  .87; and validation, M .86, F  .76.

573

Data Reduction
Factor analysis with a promax rotation was used toreduce the items of the OFQS. Two separate analyses
were used to reduce the dyadic and individual items.
In the analyses with the individual items, 30 items
were entered: 15 target individual items and 15 friend
individual items. Individual items 9 and 14 were
dropped due to low reliability. Based on the scree plotof eigenvalues and the interpretability of the factors,
three individual factors were used. From the factor
analysis used to reduce the 10 dyadic items, 2 dyadic
factors emerged. Each item with an absolute factor
loading of .40 or greater was considered signiﬁcant.
Because all items had the same scale (1 to 5), unweighted composites based on the factor structure
were used to represent the subscales.
The items that loaded on each factor were as
follows. Dyadic cognitive sophistication represented
dyadic cognitive sophistication, gossip, and sharing of
information (eigenvalue  0.95). Dyadic negative behavior was made up of dyadic noncontingent behavior,conﬂict, and being positively linked (loading negatively; eigenvalue  1.17). Individual positive behavior
represented target children’s and friends’ positive
initiations, positive affect, negative affect (loading
negatively), and responding negatively (loading negatively; eigenvalue  3.26). Target child dominancerepresented target children leading, target children
following (loading negatively), friends leading (loading negatively), and friends following (eigenvalue 2.27). Individual cognitive sophistication represented
target children and friends’ negotiation and cognitive
sophistication (eigenvalue  2.06).
The Cronbach s for the factors were: dyadic cognitive sophistication, .67; dyadic negative behavior, .62;
individual positive behavior, .60; individual cognitive
sophistication, .73; and target child dominance, .70.
Thus, observational measure reliably captured children’s behaviors while interacting in a dyad.
RESULTSIs the OFQS a Valid Measure of Children’s
Behavior with Friends?
The target children interacted in the same task with
their friends and, separately, with unacquainted
peers. A series of t tests was used to determine if the
OFQS could differentiate children’s behavior withfriends from behavior with nonfriends (and thus, evidence discriminant validity; Table 1). When the target
children’s individual behavior with a friend was compared with their behavior with an unacquainted peer,
several comparisons emerged as signiﬁcant. Typically,

574

Child Development

the target children behaved more positively and negatively with a friend. On the dyadic level, target children and friends’ dyadic behavior was compared withthat of target children and unacquainted peers. Consistently, there were signiﬁcant differences between
the two dyads. The friends dyad exhibited increased
mind-reading, gossip, competition, physical proximity, conﬂict, and positive interactions; and less noncontingent behavior and discussion of thoughts.
Is There a Correspondence between Children’s
Behavioral and Self-Report Data?
To understand the relations between the target
children’s self-reports and behavior, bivariate correlations were computed separately for boys and girls(Table 2). As expected, there were only sparse relations between self-report and observational friendship measures for girls. There was a more signiﬁcantcorrespondence between boys’ perceptions and be-

havior. Boys’ increased dyadic negative behavior
and lower individual positive behavior were related to target children’s reports of lower conﬂict
resolution, disclosure, validation, helping, and increased conﬂict.
Is Friendship Quality for Mothers and Fathers
Related to Children’s Friendship Quality?
The substantive analyses of this study were conducted in two parts using bivariate correlations andmultiple regressions to assess the associations between the Adult Friendship Quality Questionnaireand children’s observed and self-reported friendshipmeasures. In view of our hypothesis concerning thedifferential relations based on parents’ and children’s
gender, the analyses were grouped by gender of theparents and children, yielding four sets of dyads:
mothers–daughters, fathers–daughters, mothers–sons,and fathers–sons.

Table 1 Mean Target Children’s Individual Behavior with Friend and Unacquainted Peer and Target–Friend Behavior Versus Target–
Unacquainted Peer Behavior
Target–FriendInteraction

Target–Peer
Interaction

dft Value

Individual behavior
Involvement
Positive initiations
Positive responses
Negative initiations
Negative responses
Leading behavior
Following behavior
Negotiation
Angry coercion
Guilty coercion
Positive affect
Negative affect
Provides information
Aversive physical contact
Cognitive sophistication
Positive fantasy play
Negative fantasy play

4.61 (.62)
1.35 (.92)
4.22 (.87)
1.31 (.73)
1.25 (.59)
1.74 (.85)
1.52 (.75)
1.29 (.53)
1.06 (.23)
1.19 (.45)
3.90 (.86)
1.09 (.31)
1.18 (.62)
1.06 (.26)
3.39 (1.13)
1.51 (.84)
1.13 (.46)

4.53 (.78)
1.24 (.89)
3.88 (1.15)
1.04 (.37)
1.07 (.36)
1.27 (.67)
1.37 (.68)
1.12 (.47)
1.02 (.18)
1.02 (.13)
3.43 (1.00)
1.08 (.46)
1.45 (.88)
1.02 (.20)
3.24 (1.40)
1.21 (.55)
1.04 (.24)

1, 1201, 1201, 1201, 1201, 1201, 1201, 1201, 1201, 1201, 1201, 1201, 1201, 1201, 1201, 1201, 1201, 1201.04
1.71
2.74**
3.62***
2.83**
5.05***
1.58
3.11**
1.52
4.00***
4.78***.18
3.29**
1.27
1.61
3.23**
1.94*

Dyadic behavior
Positively linked
Noncontingent behavior
Conflict
Cognitive sophistication
Proximity
Competition
Cooperation
Discussion
GossipMind-reading

4.16 (.87)
1.32 (.71)
1.29 (.62)
2.91 (1.07)
2.58 (.98)
1.93 (1.15)
4.29 (.75)
1.33 (.65)
1.08 (.28)
1.07 (.28)

3.75 (1.05)
1.55 (.83)
1.04 (.37)
2.72 (1.28)
2.21 (1.14)
1.31 (.67)
4.28 (.87)
1.76 (1.01)
1.01 (.13)
1.00 (.02)

1, 1201, 1201, 1201, 1201, 1201, 1201, 1201, 1201, 1201, 1203.68***
2.51*
3.90***
1.34
2.93**
5.27***.08
4.45***
2.35*
2.59**

SubscaleNote: Numbers in parentheses are standard deviations.
* p  .05; ** p  .01; *** p  .001;  p  .10.

Simpkins and Parke

575

Table 2 Correlations between Observed Behavior and Target Children’s Self-Report of Friendship Quality
Target Children’s Self-Report

Observed Behavior
Girls
Dyadic behavior
Negative
Cognitive sophistication
Individual behavior
Positive
Leading
Cognitive sophistication
Boys
Dyadic behavior
Negative
Cognitive sophistication
Individual behavior
Positive
Leading
Cognitive sophistication

Conﬂict

CompanionshipConﬂict
Resolution

Disclosure

Validation

Help

.16
.13

.07
.05

.03
.05

.07
.11

.02
.05

.02
.07

.20
.08
.13

.04
.09
.08

.03
.08
.06

.05
.13
.01

.03
.06
.02

.11
.06
.02

.51***
.22

.16
.12

.31*
.05

.27*
.12

.40***
.16

.28*
.15

.39**
.02
.18

.19
.01
.17

.35**
.01
.05

.26*
.04
.01

.39**
.14
.06

.30*
.15
.04

* p  .05; ** p  .01; *** p  .001;  p  .10.

Mothers and daughters. Daughters’ reports of conﬂict were negatively correlated with mothers’ reportsof helping, validation, and conﬂict resolution (Table3). Mothers’ ratings of conﬂict resolution were also
positively related to target children’s perceptions of
conﬂict resolution. Higher maternal ratings of conﬂict
correlated with increased dyadic negative behavior,less individual positive behavior, and less validation
as reported by the female target children. Increasedmaternal ratings of disclosure were correlated withincreased target children and friends’ individual positive behavior, and less dyadic negative behavior.
Fathers and daughters. The pattern of the bivariate
correlations for the fathers differed from the mother–daughter correlations (Table 3). Paternal friendships
correlated with the girls’ self-report data. There wereno statistically signiﬁcant correlations between fathers’ friendships and children’s behavior. Fathers’
ratings of helping and conﬂict resolution were positively related to target children’s reports of helping,
conﬂict resolution, and validation. Validation in fathers’ friendship was positively associated with ratings of companionship and conﬂict resolution by thetarget children. Paternal ratings of disclosure were related to target children’s perceptions of companionship, conﬂict resolution, and validation.
Mothers and sons. Maternal friendship ratings werecorrelated with several outcomes (Table 3). First,
higher levels of maternal disclosure were related tolower levels of children’s dyadic cognitive sophistica-

tion. Mothers’ ratings of conﬂict resolution were positively correlated with dyadic negative behavior andtarget children’s ratings of conﬂict. Higher levels ofmaternal ratings of helping were associated with lower
levels of dyadic cognitive sophistication and higher
levels of target children’s leading behavior and reportsof conﬂict. Higher maternal reports of companionshipwere correlated with increased dyadic negative behavior and decreased individual positive behavior.
Fathers and sons. In comparison to mothers and sons,fewer relations were evident for fathers and sons(Table 3). Higher ratings of fathers’ conﬂict were related
to increased dyadic negative behavior and lower individual positive behavior. Paternal ratings of helping
were positively related to dyadic cognitive sophistication and target children’s reports of disclosure. Target
children’s leading behavior was negatively correlatedwith paternal ratings of disclosure and validation.
Do Mothers’ and Fathers’ Friendships Make UniqueContributions to Children’s Outcomes?
The distinct contribution of mothers and fathers
was evident in the bivariate correlations. The patternand strength of the relations between parental variables and children’s outcomes differed according to
the gender of the parent (see Table 3). To compare themothers’ and fathers’ pattern of correlations, MULTICORR, a computer program designed to simultaneously compare several correlations within the same

576

Table 3

Correlations between Parental Self-Report of Friendship Quality, Children’s Self-Report of Friendship Quality, and Observed Friendship Quality

SubscaleGirls
Target children’s
friendship quality
Companion
Conflict
Disclosure
Help
Conflict resolution
Validation
Observation of children’s
friendship quality
Dyadic behavior
Negative
Cognitive sophistication
Individual behavior
Leading
Positive
Cognitive sophistication
Boys
Target children’s
friendship quality
Companion
Conflict
Disclosure
Help
Conflict resolution
Validation
Observation of children’s
friendship quality
Dyadic behavior
Negative
Cognitive sophistication
Individual behavior
Leading
Positive
Cognitive sophistication* p  .05; ** p  .01;  p  .10.

Maternal Friendship Quality

Conﬂict

Companionship

Disclosure

Help

Conﬂict
Resolution

.00
.14
.02
.13
.20
.16

.13
.09
.06
.19
.21
.18

.23
.01
.03
.18
.33*
.24

.18
.21
.06
.33*
.41**
.32*

.31*
.13
.17
.31*
.29*
.35**

.23
.05
.12
.17
.34*
.21

.06
.20
.12
.09
.19
.23

.09
.16
.12
.00
.02
.08

.16
.06
.13
.02
.10
.04

.14
.31*
.09
.02
.08
.03

.03
.23
.03
.06
.23
.08

.04
.27*
.07
.09
.11
.11

.13
.02

.17
.06

.13
.12

.14
.10

.12
.00

.03
.07

.38**
.19

.20
.04

.26*
.12

.24
.01

.01
.09

.01
.02

.07
.00
.10

.05
.07
.06

.12
.07
.14

.08
.17
.05

.06
.06
.02

.05
.03
.03

.12
.24
.00

.15
.12
.01

.01
.25
.03

.01
.09
.10

.09
.01
.19

.09
.04
.14

.11
.13
.05
.03
.01
.18

.02
.16
.14
.13
.02
.04

.00
.04
.15
.12
.14
.12

.00
.08
.24
.10
.12
.09

.01
.11
.11
.02
.11
.04

.04
.04
.03
.10
.15
.10

.02
.01
.02
.04
.15
.09

.17
.13
.09
.13
.00
.07

.18
.11
.19
.08
.08
.02

.17
.23
.11
.11
.06
.05

.13
.27*
.14
.06
.14
.15

.18
.01
.09
.08
.03
.03

.24
.01

.06
.01

.05
.01

.10
.22

.06
.07

.06
.01

.09
.04

.23
.07

.06
.30*

.12
.21

.26*
.02

.05
.11

.02
.28*
.03

.02
.03
.00

.24
.13
.08

.07
.12
.08

.01
.12
.11

.22
.02
.03

.07
.07
.05

.01
.22
.08

.12
.03
.01

.22
.00
.07

.03
.18
.20

.09
.22
.05

Validation Conﬂict Companionship Disclosure

Help

Conﬂict
Resolution Validation

Child Development

Paternal Friendship Quality

—
—
—

—
—
—

—
.34*
.25

.27*
—
—

4.33**
3.26*
3.68**

3, 54
4, 53
4, 53

.15
.14
.16

577

Note: The dashes indicate that this parental subscale was not retained in the analyses.
* p  .05; ** p  .01; *** p  .001;  p  .10.

.30*
.59**
—
—
—
.33

—
.45*
.39*

—
—
—

.35**
.31*
—

—
—
.32*

.07
.15
2, 55
2, 55
3.21*
6.04**
.23
—
—
—
—
—
—
—
—
—
—
.47**

—
—

—
—

.25
.45**

—
—

.10
2, 55
4.02*
—
—
—
—
.22
—
.24
—
—
—

Boys
Negative dyadic behavior
Individual behavior
Cognitive sophistication
Positive
Target children
Companionship
Help
Conflict

.15
.05
3, 51
2, 52
4.09*
2.42
—
—
—
—
—
.36*
—
.38*
.43**
—
.27
—
—
—
.27
—
—
—

—
—

.44
.37
7.80*** 6, 47
7.24*** 5, 48——
.39**.44***——.41**
.46***
—
—
—
—
.24*
—
.32**
.20
.55***.57***.63***
.58***

Girls
Negative dyadic behavior
Positive individual behavior
Target children
Conflict
DisclosuredfFConﬂict
Companionship Resolution
Conﬂict
Resolution Validation HelpChildren Subscale

Validation Disclosure Conﬂict Companionship

Help

Paternal Friendship
Maternal Friendship

Regression of Children’s Observed Friendship Quality and Friendship Quality Questionnaire on Maternal and Paternal Friendship
Table 4matrix, was utilized to compare mother–child andfather–child correlation matrices separately for boys
and girls (Steiger, 1979, 1980a, 1980b). In this comparison, using the 2 statistic, the hypothesis that the twocorrelation matrices are different was evaluated. Thus,
a signiﬁcant chi-square value signiﬁed that the overall
pattern of correlations was different for mothers andfathers. Three different pairs of correlation matrices
were compared separately for boys and girls, namely,
target children’s self-reports, friends’ self-reports, andchildren’s observed behavior. Of these six different
comparisons, mothers’ and fathers’ correlation patterns or matrices differed only for female target children’s self-report, 2(1, N  58)  5.41, p  .05.
Regression analyses were used to examine the combined inﬂuence of maternal and paternal friendship
qualities that accounts for variation in children’s behavior and their self-reported quality of friendship. A set of
backward regression analyses was performed due to thevariable:sample size ratio. A second approach was used
to select the variables for the regression analyses basedon the signiﬁcance of the bivariate correlations. Because
this approach capitalized on the ﬁndings of the bivariate
analyses, however, the backward regression approach
was viewed as preferable. Both approaches yielded
meaningful and similar patterns of results, but theamount of variance explained was higher in the case of
the backward regressions.) In the ﬁrst step, all maternaland paternal subscales were entered. In subsequent
steps, maternal and paternal subscales were deleted if
the  weight was nonsigniﬁcant (i.e., p .10). The regression equations reported in Table 4 are the equations
in which more than one parental subscale predictedchildren’s friendship qualities.
Daughters. Four regression equations emerged fordaughters (Table 4). First, maternal validation, disclosure, conﬂict, and companionship, and paternal validation and companionship predicted children’s dyadic negative behavior. This model accounted for 44%of the variance of children’s negative dyadic behavior.
Maternal validation, disclosure, and conﬂict, and paternal validation and companionship predicted children’s individual positive behavior. Target children’s
reports of conﬂict were predicted by maternal reportsof disclosure, help, and conﬂict resolution. Two paternal variables (validation and helping) were utilized to
predict the target children’s perceptions of disclosure.
Sons. Maternal companionship and conﬂict resolution accounted for 10% of the variance of children’s dyadic negative behavior (Table 4). Children’s individual
cognitive sophistication was predicted by maternaland paternal conﬂict resolution. Maternal conﬂict resolution and validation predicted children’s individual
positive behavior. Maternal companionship, maternal

Adjusted R2

Simpkins and Parke

578

Child Development

helping, and paternal helping explained 15% of thevariance of the target children’s reports of companionship. Target children’s reports of helping were related
to three maternal variables (companionship, disclosure, and helping) and paternal companionship with amodel accounting for 14% of the variance. Paternal
companionship and maternal conﬂict resolution, validation, and disclosure predicted target children’s reports of conﬂict.
DISCUSSION
This study makes two contributions to the friendship
literature: it validates a new measure to assess children’s behavior with friends and suggests new links
between the family and peer contexts by revealing relations between parents’ and children’s friendships.
Measuring Friendship Quality
The OFQS was useful for describing complex interactions between two children. First, this scale reliably
measured both individual and dyadic characteristics
during two different play segments. Second, it reliably
differentiated between two friends’ and two nonfriends’ behaviors. Third, it revealed various signiﬁcant associations with parents’ friendship qualities. In
addition, the results of this study were consistent withearlier ﬁndings based on this measure. For instance,
Howe (1996) found that the scale was useful in successfully differentiating the friendship patterns ofabused from those of nonabused children. Although
this study focused on fourth-graders, the OFQS has
also been found to be reliable with studies of children’s
friendships in third and ﬁfth grade (Flyr, 1996; Simpkins, Flyr, Parke, & Wild, 1998). This observational
scale holds promise for helping to understand interactions between friends.
The expected weak relations between observed
and self-reported methods of friendship assessment
were largely conﬁrmed and the pattern was consistent
with that described in previous work (Berndt, 1986;
Hobart, 1987). As argued earlier, the low correlations
may have occurred because children’s thoughts andperceptions about their friendships did not exactly correspond with the reality of their friendship interaction
patterns. Further, these two assessments also measured
different qualities. The behavioral measure captured
leading behavior and cognitive sophistication that were
not directly assessed by the self-report questionnaire. In
addition, the self-report questionnaire examined children’s disclosure and companionship, which are difﬁcult to capture through observation of children. These
approaches may assess overlapping perspectives ofsimilar constructs, but they also tap nonoverlapping
friendship qualities. This ﬁnding was qualiﬁed by thegender of the child, however. Speciﬁcally, male target
children had numerous associations between their perceptions of a friendship and the dyad’s positive andnegative behavior, but with female target children, no
statistically signiﬁcant relation occurred. Why would
male target children’s perceptions be correlated withobserved behavior more than female perceptions? Perhaps boys change their behavior or responses less frequently than do girls. Boys may not be as worried about
how their answers on the questionnaire make them appear; thus, they may give a more accurate picture of
their friendship. Our ﬁndings suggest that it is useful to
include both methodologies in future studies to obtaina complete picture of children’s friendships.
Finally, in addition to the possibility that different
aspects of friendship are being assessed, more attention to two other factors may increase the relations between observational and self-report measures. By expanding the time frame of the observations, a moredetailed picture of children’s friendships may emerge;
in turn, this would more likely capture a broader
range of experiences and therefore more closely approximate the wealth of relationship history uponwhich children draw in assessing their friendships.
Similarly, the use of more ecologically valid settings
may yield a more representative picture of children’s
friendship behavior than can be observed under theconstraints of the laboratory context (Hartup, French,
Laursen, Johnston, & Ogawa, 1993). More naturalistic
observational studies of friendship over more extended time periods would help address this issue.
Parents’ and Children’s Friendship Quality
Qualities of mothers’ and fathers’ friendships were
found to be related to their children’s perceptions of
their own friendships and to observed behavior of thechild with a friend. Although the speciﬁc pattern ofﬁndings varied as a function of parent and child gender, there was little support for the expected differential relation between same-gender and opposite-genderparent–child pairings. Instead, both mothers’ and fathers’ friendship patterns were linked in interesting
ways to both their sons’ and daughters’ friendships.
These ﬁndings suggest that both gender of child andgender of parent need to be considered in future efforts to unravel the complexities of the relations between parents’ and children’s friendships. In the caseof girls, different qualities of paternal and maternalfriendships were related to daughters’ friendship qualities. The positive aspects of girls’ friendships (e.g., help,
resolution of conﬂict, validation) were largely relatedSimpkins and Parketo their fathers’ positive friendship qualities, whereas
the negative aspects of girls’ friendships (e.g., observed
and self-reported conﬂict) were related to maternalfriendship qualities. Several explanations for this pattern of ﬁndings can be suggested. First, several lines ofevidence suggest that fathers have a stronger impact onchildren’s social–emotional development than domothers. For example, Gottman et al. (1997) found thatfathers’ acceptance of children’s emotional displays
was more predictive of their children’s relationships
with a friend than was mothers’ management of children’s emotions. Similarly, the ﬁndings are consistent
with previous literature, which suggests that fathers are
signiﬁcant contributors to children’s emotional understanding, emotional regulation, and capacity to maintain playful exchanges (Parke, 1996); in turn, these abilities are important correlates of children’s friendshipcompetence. Second, a selective explanation of exposuresuggests that fathers are more likely to shield girls fromexposure to friendship-related conﬂict, whereas mothers
may be more likely to expose girls to friendship-related
conﬂict as a way of indirectly teaching them to better
manage conﬂict in close relationships.
Boys’ friendship patterns were only sparsely related to both mothers’ and fathers’ self-reports offriendship quality. Girls’ friendships had more overall relations to parents’ friendships than did those ofboys. Perhaps girls have more contact than boys with
their parents’ best friends because boys spend moretime away from home than do girls (Hoffman, 1977).
This result could also be due to the size differences inchildren’s friendship and playmate networks, where
girls only have a few close friends and boys are part oflarger groups (Maccoby, 1990). Therefore, parents’best friendships may be more signiﬁcant for girls because girls’ friendships are intimate and small in
number. On the other hand, boys have a larger number of friends and the qualities of parental friendships
may be less relevant for the more diffuse, grouporiented nature of boys’ friendships. Perhaps parents’social networks may be more signiﬁcant for boys’
friendship patterns. Future research is needed to determine the mechanisms that account for these differing relations for boys and girls.
Although some of the ﬁndings of this study wereconsistent with expectations, such as the reported
level of friendship-related paternal conﬂict being negatively correlated with boys’ positive friendship quality (observed), other ﬁndings were unexpected. Several positive parental variables were unexpectedly
positively correlated with negative child outcomes orvice versa. This pattern of results concerning the links
between parents and children’s social relationships
has been found by other researchers (Doyle & Mar-579

kiewicz, 1996; Doyle et al., 1994; Simpkins, O’Neil, Lee,
Parke, & Wang, 1999; Youngblade & Belsky, 1992). In thecurrent study, for example, maternal conﬂict resolution
positively predicted boys’ negative behavior. Results
such as these may not be counterintuitive, because
friendships encompass both positive and negative qualities (Hartup et al., 1993; Howes, 1983; Newcomb &Bagwell, 1995). Perhaps through their parents, children understand how to behave within the context ofa friendship that includes qualities such as dominanceand conﬂict as well as positive features such as helping, sharing, and conﬂict resolution.
Limitations and Future Directions
Although this study has uncovered links between
parents’ and children’s friendship patterns, it has several limitations. Even though parents’ and children’s
friendship patterns are related, the results are correlational in nature and no inferences concerning directionof causality can be made. The current research did not
examine the mechanisms that would explain the links
between parents’ and children’s friendships. Several
mechanisms should be the focus of investigation in future research; they include observational learning(Bandura, 1989), direct parental instruction or coaching
concerning appropriate ways of relating to friends(Parke & Ladd, 1992), and cognitive working models ofsocial relationships, which derive from earlier infant–parent attachment relationships and guide child friendship patterns (Sroufe, Carlson, & Shulman, 1993).
Moreover, both direct and indirect pathways between
parents’ and children’s friendships need to be explored.
Evidence from earlier studies supports an indirect inﬂuence, in which the parents’ friendships enhance theirown well-being or parenting style, which in turn affects
the child’s social adjustment (Daniels & Moos, 1988; Simons, Lorenz, Wu, & Conger, 1993). A direct route, consisting of the parent teaching or modeling appropriatesocial skills or behavior, is also possible (Bhavnagri &Parke, 1991; Finnie & Russell, 1988). Examination ofthese pathways is an important direction for future research. Finally, the generalizability of these ﬁndings islimited in terms of both age and ethnicity of children.
Although European American and Mexican American
children participated in the study, the sample sizes did
not permit a comparison of the relative strength of therelations across the two ethnic groups. Direct exploration of these issues would be worthwhile.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
This research was supported by NSF Grant BNS
8919391 to Ross D. Parke and NICHD Grant HT 32391

580

Child Development

to Ross D. Parke and Robin O’Neil. The authors
would like to thank the Fontana and Jurupa Uniﬁed
School Districts for their generous and continued
support of the University of California at Riverside
Social Development Project, and are especially grateful to all of the families whose ongoing involvement
made this project possible.
ADDRESSES AND AFFILIATIONSCorresponding author: Sandra D. Simpkins, Institute for Social Research, University of Michigan, Ann
Arbor, MI 48106; e-mail: sandisim@isr.umich.edu. At
the time of this study, she was with Ross D. Parke at
the University of California, Riverside.
APPENDIX
DEFINITIONS OF INDIVIDUAL AND DYADICCODES FOR THE OBSERVED FRIENDSHIPQUALITY SCALE
Individual codes
Involvement: The intensity and duration of being aware of
the peer, engaging in conversation or play, knowing
where the other child is, watching the other child, initiation of interaction, and participation with the other child.
Positive initiations: The intensity, frequency, and duration ofproactive behavior, including spontaneous sharing; giving a compliment, and solicitations; or empathic behavior such as helping, courteous requests, initiation or
maintenance of play, and invitations. All of these must be
initiations, not responses.
Positive responses: The frequency, duration, and intensity ofcompliance, sharing, soliciting, complimenting, laughing
in response, and joining in play.
Negative initiations: The frequency, duration, and intensityof intrusive behavior; stealing or snatching toys; physical or verbal aggression; angry behavior; unfriendly, demeaning statements or tone of voice.
Negative responses: The frequency, duration, and intensityof refusal of objects or play; angry or aggressive responses; rebufﬁng of a positive initiation; grabbing an
object that is not offered; actively ignoring a bid; or actions with negative affect.
Leading: The extent to which a child exerts disproportionate control over what happens, such as being bossy orcontrolling, and deﬁning the activities or rules.
Following: The extent to which a child lets another control
his or her behavior or is submissive, such as evoking directions from the other, complying with their directives,or going along with anything the peer does.
Negotiation: Child’s use of strategies to attain goals, including trading, number of strategies, bargaining, rationalization of strategies, persuading, or talking about the
problem. The child does not have to be successful withthese strategies.

Angry coercion: The intensity and frequency of threatening
and derogatory directives that demand speciﬁc behavior
change. This includes such things as verbal and nonverbal threats that imply physical, psychological, or emotional harm.
Guilty coercion: The intensity and frequency of the use of
guilt in manipulating the behavior of the peer (e.g., if achild says “That really hurts my feelings when you saythat”).
Positive affect: The frequency and intensity of such behavior
and affect as ease of movement, relaxed body posture,enthusiasm, smiling, level of enjoyment, vocalizations,and positive facial expressions.
Negative affect: The frequency and intensity of verbally or
behaviorally negative feelings, such as postural expressions, pouting, stomping feet, throwing toys, unpleasantvocal tones, and angry facial expressions.
Provides information: Information about the self, including
feelings, traits, likes/dislikes, relationship issues, selfevaluation, family experiences, skills or skill deﬁcits, orrecurring behaviors.
Aversive physical contact: The frequency and intensity of behaviors such as hitting, kicking, pushing, grabbing, hairpulling, but not including the destruction of objects unless they are used to hurt the peer.
Cognitive sophistication: The extent to which a child’s behavior shows meaningful and coherent responses, including
duration and content of conversations; the extent towhich an activity is organized and planned according torules.
Positive fantasy play: The frequency and intensity of imaginative characters, places, and scenes acted out. All roles,
themes, and occurrences are of a happy, peaceful, andgenerally positive nature.
Negative fantasy play: The frequency and intensity of imaginative characters, places, and scenes acted out. All roles,
themes, and occurrences are of a destructive nature,
where harm is intended for other individuals and objects.
Dyadic codes
Positively linked: The extent to which two children are relating to one another. This includes mutual pleasure (e.g.,laughing); smiling; getting along well; cooperative, considerate, nice behavior toward each other; and joint positive pretend play.
Noncontingent behavior: The disharmony of the children’sinteraction. Overt indicators include not partaking of theother’s agenda, talking at the same time, interrupting
each other, invading the other’s space, intrusiveness, unresponsiveness, and imbalance, where one child dominates, or the children’s goals do not match.
Conﬂict: Conﬂict, disagreement, or aversive interchanges.
Cognitive sophistication: The duration and intensity of children’s sophistication in play, including play organization, development of themes, and imaginative/pretend
play.
Proximity: How much of the time children spend within 5feet of each other.

Simpkins and Parke

Competition: The extent to which the children try to show that
one is better than the other. This includes comparisons ofself or performance and attention-seeking behaviors.
Cooperation: The extent to which the partners listen to eachother regarding instructions, cooperate on tasks, andavoid becoming sidetracked.
Discussion: The extent of a reciprocal exchange of personal
information.
Gossip: The frequency, intensity, and duration of the children’s exchange of statements about another person thatboth children know.
Mind-reading: This code deﬁnes the extent to which thechildren engage in making statements that give the appearance that each is reading the mind of the other (e.g.,“You don’t like Roy,” when the peer makes a face). The
children appear to understand each other’s feelings,
opinions, and behaviors without talking about it.

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