In preschool - based on common interests and getting along well. As older, loyalty, trust, and intimacy are important. Friends are usually similar in age, race, and attitudes. Children with friends are more skilled socially and better adjusted. Groups Older kids and adolescents form cliques.
Cliques have varied status.
Most have a hierarchy. Peer pressure Popularity and Rejection Popular kids are socially skilled. Kids who are rejected often are too aggressive - are unsuccessful in school and have behavior problems. Today children enter puberty earlier and are bigger at maturity than in previous generations. A recognition that truth may vary from one situation to another, solutions must be realistic, ambiguity and contradiction are the rule and emotion and subjectivity play a role in thinking.