Friendship is a relationship of mutual affection between people. In some cultures, [ which? Although there are many forms of friendship, certain features are common to many such bonds, such as choosing to be with one another, enjoying time spent together, and being able to engage in a positive and supportive role to one another.
Sometimes friends are distinguished from family , as in the saying "friends and family", and sometimes from lovers e. Similarly, being in the friend zone describes someone who is restricted from rising from the status of friend to that of lover see also unrequited love. Friendship has been studied in academic fields, such as communication , sociology , social psychology , anthropology , and philosophy.
Various academic theories of friendship have been proposed, including social exchange theory , equity theory , relational dialectics , and attachment styles. The understanding of friendship by children tends to be focused on areas such as common activities, physical proximity, and shared expectations. Recent work on friendship in young children investigated the cues they use to infer friendship. Young children use cues such as sharing resources, like snacks, [ 7 ] and sharing secrets, [ 8 ] especially in older adolescents, to determine friendship status.
As children mature, they become more reliant on others, as awareness grows. They gain the ability to empathize with their friends, and enjoy playing in groups. They also experience peer rejection as they move through the middle childhood years. Establishing good friendships at a young age helps a child to be better acclimated in society later on in their life. Friendships in childhood can assist in the development of certain skills, such as building empathy and learning different problem-solving techniques.
Eileen Kennedy-Moore describes three key ingredients of children's friendship formation: 1 openness, 2 similarity, and 3 shared fun. In adolescence, friendships become "more giving, sharing, frank, supportive, and spontaneous. A large study of American adolescents determined how their engagement in problematic behavior such as stealing, fighting, and truancy was related to their friendships. Findings indicated that adolescents who were less likely to engage in problematic behavior had friends who did well in school, participated in school activities, avoided drinking, and had good mental health.
