Children’s friendships in culturally diverse classrooms

This paper draws attention to the potentially harmful effects of evaluating children’s friendships on what are often negative outcomes, rather than on the efforts that children make to effectively negotiate their friendships. In the study reported here, children’s friendships in a fifth-grade culturally diverse class in a large urban elementary school in the southeastern United States indicated the existence of nonsynchronous patterns. Two interrelated sociocultural findings emerged. First, the children who negotiated their friendships within their own tacitly agreed upon parameters experienced consonance in their relationships. Second, the children who negotiated their friendships beyond their own tacitly agreed upon parameters experienced dissonance in their relationships. In the cases of the children with dissonant friendships the influence of social pathologies related to drugs, transiency, and being a runaway became salient. Implications for research and practice are raised.