Friendship and Peer Culture in the Early Years

Based on a year-long micro-ethnography of a nursery school, this book presents a unique approach to childhood socialization by focusing directly upon the social, interactive, and communicative processes that make up the world of young children. It contains micro-sociolinguistic analyses of videotaped peer interactive episodes which are the basis of explanations of children’s development and use of social concepts such as status, role, norms, and friendship. Stable features of peer culture in the nursery school are identified, and the importance of interpreting children’s behavior from their own perspective is demonstrated. The author also addresses the implications of the findings for early childhood education.