Understanding Friendship: The Perspectives of Parents, Preschool Teachers, and Preschoolers

Friendship is a central feature of preschool children’s social lives and plays an important role in their social, emotional, and developmental experiences. Although friendships in early childhood have been widely studied, much of the existing research relies on quantitative approaches and adult-defined frameworks focused on observable behavior, offering limited insight into how young children understand and experience friendship. In addition, parents’ and preschool teachers’ beliefs about friendship are often examined separately from children’s perspectives, limiting understanding of how these views intersect in children’s everyday social worlds. Guided by a constructivist, interpretive framework and informed by Bronfenbrenner’s ecological systems theory, this qualitative study used interviews, children’s drawings, and classroom observations to examine how parents (N = 13), preschool teachers (N = 2), and preschool children (N = 11) conceptualize friendship in a university-based learning center in the Midwest. Findings indicated that parents and preschool teachers commonly defined friendship in relation to play, kindness, emotional connection, and social competence, though their emphases differed across home and school contexts. Parents described friendship as developing through shared activities and emotional closeness over time, whereas teachers emphasized friendship as a context for supporting social-emotional learning and classroom community. Preschool children understood friendship through shared play, proximity, and everyday interaction, using friendship labels flexibly to signal inclusion and belonging. By foregrounding children’s perspectives alongside those of adults, this research contributes to a relational and contextualized understanding of preschool friendship and highlights children as active meaning-makers.

Author dc:creator

• Jolanta Dohrmann (24400160)

• Friendship

Statement dc:rights

• In Copyright
• Open Access after 2028-05-01

DOI dc:identifier

https://doi.org/10.25417/uic.32995223.v1

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:figshare.com:article/32995223