Facilitating Child Friendships

11/17/2009

Facilitating Child Friendships

You can't cross the sea merely by standing and staring at the water.
Rabindranath Tagore

"Adults need to take a more active role in many ways, than in the past, in helping children to learn how to be friends and what you do to be friends, because they're having less spontaneous opportunities to interact with peers in positive give-and-take ways."

This is the observation of Nancy Carlsson-Paige and Diane Levin in their chapter, "Children's Friendships in Contemporary Society," from the Exchange book, Connecting: Friendship in the Lives of Young Children and Their Teachers. They continue...

"They're having more time in front of the screen, families often interact less, say, during dinner. There's less neighborhood play where children would spontaneously play with other children outside. So we're often left with a situation where children don't have as many places in which to learn the positive things they should be learning that help them feel powerful and effective and counteract all those negative messages they're learning about social interactions on
television."

CORRECTION NOTICE: In the list of Exchange authors at this year's NAEYC conference, Ellen Hofstetter Jaffe's presentation was incorrectly listed for Saturday; her presentation is Friday, 8:30 AM - 9:30 AM. Also, 2 presentations by Diane Levin have been added. Click here, for the revised schedule.

Connecting at Exchange

Connecting: Friendship in the Lives of Young Children and Their Teachers looks at friendship as it develops in the context of early childhood programs, where people come together in unlimited combinations of age, experience, sex, culture, and background. This thought-provoking collection of articles offers practical tools and ideas for facilitating relationships among children and adults with contributions by experts including Ashley Montagu, Judith Leipzig, Kay Albrecht, Lella Gandini, Margie Carter, Diane Levin, and a host of others.

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