As we talk about social development, you will be reading mainly about how children develop their social interactions with other people, from infancy through age 8.

Friendship in Early Childhood

When you hear the term “social development”, what do you think of? A lot of people think first of friends – the people who we are social with. Friends and friendship are essential to healthy emotional and physical development in childhood.

In infancy, friendship is about exposure that parents and other caregivers orchestrate. Infants are often curious about other babies, and typically will play with anyone they are put down next to. However, infants lack the social knowledge or language ability to navigate these interactions the way that older child do; infant “friendship” is really more of being in the same place at the same time than it is about an emotional bond.

For example, infants playing together often explore their environment without any coordinated effort. If you have ever watched two babies playing, you may have noticed that their play is very individual and typically focused on an object that one or both of them wish to control. When babies interact, their play is often very exploratory as well. They smile at one another and react positively when they get a smile in return. They may touch each other, and it is common for babies to babble to one another in a conversational pattern. These behaviors all demonstrate the first steps towards understanding social interactions and what the range of possibilities are.

As children mature into toddlerhood, their friendships start to become more about one another although the ways in which children meet and the types of interactions they have are still very different from what you experience as an adult. Once a baby becomes mobile, she is no longer stuck playing with the baby next to her; she can get up and walk away, and find someone else to play with. However, she still is limited to playing with the other children who are in her immediate environment – whether that is home, day care, or a playdate.

As children begin preschool and then K-12 schooling, they are exposed to a much wider range of peers with whom to form friendships. In this exposure to new environments, children learn to manage social interactions and learn about people with different backgrounds, languages, and ideas. Meeting new people who don’t look like them is an important piece of social development for young children. It helps them to understand that not everyone thinks the same things, and that each one of us is an individual. It also plays an important role in helping children to understand which characteristics about themselves are changeable (cutting your hair, for example), and which are not (racial identity).

Theory of Mind

One example of where domains overlap is in the development of Theory of Mind. This ability is based on factors of cognitive development but allows children to have a wider range of social interactions.

Theory of Mind is, in the most simple terms, the ability to understand that what is in your mind is different from what other people have in their mind. It means understanding that your thoughts are private and that unless you share them through some means, such as language, other people do not have access to them. It also means understanding that you can think about your own point of view and another person’s point of view simultaneously, and are able to separate what you know / are thinking from what they know / are thinking. It helps children to move from seeing the world as true/false and come to understand that there are shades of gray everywhere.

It might be easiest to understand this concept if we use a scenario:

Susie’s mother gives her a chocolate bar as a snack. Susie eats a few squares, then wraps it back up and puts it in the refrigerator. Then, she goes outside to play.

While she is outside, her mother is making chocolate chip cookies but realizes that she doesn’t have enough chocolate chips. She gets the chocolate bar from the refrigerator, and uses all of it in the cookies. When Susie comes back inside from playing, she looks for her chocolate bar. Where does she look?

Because you have a fully developed Theory of Mind, you know that Susie will look in the refrigerator, where she left her chocolate bar before going outside. Since she was gone, there is no way for her to know that her mother took it out and used it all.

When this task is given to very young children, younger than 4, they typically will say that Susie will not look in the refrigerator, because the chocolate isn’t there anymore. Prior to the development of Theory of Mind, children treat all knowledge as universal: everyone knows the same thing. However, as they have more experience with social interactions, they will come to understand that is not true. This becomes essential for negotiating social interactions that involve the transmission of information and may require one person to make calculated choices about how much information to share with the other person: for example, knowing when you need to give extra information about context for someone to understand your story, or knowing when it is better not to share something that you shouldn’t know, or that might upset someone else!

Going back to our discussion of lying, Theory of Mind can be related to children’s ability to tell lies and play tricks on people; the cognitive ability to hold multiple perspectives in mind simultaneously comes from Theory of Mind, and allows behaviors such as hiding things and other jokes that require one person to have more information than another (Crain, 2011).