Sense of Friendship

Friendship offers social and psychological benefits across the lifespan and has different values at different stages of life. Friendship in its broadest sense can be considered a connection between human beings alleviating the isolation of the individual human psyche. Friendship develops across the life cycle and changes as the nature of human psychology and social interactions changes. There are different ways of viewing the life cycle, one way being to see it extending through a series of stages covering infancy, pre-school, early adolescence, adolescence, early adulthood, middle adulthood, and late adulthood. Friendship is important at each of these stages and provides specific comfort and needed interpersonal connections for each individual.

The stages can be framed in different ways and have been by different theorists, and one of the more interesting is that of Erik Erikson because he also links each stage with life conflicts which help identify both the stage and the "problem" to be overcome as part of human development. Erikson's approach is a psychosocial theory of development which describes a series of eight stages in the development of the individual throughout life--Erikson divides the life cycle somewhat differently to get eight stages. This is based on the interaction of biological, psychological, and social processes, and it is the interaction of these processes that accounts for the "psycho" (inner) "social" (external) character of development.

Everyone have readings from literature on friendship, personal written responses to the literature, supported rea dings of the literature for the purpose of preparing a performance to share the literature with others, performance related to the literature, and jo

urnal writing on the topic of friendship. The authors conducted research using this unit and detailed the findings: In the various activity settings that we have described, the children read and wrote for a broad range of purposes, including indicating their understanding of the stories, expressing their own opinions, creatively representing the stories to others, and reflecting on their own beliefs about friendship. They experienced reading and writing in holis tic and integra te d ways. They assisted each other during activities, sharing their expertise and knowledge. Finally, from a developmental standpoint, the instruction began with the children, bo th in terms of their concerns about friendship and in terms of their current literacy levels. Friendship across the life cycle ca n also be identified with social support, something each person needs both to have support from a community and to be part of a community that gives support to others. . .