The Importance of Friendship Essay -- Sociology

The Importance of FriendshipAlthough relationships with p bents determine in large measure our longer-term preferences, attitudes and values, during adolescence it is often relationships with friends that cause most concern and which pre-occupy the thoughts of girlish people as they farm up.Friendships argon based on a completely different practice of structural relationships to those with parents. They are more than symmetrical and involve sharing and exchange. Friendships are important to young children but there is a change at the beginning of adolescence -- a move to intimacy that includes the development of a more exclusive focus, a willingness to talk about unmatchableself and to share problems and advice. Friends tell one another just about everything that is going on in distributively others lives... Friends literally reason together in order to organise eff and to define themselves as persons.The role of friendshipsIn adolescence friendships normally exist deep down the larger neighborly structure of peer relationships. In this larger social setting each adolescent has a particular role to influence and is usually aware of their own status within the group. Close friendships are not independent of such status. Popular or successful youngsters have together. Those who are in do not mix as frequently with those on the periphery of what is acceptable to the group. Whereas the standards and styles set by the peer group flock set highly influential markers around acceptable and unacceptable behaviours for young people, it is in individual friendships that young people find support and security, discuss their emotional independence, exchange information, put beliefs and feelings into words and develop a unsanded and different perspective of themse... ... become important points of reference. They provide social contexts for pliant the day- to- day behaviour of adolescents, and encourage conformity to norms and values. Despite much habitual mythology about the generation gap, such standards are startlingly similar to paternal values, though the similarities are masked by different youth styles or expressions. Such groupings clearly have a developmental potential in enabling young people to make the social adjustments necessary for them to plight in adult society.Educationalists concerned with young people have begun to recompense much more care to the concept of peer education--for example, in relation to smoking, do drugs or HIV education programmes (eg Smokebusters or Fast Forward). How much attention do these programmes pay to the real dynamics of peer group pressures as they ebb and flow across adolescence?