PARENTING AND PARENT-CHILD RELATIONSHIP QUALITY AS PREDICTORS OF FRIENDSHIP DISSOLUTION IN LATE CHILDHOOD AND EARLY ADOLESCENCE

Friendships convey developmental advantages. Adolescents without friends suffer from a host of difficulties. Much more is known about which friendships are likely to be stable over time, than about maternal contributions to friendship stability. To this end, the current study examines characteristics of mother-child relationship quality (i.e., child reported social support, negativity and relationship importance) and maternal parenting practices (i.e., child-reported behavioral control and psychological control) that predict the dissolution of children’s friendships in a sample of primary school (ages 10 to 11) and middle school (ages 11 to 14) students attending seven public schools in Lithuania. A total of 574 participants (290 female, 284 male) completed identical surveys at six time points across two consecutive school years. Peer nominations provided an index of peer status (i.e., acceptance or liking and rejection or disliking), which were also included as predictors in order to control the contribution of peer status. Friendships were defined as dyads in which both partners nominated each other as friends. Dissolved Friendships were defined as dyads that were reciprocated at Time 1 but one or both partners failed to nominate the other as a friend as a subsequent time point.
Discrete time survival analyses were conducted to predict friendship dissolution from maternal parenting practices variables, mother-child relationship quality variables, peer status variables, and demographic variables (sex, dyad sex, nutrition, household structure, relationship rank). Two sets of analyses were conducted. The individual model explored the degree to which individual scores on each variable predicted friendship dissolution. The dyadic model the degree to which dyadic differences (i.e., the absolute difference between friend scores) on each variable predicted friendship dissolution.