The aim of this proposal is to provide new measures of family, peers, and friendships that will be suitable for the middle childhood phase of the ongoing NICHD Study of Early Child Care. The proposed protocol focuses on the combined contribution of the family and prior and current child care experience to the development of children's social relationships with peers and friends. The work is guided by a tripartite model which suggests that families influence children's social relationships in three ways: (1) through the impact of parent-child interaction, (2) through the impact of the parent as advisor and (3) through the role of parent as provider of opportunities for social contact with other children. A multi-method, multi-agent approach is proposed involving self-report, parent and peer reports and observational measures in both naturalistic and laboratory contexts. Two sets of mediating processes, namely emotional processes (children's emotional understanding and emotional regulation) and children's and parental cognitive representations of social relationships will be examined. Observational and self-report measures of friendship quality will be secured. Consistent with the ecological model of the NICHD study, measures of parental and child perception of the neighborhood are proposed. The project will permit us to identify (1) the changing role of the three parental influence sources on children's social relationships across time, (2) the relative importance of these three sets of strategies as a function of children's social competence, (3) the cross-time relations between changes in these three parental strategies and changes in children's social functioning, (4) the relative impact of child care history on these three family pathways and (5) the combined contributions of early child care experience, current child care arrangements and family factors to children's social relationships.
