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This book is one of the series, The Developing Child, edited by Jerome Bruner, Michael Cole and Barbara Lloyd. As such it is addressed to workers
professionally concerned with children as well as to parents and the general reader. The dual nature of the book's intended audience is reflected in the two main sources the author has drawn on. Zick Rubin is a professor of social psychology whose work, he writes, has been concerned largely with, adult behaviour; but he is also the father of a son. Thus we are given the results of academic research on children's friendships—for instance, on what kinds of factors influence the way they interact in different sorts of playgroups; but we are also given careful observations the author made of his own little boy's behaviour, as well as his detailed notes on older children attending pre-school playgroups in California. Children's logs on friendship that were collected by a teacher, extracts from teenagers' diaries, responses to interview questions, relevant sections from works of fiction—all these are brought into the discussion.
The book covers a wider area. (Chapter headings in themselves are proof of this: Do friends matter? The earliest friendships; What is a friend; The skills of friendship; Being friends; Losing friends; Boys, girls and groups; Cross-age friendships; Environment and friendship.) The book is suffused with the conviction that friends do matter; more generally, that children matter, and that how we as adults behave towards them matters very much. Repeated attempts are made to draw practical conclusions for parents and teachers from the academic research that is discussed.
Unfortunately, no unity is achieved in this book between Professor Rubin's voice as a social psychologist and his voice as a father. The observations are invariably telling, vividly recorded and stimulating to further thought However, the author never confronts the question of the scientific status of observation, and the implicit underlying