Mind the gap – Age gaps among young children’s ‘friendships’

Cynthia Hicban; Maryanne  Theobald; Julia Mascadri

doi:10.1080/02643944.2025.2477492

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Mind the gap – Age gaps among young children’s ‘friendships’

Journal article

Open access

Peer reviewed

Mind the gap – Age gaps among young children’s ‘friendships’

Cynthia Hicban, Maryanne Theobald and Julia Mascadri

Pastoral Care in Education, Vol.43(3), pp.351-376

2025

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1080/02643944.2025.2477492

Appears in UniSC Diversity and Inclusion Research Collection

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Abstract

Education policy, sociology and philosophy not elsewhere classified

mixed age

child-peer interactions

friendship

age gaps

conversation analysis (CA)

UniSC Diversity Area - Life Stages

Early childhood education settings provide opportunities for children to learn what it means to be social and consequently, what it means to be a friend. Friendship-making is multifaceted among peers of similar ages and perhaps even more complex between children with a significant age discrepancy. Mixed-age settings, where children socialise within a large age range, offer a rich context to explore the concept of ‘friendship’ between older children and their (much) younger peers. This paper investigates how children explore the ‘doing of making friends’ by analysing how children initiate connection, how they recognise social cues, and how they respond. The paper reports on data taken from a study investigating children’s participation rights in an early childhood education setting in Australia. Taken from 75 h of video-recordings, selected extracts of interactions between a child of 5-years with different aged younger peers were analysed using a fine-grained analysis of conversation analysis. The findings provide insights into the complexity of children’s relationships while also underscoring the critical role educators play in scaffolding connections between young children of different ages.

Details

Title: Mind the gap – Age gaps among young children’s ‘friendships’
Authors: Cynthia Hicban (Corresponding Author) - University of the Sunshine Coast, Queensland, School of Education and Tertiary Access
Maryanne Theobald - Queensland University of Technology
Julia Mascadri - Queensland University of Technology
Publication details: Pastoral Care in Education, Vol.43(3), pp.351-376
Publisher: Routledge
Date published: 2025
DOI: 10.1080/02643944.2025.2477492
ISSN: 1468-0122
Copyright note: © 2025 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, and is not altered, transformed, or built upon in any way. The terms on which this article has been published allow the posting of the Accepted Manuscript in a repository by the author(s) or with their consent.
Grant note: The work was supported by the Australian Government Research Training.
Organisation Unit: School of Education and Tertiary Access
Language: English
Record Identifier: 991113047202621
Output Type: Journal article

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