Few friends or many friends?

[Mr Rayon]

For children (from 6-10 years of age) is it better for them to have a few group of friends or many friends? What are the advantages of a child having many friends and what are the disadvantages as well? And when I say advantages and distadvantages I mean to refer to their psychological and social development. How can having many friends have a negative impact on a young student?

 

Also, generally speaking, how can having many friends be a bad thing?

 

Would you rather have few friends that you know very well or many friends that you know but not as closely well? Have there been any scientific studies on this to show which is more beneficial to an individual (e.g. for better self esteem, health, general happiness etc)?

[PhDwannabe]

I'll summarize a lot of findings for you really quickly, Voltman:

 

To put it in the conventional psychological language of the moment, you're talking about two sorts of variables. Typically, social network size is associated with positive health and developmental outcomes. Social network connectedness is associated with those same outcomes. Both of them are independently important. Also, they're distinct variables in their own right--in other words, there are more options besides "lots of acquaintances" and "few good friends." The patterns of these variables in the population don't really produce the sort of head-to-head matchup you propose, so it's difficult to examine that kind of head-to-head matchup empirically. In fact, in both children and adults, they tend to be positively, not negatively correlated--people with very good friends (which we might think of as network connectedness) have somewhat wider social networks.

 

That's a lot of social and behavioral science in a very small nutshell; hope it makes sense.