research

Gen Y moms (born between 1982 and 1995), AKA  babies of baby boomers) are pushing the digital envelope. Compared to Gen X moms before them, they are more likely to use the internet to form bonds with one another to hone their parenting skills. A research brief on MediaPost draws distinctions between the way the two groups use a popular parenting site, Parenting.com.

Generation X women (born between 1965-1982, AKA post-baby boomers) tend to rely on the internet for more practical applications, like shopping and uploading pictures---as compared to Generation Y women, who are more likely to use technology to connect with other moms---by texting, sharing photos and videos, and chatting as members of online communities.

According to the report: “It…reveals a trend among the younger Gen Y moms of relying on the common experience of members of their cohort to help them navigate their journey through parenthood.”

As a baby boomer, the telephone was the tool I used to connect. I would call my one-and-only best friend and next-door neighbor Judy, who had given birth a few years before me, to find out all the tricks she knew and I was yet to learn as a young mother. Now young moms can learn from groups of their peers, 24/7, as long as the baby takes naps and sleeps through the night. But if that were the case, why would they need parenting advice? :-) 

In a recent post on her Psychology Today blog, research psychologist Dr. Bella DePaulo, author of Singled Out, raises the issue of what it means to be “just friends.”

Unlike marriage (and same-sex unions in some States), friends have no legal ties to one another. Unlike siblings, they have no blood ties. Yet one of the most unique and defining characteristics of a friendship is that it is a totally voluntary relationship that exists simply because two people “just” want to be friends.

Ironically: “Friends are marginalized as ‘just’ friends,” writes DePaulo. “Now that Americans spend more years of their adult lives single than married, friendship is more important than it used to be,” she adds. “As family size decreases, so, too, do options for family care in old age or any other age - fewer people have siblings or adult children to care for them (or if they do, those family members may live many miles away). Again, it is friends who come to the rescue.”

Whether single or married, it is often difficult for women to strike the right balance between their friendships, family ties, careers, and needs for time alone. Yet DePaulo’s remarks remind us that---in sickness and in health, for better or for worse---it’s always a treasure to be surrounded by strong, caring female friendships.

In the course of my own research on female friendships, I serendipitously found the perfect mentor to teach me about male friendships and the differences between the two: Geoffrey Greif, DSW, a professor at the University of Maryland School of Social Work and author of the new book, Buddy System: Understanding Male Friendships (Oxford University Press, 2008).

Dr. Greif studied 386 men and 122 women, whom he interviewed in depth about their definitions of friendship, how they made friends, how they maintained them, and whether they had ever lost friends. These questions and answers represent just a few of the lessons he learned and that he shares in greater detail in his excellent book:

Q: How do male and female friendships differ from one another?

Through listening to men and women and studying what they tell us about friendships, certain tenets about friendship can be cautiously put forth. We must be careful though about making sweeping generalizations about women’s friendships, just as we must be careful about making generalizations about men’s. Great diversity exists in the friendships of both genders---but:

• Women are more apt to say they have enough friends and that friends are important; they are less apt to say they didn’t have time for friends. Although the majority (60%) of men say they have enough friends, 40% do not have enough or are unsure, a greater number than women. It may be that some men are pulled by work and cannot find the time to balance friends, work, and family. Or, it could be as we have heard from some men: that they have a hard time connecting with other men in a way that is satisfying to them on a friendship level. They may feel they do not have enough must friends. (Grief uses four categories to describe friendships: must, trust, rust and just).

• Women are more apt to help each other than are men, by being supportive, encouraging, and “being there.” Men, on the other hand, are more apt to give their friends advice and offer their perspectives. Both mentioned the importance of listening and talking. Men tend to be fixers, and see getting something concrete accomplished as a way of helping, whereas women are more comfortable with emotional support, which sometimes involves listening without giving specific advice.

• When with friends, women spend more time shopping, going out to dine with them and going to the movies, as well as staying home with friends to cook or watch movies. Communication, as part of the relationship, is frequent for both women and men. Men, who gave fewer distinct responses to this question, are much more apt to be involved in sports-related activities, either as a participant or viewer.

• To make friends, women may reach out to others a bit more than men, and they are less concerned with finding commonalities as a basis for friendships. Men mention sports more often than women as a basis for making friends. To feel comfortable, men may be slightly more apt to need a socially acceptable arena for having a friendship begin, like a similar hobby or sports. This would be a shoulder-to-shoulder approach to friendships, as opposed to women perhaps feeling slightly more comfortable making friends without a specific activity or commonality being at the center of the friendship.

• To maintain a friendship, women put a much greater value on frequent contact than men. Men often mention being able to pick up again with a friend after little contact, whereas women place a greater value on staying in touch. Women appear to need more communication in general than men. Emotional connection is important to them, and it is often manifested by staying in frequent contact.

• Women are more apt to lose friends and more apt to try to get them back than are men. We have learned already that men are often less concerned about slights than women and so they may be slightly less apt to lose a friend because of someone’s behavior.

Q: How are male and female friendships similar?

• The words used to define friendships are similar. Being understood, trust, dependability, and loyalty are key features of friendships for both genders.

• The percentage of people who said they had a friend of the opposite sex is similar.

• The importance of friends, although slightly higher for women, is very high for both men and women.

• Women and men both make friends through their spouses and significant others.

• Women’s friendships can also be effectively grouped using the must, trust, just, and rust categories. These categories of friendships are discussed in depth in the book and help us understand our relationships with friends.

Q: What can men learn from female friendships?

Men can learn that physical and emotional expressiveness can exist in a friendship without it meaning that a man is gay. Women are much less concerned about this level of expressiveness than are men who often pull back from other men. Men are socialized to compete with and not pursue other men as friends. Unless it is sports, music, or war, emulating men, having a “crush” on them, and being physically close, is not universally acceptable.

Q: What can women learn from female friendships?

Men tend to have less complicated friendships than women. Some women, when directly asked, said they wished their relationships were more upfront and less emotionally demanding. They like the fact that men are able to resolve differences more quickly and move on.

“Cultural relevance is key,” cautions Dr. Greif. “Different sub-groups in America view friendships, women’s and men’s roles, and community connectiveness in vastly divergent ways. Anything that can be learned from men or women must be understood within such a context.”

In your own experience, which friendships do you think are stronger or more meaningful, male or female? Who takes the gold and who takes the silver?

 

 

I hereby proclaim February 29th, 2008 as the first Make Time for Friends Day. There are no commercial aspects to the day that you need to worry about. You don’t have to buy cards, send gifts or spend money. You have received the gift of extra time and are free to use it wisely. Let me suggest how:

At various times in our lives, we have more or less time and need for our female friends. Women who are single, divorced, widowed, or retired tend to have more discretionary time than women who are involved in marriage, child-rearing or heavily invested in their careers. Of course, most research looks at groups and talks about averages rather than individuals so these trends certainly don’t apply to every woman. There are many women who are married, raising their brood, or working---who are wise enough to make female friendships a priority in their lives.

However, looking at the trends, you might easily ask: How will women have any friends when they get divorced, become widowed, or decide to retire, if they don’t make efforts to maintain those friendships beforehand? You are absolutely correct in posing that question because research suggests that single women who forgo marriage are more likely to retain their close friendships over the long haul. In a recent post on her blog on the The Huffington Post, social psychologist Bella DePaulo and author of Singled Out states that based on scientific research on loneliness in later life, “…No group is likely to be less lonely in their senior years than women who have always been single.”

I think I have one answer to reconcile the gap for those at-risk: This year, 2008, is a leap or intercalary year. That means that an extra day has been added to the calendar, Friday the 29th, to synchronize the calendar year with the solar year.

This extra day is a perfect time for Make Time for Friends Day. All you very busy multi-tasking women (me among them), take out your Blackberry, Palm, or conventional paper daybook or calendar and give yourself that extra day, February 29th, to catch up with one or more female friends---old or new--- who you’ve not had time to be with.

Take the leap and do it now! Think about the significance of friendships to your well-being, physical, emotional, and spiritual---and give yourself the gift of time with friends. My suspicion is that you may decide that one day every four years isn’t enough---and that it may become a habit.

Need another reason to nurture your friendships? Every year, about 15 million Americans undergo surgical procedures. Whenever anyone goes under the knife, even for an elective procedure, it is likely to be a time of great stress.

Whether the surgery is for breast cancer, an ovarian cyst or a cosmetic procedure, female friendships can help ease an otherwise difficult journey. Friends can provide physician referrals, listen when you need another set of eyes and ears to interview a doctor, and provide a potent dose of caring and cheer at your bedside. A new study published in the Journal of the American College of Surgeons confirms that a strong network of family and friends can even ease postoperative pain and anxiety---and speed recuperation.

“Strong social connectedness can have a tremendous impact on patient recovery by helping blunt the effect of stress caused by postoperative pain, as well as ease concerns about health, finances and separation from family members,” says Allison R. Mitchinson, MPH, who works with the Ann Arbor (MI) Healthcare System and was one of the co-authors of the study.

The researchers studied more than 600 patients undergoing major thoracic or abdominal operations at two Veterans Affairs’ medical centers. Prior to surgery, the patients responded to a questionnaire that elicited the numbers and frequency of their social contacts. Patients with smaller social networks reported significantly higher preoperative pain intensity, unpleasantness, and anxiety.

Like exercising regularly and eating a balanced diet, maintaining meaningful friendships is one of the things we can all do to improve health, prevent disease and extend life,

What do lonely people do when they need friends but have none? According to new research, they tend to anthropomorphize: They attribute human motivation, characteristics, or behavior to inanimate objects, animals, or natural phenomena.

“When people lack a sense of connection with other people, they are more likely to see their pets, gadgets or gods as human-like,” says psychologist Nicholas Epley, an assistant professor at the University of Chicago, in a press release.

The loneliness of having too few friends or being totally bereft of friends can be excruciatingly painful. In fact, Epley suggests that it can even be deadly. “It’s actually a greater risk for morbidity or mortality than cigarette smoking is. Being lonely is a bad thing for you,” he says.

The researchers suggest that humanizing the inhuman may confer some of the same benefits that people derive from friends and other social relationships. The bottom Line: If you find yourself talking to your cat, you may want to think about whether you have a friendship deficit that needs to be addressed.

 

The study will appear in the February issue of Psychological Science. Also contributing to the research were Scott Akalis of Harvard University and the University of Chicago’s Adam Waytz and John Cacioppo.

Preteens tend to worry. Why? As they’re simultaneously growing into awkward new bodies and tackling the social challenges of middle school, they’re also victims of the emotional roller coaster created by their fluctuating hormones. With these stressors, it’s a difficult time for kids well as their parents.

Preteens tend to be tight-lipped---preferring to share secrets with their friends over their parents---so it’s natural for moms, dads and teachers to wonder what they worry about. A new KidsHealth KidsPoll was designed to provide some answers. The January 2008 poll surveyed 1,154 kids between the ages of 9 and 13, looking at how much they worry and what they worry about.

By far, the largest proportion (86 per cent) worry “almost all the time” or “a lot” about someone they love. They also worry about tests and grades, the future, their appearance, and making mistakes---in that order. But 1 out of 4 worry about their friends “almost all the time” and a third of them worry about friends “a lot.” In fact, friendships ranked among the top 8 of 20 pre-teen worries.

One implication: Moms need to talk to their daughters about female friendships and share their wisdom and experience about the fragility of these relationships. Particularly during these pre-teen years, we need to help cushion the blow when our daughters are excluded from a clique at school or camp, or when they are inevitably rejected by one of their Besties.

 

The poll was conducted by KidsHealth.org, a web portal that provides health information for children.

An article by Stephanie Rosenbloom in yesterday’s New York Times, On Facebook, Scholars Link Up with Data, explains how the popular social networking site is increasingly being used by academic researchers to study friendships.

Rosenbloom quotes Nicholas Christakis, a Harvard sociology professor: “Our predecessors could only dream of the kind of data we now have.” While there are legitimate concerns that some of the 58 million Facebook may not know their habits and preferences are being tracked, never before have social scientists had such a fertile source of information to mine on the nature of our friendships.

As one example, the article mentions that researchers at Harvard and UCLA are using Facebook to examine the concept of triadic closure: whether your friends are friends of one another. Although the phenomenon was first described by a sociologist named Georg Simmel as long as a century ago, there were few empirical studies. Using Facebook as a laboratory, social scientists are studying triadic closure---which one day may shed light on the exclusionary social cliques that draw circles keeping some people in and others out.

Given the importance of friendship in our lives, used well, Facebook and other such social networking sites could potentially yield important information on how to build and sustain healthy relationships.

Transitioning from one school to another is always nerve-wracking for children and their parents but friendships can help ease the way. A new study of 600 children and 80 parents in the UK suggests that children who are separated from their friends as they move from elementary to secondary schools are “inherently more vulnerable.” These children are more likely to lose solid friendships and feel less confident, and are more prone to bullying.

 

However, when children move with siblings or with other friends, their transition is made easier because friends and siblings provide social support and “insider information” that helps them better navigate new waters. The four-year project conducted by Dr. Susie Weller and Irene Bruegel from London South Bank University was funded by the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC).

 

According to a press release from the Council, the benefits of childhood friendships are too often overlooked or placed in a negative light. “They [social theorists] have focused on the ‘youth problem’ - describing peer group interaction as having a negative affect on educational attainment and associated with destructive activities such as membership of a gang,” said Dr. Weller. "This often means that relationships such as friendship are sidelined, and little attention has been given to the positive and constructive resources and experiences such networks can provide."

 

Thanks to Sophia Casey, Age 9, for the beautiful picture of Best Friends. 

 

Some people worry that digital technology is eroding the face of friendship as we now know it---that time spent in virtual relationships detracts from real ones. A new report provides evidence to the contrary. Among Americans:

• 48 percent of those interviewed said that social networking sites help them build new relationships

• 44 percent said that social networking sites help them maintain current relationships

This social effect cuts across age groups:...