Social Relationships

The interactions we have with other people play a key part in shaping our personalities and identities, our sense of who we are and what we value, as we’ve seen in Chapter 10. Central to these interactions are the relationships we develop with our families and friends, and the romantic connections we later experience. How do these relationships develop and change through childhood and adolescence? How do we learn to form friendships, to fall in love, to treat one another (and ourselves) with compassion and respect? How does the deepening nature of our relationships affect our emotional development, our self-esteem, our understanding of self? These are the questions explored in this chapter.