When Friendships Get Complicated: What Happens Around Ages Five and Six

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"They were best friends, and then suddenly she came home alone." "He's started talking about being left out, or about leaving someone else out." Around ages five and six, the reports that come home from school or daycare start sounding more complicated.

Between ages two and three, friendship means something straightforward: a fun person to play with nearby. By ages five and six, something has shifted. Developmental psychology has described that shift with some precision over the past several decades. Understanding what changes — and why — gives parents a slightly richer vocabulary for listening to their children's social lives.

How Children's Concept of Friendship Develops

Bigelow and La Gaipa (1975) gave 480 children ages 6–14 a simple task: write down what you expect from a friend [1]. Analyzing those essays, they found that friendship concepts change in recognizable stages as children grow.

At around ages 6–7, children understand friendship mainly in behavioral and physical terms: being nearby, playing together, sharing things. "The kid I ride the swings with" is a friend.

By ages 8–10, elements of reciprocity and loyalty enter the picture: keeping promises, not sharing secrets, coming to help. The friend shifts from "someone who provides benefits" to "someone I can trust" [1].

Selman (1980) offered a more structured developmental model, connecting the evolution of friendship concepts to the development of — the ability to hold another person's point of view [2]. At around ages 5–6 (what Selman calls Stage 1), a friend is defined as "someone who agrees with what I want to do." The friend's independent perspective and desires are not yet fully factored in. At ages 7–9 (Stage 2), the recognition that "this person also has thoughts and feelings" enters the friendship concept, and relationships begin to be understood as bidirectional [2].

The complexity that parents notice around age five and six arises precisely because children are in this transition. They are beginning to experience the collision between their own desires and a friend's desires — but the cognitive and emotional tools to navigate that collision are still developing.

Social Withdrawal: Is Being Alone a Problem?

A child who often plays alone prompts parental concern. But Rubin, Coplan, and Bowker's comprehensive 2009 review in Annual Review of Psychology cautions against treating social withdrawal as a single phenomenon [3].

Social withdrawal covers at least two distinct mechanisms. One is withdrawal driven by social anxiety or shyness — the child who wants to join the group but feels afraid. The other is withdrawal driven by a preference for solitary activity — a temperamental characteristic that is not the same as a deficit in social skills [3].

The first may warrant attention if it persists and appears to cause the child distress. The second generally does not, and treating it as a problem can create one where none existed. A useful indicator: is the child distressed by being alone? A child who wants to be with friends but cannot get in, and a child who prefers building something on their own, are in different situations. The difference matters more than the surface behavior.

Hartup (1996), in a widely cited review of friendship research, made a clarifying observation: what predicts developmental problems is not "having no friends" but "not being able to make friends" and "having low-quality friendships" [4]. The question is quality, not quantity — an observation that remains useful guidance now.

Reading the Early Signs of Exclusion

At ages 5–6, in daycare and kindergarten settings, "not letting a particular child join," "deliberately ignoring someone," and similar behaviors are already observable. These are sometimes treated as precursors to bullying.

In developmental research, this kind of behavior — using social relationships as a tool to harm, rather than using direct physical aggression — is known as . It is documented to emerge as early as ages 4–5, and while it is found in children of all genders, it tends to become more prominent than physical aggression earlier in girls than in boys [5].

As Rubin and colleagues' review notes, peer exclusion at this age is a developmentally common behavior — not automatically a bullying problem [3]. Whether to treat a specific episode as requiring intervention depends on pattern: is it recurring? Intentional? One-directional over a sustained period? Parents and caregivers who observe carefully and respond when a pattern becomes clear are better positioned than those who either dismiss all episodes or treat every incident as a crisis.

What Parents Can Do

Hartup's framework suggests that supporting the quality of friendships matters more than expanding their number [4]. "Who did you play with today?" generates less information than "What happened at school today?" The second question makes space for the child to put into words what the relationship felt like, not just who was there.

There is also something to be said for tolerating the discomfort of not intervening immediately. When a five-year-old describes a conflict with a friend, the instinct to fix it — to call the other parent, to coach the child through a scripted response — is understandable. But friendship at this age is partly a training ground for the experience that relationships break and can be repaired. A child who has lived through a conflict, sat with the discomfort for a day, and returned to reconcile has learned something about relational resilience that a parent's early intervention would have bypassed. This is not an argument against ever stepping in; it is a reason to pause before doing so reflexively.

When a child reports "Mei wouldn't let me play with them," the most useful first response is often not a solution but a question: "What did that feel like?" Naming emotions — getting the feeling into words — is, according to Selman's framework, foundational to perspective-taking: a child who can articulate their own experience is building the capacity to imagine someone else's [2].

Friendship development is not a clean sequence of stages. Conflict, repair, and reconnection are the medium through which children learn that relationships can survive rupture. A child who has experience of conflict-then-reconciliation is accumulating something durable.

Logged month by month in an app like Memori, social notes — "made up with a friend today," "chose to play alone all afternoon for the first time" — become readable as a developmental arc rather than isolated incidents.

Summary

The increasing complexity of friendship at ages 5–6 reflects a genuine developmental transition: children are moving from understanding friendship as "physical proximity and shared activity" toward understanding it as "mutual trust and reciprocity," but the cognitive tools to manage the gap between their own and another's perspective are still forming [1,2]. A child who appears to be alone is sometimes expressing a temperamental preference, sometimes expressing anxiety — and the two warrant different responses [3]. In either case, the more useful lens is not "how many friends does this child have?" but "what is this child experiencing within the friendships they do have?" [4]

References

Bigelow BJ, La Gaipa JJ. Children's written descriptions of friendship: A multidimensional analysis. Developmental Psychology. 1975;11(6):857–858. doi:10.1037/0012-1649.11.6.857.
Selman RL. The Growth of Interpersonal Understanding: Developmental and Clinical Analyses. New York: Academic Press; 1980.
Rubin KH, Coplan RJ, Bowker JC. Social withdrawal in childhood. Annual Review of Psychology. 2009;60:141–171. doi:10.1146/annurev.psych.60.110707.163642. PMID: 18851686.
Hartup WW. The company they keep: Friendships and their developmental significance. Child Development. 1996;67(1):1–13. doi:10.1111/j.1467-8624.1996.tb01714.x. PMID: 8605821.
Rubin KH, Bukowski WM, Laursen B, eds. Handbook of Peer Interactions, Relationships, and Groups. New York: Guilford Press; 2009.