For my three-year-old son, his playmates are an endless source of entertainment: They meet up at the park to go down the slide, ride tricycles, and conspire in plenty of shenanigans. As he gets older, I hope he will also experience the unparalleled gift of great friendship, with all the delight, reassurance, interconnection, and opportunities for growth that it brings.
My hopes are echoed in a new study published in Psychological Science, which found that boys’ friendships are not just fun and rewarding—they could also lead to better health.
Jenny Cundiff and Karen Matthews explored whether boyhood friendships were related to physical health in adulthood. The study enrolled over 250 six-year-old boys attending public schools in an urban city in the United States in the late 1980s. The boys were primarily black (56 percent) and white (41 percent), and mostly came from families receiving public financial assistance (61 percent).
[For more on this story by MARYAM ABDULLAH, go to https://greatergood.berkeley.edu/article/item/why_friendships_are_important_for_boys_health ]
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