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Parents are considered as more or less supportive for children's friendships. In this study, it is investigated whether parents' own friendships can facilitate children's friendships and enrich children's cognitions about friendships. Data were collected on children's peer relationships and children's concepts of friendship ( N = 116; 52 girls and 64 boys; 7 to 12 years old). Corresponding data on parental social networks, including friendships and kin relationships, were available. Results show that the more friends with whom parents spent leisure time and who were nominated by parents, the more friendships with nonclassmates were named by their children. Additionally, when parents had more friends, their children in late-middle childhood (ages 10 to 12 years) had more close reciprocated friendships with classmates. This was not true for children in early-middle childhood (ages 7 to 9 years). The more friendships that were maintained by parents, the more developed were children's friendship concepts. Parents' relationships with relatives did not predict children's friendships or children's friendship concepts.

In the years following German reunification, East and West German parents (282 mothers and 207 fathers) were interviewed about attitudes to the rearing of their 7- to 13-year-old children and about their social networks. Path analyses show that East German parents engage in more protective and less permissive parenting, and that East German fathers raise their children in a more traditional and authoritarian manner than their West German counterparts. In part, these differences can be attributed to the strong family orientation of East German parents (many and intensive kinship relations, few friends). Further analyses show that corollaries of the social upheavals in East Germany, namely closer cohesion of the immediate family and a decrease in the social support provided by the extrafamilial environment, are associated with protective attitudes to parenting and hence with the tendency to limit children’s freedom of decision-making.

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