The right of the child to be heard is an article of the Convention on the Rights of the Child, which most clearly expresses the concept of the child underlying the entire Convention. In the legal history of the Convention the substance of this article evolved in close connection with the article on the child's best interests. Based on article 12 manifold practices have been developed, now often are summarized under the heading of participation – a term not used in the Convention. These practices operationalize the article to an extent that questions are raised, in which way the broadly applied procedures can be understood as covered by the article. It is crucial that children are only heard, but their views are given weight.

Testing 551 East and 210 West Berlin children (grades 2-5), we sought to: (1) gain a broader understanding of the reciprocal nature of children’s friendships, especially their perceptions of friendship quality; and (2) examine sociocultural influences on such perceptions. We expected friends’ perceptions to form two distinct types of perceptions: (i) objectively perceived and, thus, shared interpersonal perceptions; and (ii) subjectively interpreted and, thus, nonshared intrapersonal perceptions. Mean and covariances structures analyses revealed that: (a) our distinction was well supported and generalisable across both contexts; and (b) East Berlin children reported more perceived friendship conflict, fewer mutual visits and sleep-overs, and less fun in their play activities than did their West Berlin age-mates. These differences are consistent with known characteristics of these two distinct sociocultural contexts.

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