Early childhood programs are often considered contexts for
the development of social competence with peers. Certainly one
of the tasks for children in these programs is to construct relationships
and positive interactions with peers. These social interactions
and relationships become the basis of peer group social
structure (Corsaro, 1988; Howes, 1988; Howes and Matheson,
1992). Through these early developmental experiences, children
internalize representations of social relationships and social networks,
which influence their individual orientations to the social
world as older children and adolescents (Howes and Smith, 1995).
The developmental advance in social competence with peers that
children experience from ages 3 to 8 involves the construction of
more and more complex forms of social pretend play