The Role of Peer Relationships in the Development of Minority Children

Dear Colleagues,

Relationships and interactions with peers are foundational human experiences that deeply affect children’s growth and well-being. Peer relationships are especially salient for children who are minorities in their cultural contexts due to their religious, ethnic–racial, or gender identities, or due to their immigrant, refugee, or socioeconomic status. For such children, healthy peer relationships can enhance a personal sense of belonging in public spaces; foster positive social identity development; buffer against depression, anxiety, and low self-worth; and enrich acculturation and enculturation processes. Conversely, unhealthy peer relationships and interactions, such as being neglected, bullied, or rejected by one’s peers, can have deleterious consequences and exacerbate stress due to having minority status. The cascading effects of a child’s peer relationships—both positive and negative—vary as a joint function of the child’s intersectional identity, developmental history, and cultural context. Yet, to date, the literature on minority children’s peer relationships has primarily featured unidimensional constructs of identity (e.g., racial–ethnic identity), narrow age ranges, and samples from the Global North. Global research initiatives that address these limitations are needed to advance the theory, methodology, and translation of research to culturally responsive policy and practice. To this end, we have organized a Special Issue dedicated to this topic, which is now open for submission. Our aim is to foster cross-fertilization of ideas through comparative study of minority children in diverse cultural contexts around the world. We welcome original research papers and review articles on minority children or adolescents in the following areas:

• Enactment of personal identity in peer group contexts;
• Friendships among minority children, or between minority and majority children, and their links with developmentally salient outcomes;
• Peer status hierarchies and related processes (e.g., peer rejection, peer acceptance, popularity, bullying), and their links with developmentally salient outcomes;
• Peer influence processes;
• Peer groups as contexts for enculturation and acculturation;
• Peer relationships as buffers against prejudice and discrimination;
• Peer relationships and interactions in cyberspace.

Dr. Travis Wilson
Guest Editor

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• minority children
• peers
• relationships
• culture
• development