Kompisar och Kamrater : Barns och ungas villkor för relationsskapande i vardagen

Sammanfattning: The aim of this thesis is to create an understanding for children’s and young people’s buddy relations when it comes to the creation of identity and socialisation, as well as to emphasise the formation of meaning and informal learning processes of these buddy relations. This is seen from a child’s perspective.The study has an ethnographic approach in order to follow children’s establishment of relations over time and in a process. The empiric data has been collected over a period of two-and-a-half years. The children were 12 years old when the study was initiated, and there are ten children in the examination. Via interviews, talks and correspondence I have been able to learn more about the children’s leisure time, hobbies, extra-curricular activities, and their school environment. To conduct research with children for this study means that the data are collected on the children’s terms.My starting-point is that human identity is shaped by and in collaboration with others. Mead’s symbolic interactionism is the main theoretical basis for my analysis. Other theoretical perspectives that have been useful are Habermas’s theory on systems and life world, as well as Ziehe’s theories on the cultural freedom of young people.The result of this study shows that having a mate is buddy is crucial when it comes to the creation of a healthy identity. The relation between mates creates trust, confidence and mutuality. It promotes well-being in children and young people, and makes them feel loved. The buddy relation becomes a confirmation of the fact that they are all right. Having friends is not the same as having mates. Many people have friends, for example classmates, which is a prerequisite for the creation of identification with others and a possibility to establish new buddy relations. The problem is, though, that all children do not feel needed and loved by a mate and that it is difficult, especially when young, to establish new close relations.The group becomes very important to the young people in their socialisation process. From the group they hope to receive, preferably together with another mate, confirmation, and the group determines whether they are good enough or not. The terms for the establishment of relations are to a large extent ruled by adult approaches and how the children’s and young people’s everyday life is structured. Since children and young people often spend time in an institutional world in which they establish relations, this has consequences for the adult professional pedagogues who work there. Perhaps one of the most important missions of the teacher training programme is to create awareness that children and young people have a need for belonging and togetherness. When you look at relations from a child’s perspective, it is clear that they long for and try to create a working togetherness, and at the same time you realise how exposed they are when doing this.