Chapter 15 - Socioemotional selectivity theory

Chapter 15 discusses common family and life-span issues. One important concept is the socioemotional selectivity theory. This theory states that as a person gets older their network of friends become smaller and more associated with people who are emotionally important to them. I believe this is a very true concept. As youth, we want to be popular and have all these friends to hang out with, party etc. As we get older though, the group of friends tends to become smaller and smaller, either because we mature and they don't and we identify it as a problem, or we simply just outgrow people and over time we just stop communicating and hanging out. By the time we reach our elderly age, we have just a select handful of friend of whom we care alot for. By this time we have weeded out people who just were not of similar interest or just not emotionally attached. It is important to have people who care for because time is limited and in the final years, there isn't enough time to deal with the drama of having a large group of friends to deal with.