The next 50 years: Considering gender as a context for understanding young children's peer relationships

The study of children's peer relationships has been well represented within the pages of Merrill-Palmer Quarterly. Particularly over the last decade, the pace of publishing studies on peer relationships has increased. Despite this upswing in interest in peer relationships, significant gaps remain. In this article, we focus on a particularly overlooked and significant area of peer relationships, namely, the role of sex-segregated peer interactions and how these relate to development in early childhood. We review why this topic is important for researchers to consider and highlight promising directions for research that we hope will appear in future volumes of Merrill-Palmer Quarterly.