This book explores the process and characteristics of children's personal and social relationships. To determine what relationships mean to children and how children manage those relationships, a recursive interviewing technique was used with nearly a thousand children to detail children's social rules. Those rules cover a range of social issues, from compliance and autonomy, to self-assertiveness and conflict management, to mutual activities and the governance of obligation, intimacy, and trust. In interpreting children's verbalized social rules with parents, siblings, peers, and teachers, this book provides a contextually informed framework from which to explore such issues as the impact of parental authority on child compliance, sibling rivalry, and close friendships. The chapters of the book are: (1) "Social Competency and Friendships in Middle Childhood: 'Lord of the Flies' Revisited"; (2) "Social Rules and the Implicate Order: Toward a Sociology of Childhood"; (3) "Phenomenology and Relationships: The Birth of Social Rules"; (4) "The Rules and with Whom They Are Used: Compliance and Autonomy"; (5) "The Rules and with Whom They Are Used: Self-Control and Conflict Management"; (6) "The Rules and with Whom They Are Used: Mutual Activities and Obligation"; (7) "Social Competency and the Sorcerer's Apprentice: The Importance of Parents"; (8) "Siblings: The Relationship You Don't Have To Earn To Keep"; (9) "Social Rule Rationales: The Child as a Relationship Philosopher"; and (10) "Concluding Remarks." Appendices describe: (1) extracting social rules from interviewing"; (2) the recursive interview protocol; and (3) data analyses. Contains 342 references. (LPP)