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Efforts to intervene with children who experience peer relationships problems have been designed principally to improve the extent to which other children accept or reject them. Much less attention has been devoted to ways of helping children who are having problems forming or maintaining specific friendships. The distinction between peer acceptance/rejection, on the one hand, and friendship involvement, on the other, is subtle and not always recognized. However, in recent years a growing consensus has emerged among peer relationships researchers that these two dimensions of peer adjustment can be meaningfully distinguished. In this chapter we begin by discussing the distinction between acceptance and friendship, suggesting how each construct can be assessed, and discussing several lines of inquiry that validate the distinction between peer group acceptance and friendship. In the second major section, we reflect on the existing social skill training literature in terms of this distinction. Here we argue that previous social skills training studies have been fairly successful in promoting peer acceptance but have not yet demonstrated effectiveness in promoting friendships. Our view is that distinctive aspects of friendship making and friendship keeping must be attended to if researchers are to successfully shift their emphasis from promoting acceptance to promoting friendship. Accordingly, in the final major section we offer specific hypotheses about the kinds of interpersonal tasks and skills that must be emphasized if the goal is to help children form and maintain friendships. Our hope is that our hypotheses will help stimulate intervention …