My review of Hold On to Your Kids: Why Parents Need to Matter More Than Peers, by Gordon Neufeld, Ph.D. and Gabor Mate, M.D.
Are you feeling increasingly disconnected from your pre-teen or teenaged child?
Does your child refuse to look you in the eye, or prefer to be alone when at home with you and your family?
Does your child ever say things like, “You can’t tell me what to do,” or “You’re not in charge of me”?
Does your child reject your authority and shy away from your company?
Does your child prefer to look like, think like, act like and be with their peers?
Welcome to parenting in the twenty-first century.
I read a lot of parenting books and while many capture my attention, very few actually keep me awake at night.
This one did: With Hold On to Your Kids: Why Parents Need to Matter More Than Peers, authors Gordon Neufeld and Gabor Mate caution parents that our children’s pervasive orientation to their peers – at the expense and in some cases to the exclusion of parental relationships – is downright harmful to healthy growth and development.
Try this on for size: Pretend that your child’s behavior and attitude are becoming increasingly problematic.
You express displeasure with said behavior and instruct them on what they should be doing differently. You try to be consistent. You use all the positive parenting techniques and natural consequences that you can think of. Nothing works. Or at least, nothing brings about a permanent improvement.
In fact, if anything, your child seems to grow more distant, resentful, disagreeable and obnoxious.
The root cause (perhaps):
1. Your child is no longer motivated by – or even interested in – working to obtain your approval.
2. Your child is not looking to you for cues on how to be happy and prosperous (translation: cool). By their definition, you are not happy and prosperous. Hence, they do not believe that you can actually help them here.
3. Your child does not have the social skills or emotional maturity to serve two masters. As their seemingly necessary attachment to their peers (who can, they believe, help them to be happy and prosperous) grows stronger, they experience increasing levels of discomfort in your contradictory attempts to lead them down a different path.
This is a problem because: Our children’s peers are not adults. Their brains are not fully developed, they have not completed the most basic of educations and they are severely lacking in life experience. In short, they are not ready to be parents.
And yet, they are serving in this capacity! Our children are looking to their peers to learn how they want to be as human beings. Ouch.
Is this a natural part of growing up? Is it inevitable in today’s society? Is it even true?
I invite you to read this book – meditate, observe, meditate some more – and decide what is true for your family.
It makes sense to me. The authors point out (and I agree) that our culture has evolved to push our children out of the nest at an early age. Possibly too early.
Way too early.
Neufeld and Mate suggest this cultural shift began, in the United States at least, in the early twentieth century. With an increasingly immigrant population, children in the U.S. were no longer raised in small villages, surrounded by multiple generations of extended family.
And those families were no longer supported by tightly-knit communities of doctors, teachers, shopkeepers and clergy, all of whom knew the family – and the child – personally.
Fast forward to 2009. Many of our children today began their journey of separation as toddlers, when they learned to wave good-bye to Mommy or Daddy from “the good-bye window” at the local daycare center or preschool. This was a necessary measure for many families, but we are still discovering the long-term ramifications.
Even if your pre-schooler never spent a day in daycare, think about your middle-school student. How many hours (minutes?) do you spend with them each day? How much of that time is used to strengthen your family bonds and teach your family values?
Now, how much time does your child spend with their peers? You might hope that school hours are being supervised by a mature adult, but forget math class for a minute. How about the time spent on the school bus, on the playground, at lunch and playing sports? You’ve probably already exceeded any one-on-one time that you will have with this child today.
Finally, we have television, texting, video games and the Internet. Which of these activities do you think are reinforcing your family values and strengthening your position as a guiding force in your child’s life?
Hmm.
Neufeld and Mate encourage parents to woo their children – to win back their affections and their attachment – and to wean them from the overwhelming influence of their peers. Regardless of school and work schedules, we all need to find ways to reconnect with our children and to regain our footing as their role models, guidance counselors and leaders.
Reading this book will not solve all your parenting problems, but the authors do give enough practical suggestions and encouraging words to get you started.
It certainly got me thinking about how I wanted to focus my parenting energy, especially with my older son (now in seventh grade.) It was a big factor in the way I organized our vacation time this summer: Heavy on interaction with our relatives and other families who share and reinforce our value system; unsupervised time with the peer group... not so much.
As the school year gets under way, I am working on strategies to get us all on the same team. The peer group is not going away anytime soon and we have a long year ahead of us.
Is it easy? Not so far, but I’m not giving up. This is too important and I am too stubborn.
I’ll let you know how it goes.
Related Posts:
I wrote about the importance of family connections in “Roots and Wings: How to Make Your Children Feel at Home in the Universe.”
For more insight into our family vacation time this summer, please see “French Connection: On Bonding with My Children While in Paris.”
Recommended Reading:
If you are only going to read one parenting book this fall, please make it this one: Hold On to Your Kids: Why Parents Need to Matter More Than Peers, by Gordon Neufeld, Ph.D. and Gabor Mate, M.D.
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