Hold On to Your Kids: Why Parents Need to Matter More Than Peers

by Gordon Neufeld

The understanding of relationship is infinitely more important than the search for any plan of action. J. KRISHNAMURTI

Our focus is not on what parents should do but on who they need to be for their children.

The modern obsession with parenting as a set of skills to be followed along lines recommended by experts is, really, the result of lost intuitions and of a lost relationship with children previous generations could take for granted.

We struggle to live up to our image of what parenting ought to be like. Not achieving the results we want, we plead with our children, we cajole, bribe, reward, or punish.

When our impotence becomes unbearable we reach for simplistic, authoritarian formulas consistent with the do-it-yourself/quick-fix ethos of our era.

For a child to be open to being parented by an adult, he must be actively attaching to that adult, be wanting contact and closeness with him.

The secret of parenting is not in what a parent does but rather who the parent is to a child.

The attachment relationship of child to parent needs to last at least as long as a child needs to be parented.

Parents haven’t changed—they haven’t become less competent or less devoted. The fundamental nature of children has also not changed—they haven’t become less dependent or more resistant. What has changed is the culture in which we are rearing our children. Children’s attachments to parents are no longer getting the support required from culture and society.

It is not a lack of love or of parenting know-how but the erosion of the attachment context that makes our parenting ineffective.

The chief and most damaging of the competing attachments that undermine parenting authority and parental love is the increasing bonding of our children with their peers.

For the first time in history young people are turning for instruction, modeling, and guidance not to mothers, fathers, teachers, and other responsible adults but to people whom nature never intended to place in a parenting role—their own peers.

if no parenting adult is available, the human child will orient to whomever is near. Social, economic, and cultural trends in the past five or six decades have displaced the parent from his intended position as the orienting influence on the child. The peer group has moved into this orienting void, with deplorable results.

Peer bonds have come to replace relationships with adults as children’s primary sources of orientation. What is unnatural is not peer contact, but that children should have become the dominant influence on one another’s development.

Children are generating their own culture, very distinct from that of their parents and, in some ways, also very alien. Instead of culture being passed down vertically, it is being transmitted horizontally within the younger generation.

Accompanying the rise in a children’s culture, distinct and separate from the mainstream culture, were increases in youth crime, violence, bullying, and delinquency.

Absolutely missing in peer relationships are unconditional love and acceptance, the desire to nurture, the ability to extend oneself for the sake of the other, the willingness to sacrifice for the growth and development of the other.

Part of my job was to investigate the psychological dynamics in children and adolescents who attempted suicide, successfully or not. To my absolute shock and surprise, the key trigger for the great majority was how they were being treated by their peers, not their parents.

“But aren’t we meant to let go?” many parents ask. “Aren’t our children meant to become independent of us?” Absolutely, but only when our job is done and only in order for them to be themselves.

Children may know what they want, but it is dangerous to assume that they know what they need.

Adults who ground their parenting in a solid relationship with the child parent intuitively. They do not have to resort to techniques or manuals but act from understanding and empathy.

Our children want to belong to us, even if they don’t feel that way, and even if their words or actions seem to signal the opposite.

Why must we become conscious of attachment now? Because we no longer live in a world where we can take its work for granted. Economics and culture today no longer provide the context for the natural attachment of children to their nurturing adults.

As children grow, they have an increasing need to orient: to have a sense of who they are, of what is real, why things happen, what is good, what things mean. To fail to orient is to suffer disorientation, to be lost psychologically—a state our brains are programmed to do almost anything to avoid.

When a child becomes so attached to her peers that she would rather be with them and be like them, those peers, whether singly or as a group, become that child’s working compass point.

For children who have replaced adults with their peers, it is enough to just be with each other, even if they are completely off the map.

They frustrate us with their apparent certainty that they are all right, no matter how clearly we see that they’re heading in the wrong direction or in no direction at all.

“If you don’t understand your kid,” said one mother interviewed for this book, “you can’t stand your kid.”

Physical proximity is the goal of the first way of attaching.

The second way of attaching is usually well in evidence by toddlerhood. The child seeks to be like those she feels closest to.

Another means of attaching through sameness is identification. To identify with someone or something is to be one with that person or thing.

In our society, peers—or the pop icons of the peer world—have become the focus of identification in place of parents or the outstanding figures of history and culture.

To be close to someone is to consider that person as one’s own. The attaching toddler will lay claim to whomever or whatever he is attached to—be it mommy or daddy or teddy bear or baby sister.

Who is whose best friend occurs as a life-or-death question to many adolescents. This immature mode of attaching predominates much of the interaction of peer-oriented children, especially between peer-oriented girls.

On the heels of belonging comes loyalty—being faithful and obedient to one’s chosen attachment figures.

The fourth way of pursuing closeness and connection is to seek significance, which means that we feel we matter to somebody.

The problem with this way of attaching is that it makes a child vulnerable to being hurt. To want to be significant to someone is to suffer when we feel we don’t matter to that special person.

A fifth way of finding closeness is through feeling: warm feelings, loving feelings, affectionate feelings.

If attaching via the senses—the first and most primitive way—is the short arm of attachment, love would be the long arm.

The sixth way of attaching is through being known.

To feel close to someone is to be known by them.

being seen and heard are now experienced psychologically instead of strictly physically.

Parent-oriented children do not like to keep secrets from their parents because of the resulting loss of closeness.

Peer-oriented children live in a universe of severely limited and superficial attachments. The quest for sameness being the least vulnerable way of attaching, it is the one usually chosen by kids impelled to seek contact with their peers. Hence their drive to be as much like one another as possible: to resemble one another in look, demeanor, thought, tastes, and values.

that is how peer-oriented children attach to each other, intensely and desperately.

Trying to punish or control behaviors without addressing the underlying dynamics is like a doctor prescribing something for symptoms while ignoring their causes.

A child pursuing closeness with one person will likely resist anyone he perceives as competing with that person,

The bipolarity of attachment is critical for today’s parents to understand. With peer orientation on the rise, so is the corresponding parent alienation and all the problems that come with it.

A child’s alienated stance toward his parents does not represent a character flaw, ingrained rudeness, or behavior problems. It is what we see when attachment instincts have become misdirected.

Peer-oriented kids are repelled by similarity to their parents and want to be as different as possible from them.