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

by Gordon Neufeld

When children become peer-oriented, parents often become the objects of scorn and ridicule, insults and put-downs.

Peer-oriented kids often act, especially around one another, as if they don’t have parents.

Economic forces and cultural trends dominant in the past several decades have dismantled the social context for the natural functioning of both the parenting instincts of adults and the attachment drives of children.

From an early age, we thrust our children into many situations and interactions that encourage peer orientation. Unwittingly, we promote the very phenomenon that, in the long term, erodes the only sound basis of healthy development: children’s attachment to the adults responsible for their nurturing.

children are placed early, sometimes soon after birth, in situations where they spend much of the day in one another’s company.

Society has generated economic pressure for both parents to work outside the home when children are very young, but it has made little provision for the satisfaction of children’s needs for emotional nourishment.

the State of New York demands that no more than seven toddlers be under the care of any one worker—a hopelessly unwieldy ratio. The importance of adult connection is not appreciated. Children in such situations have little option but to form attachment relationships with one another.

It is not both parents working that is so damaging. The key problem is the lack of consideration we give attachment in making our child-care arrangements.

If there were a deliberate intention to create peer orientation, schools as currently run would surely be our best instrument.

Teacher training completely ignores attachment; thus educators learn about teaching subjects but not about the essential importance of connected relationships to the learning process of young human beings.

Unlike a few decades ago, today’s teachers do not mingle with their students in the halls or on the playground and are discouraged from interacting with them in a more personal manner.

The reassuring, consistent presence of grandparents and aunts and uncles, the protective embrace of the multigenerational family, is something few children nowadays are able to enjoy.

Incessant transplanting has rendered us anonymous, creating the antithesis to the attachment village. Our children cannot be coparented by people whose names we hardly even know.

Our children are growing up peer rich and adult poor.

many children are attached to their parents as a couple. When parents divorce, it becomes impossible to be close to both simultaneously, at least physically.

Parents who compete with the other parent or treat the other parent as persona non grata place the child (or, more precisely, the child’s attachment brain) in an impossible situation:

Also, under stressed circumstances, it is tempting for parents themselves to seek some relief from caregiving responsibility. One of the easiest ways of doing so is to encourage peer interaction. When children are with each other, they make fewer demands on us.

Instead of using our children’s peers to provide some relief from parental duties, we should be calling upon our relatives and our friends to step into the void and create an attachment safety net.

Deepening social stresses and the growing sense of economic insecurity even in the midst of relative wealth have all combined to create a milieu in which calm, connected parenting is increasingly difficult.

Robert Bly notes that “in 1935 the average working man had forty hours a week free, including Saturday. By 1990, it was down to seventeen hours. The twenty-three lost hours of free time a week since 1935 are the very hours in which the father could be a nurturing father, and find some center in himself, and the very hours in which the mother could feel she actually has a husband.”5

Our society puts a higher value on consumerism than the healthy development of children.

It is for economic reasons that we build schools too large for connection to happen and that we have classes too large for children to receive individual attention.

Games, too, have become electronic. They have always been an instrument of culture to connect people to people, especially children to adults. Now games have become a solitary activity, watched in parallel on television sports-casts or engaged in in isolation on the computer.

We are enamored of communication technology without being aware that one of its primary functions is to facilitate attachments. We have unwittingly put it into the hands of children who, of course, are using it to connect with their peers. Because of their strong attachment needs, the contact is highly addictive, often becoming a major preoccupation.

This wonderful new technology would be a powerfully positive instrument if used to facilitate child-adult connections—as it does, for example, when it enables easy communication between students living away from home, and their parents. Left unchecked, it promotes peer orientation.

Attachment voids, situations when the child’s natural attachments are missing, are dangerous precisely because their results are so indiscriminate.

The more children form attachments to peers who are not connected to us, the greater the likelihood of incompatibility.

The current immigration experience in North America provides a dramatic illustration of peer orientation undermining time-honored cultural connections.

Peers ultimately replace parents and gangs increasingly replace families.

Transplanted to peer-driven North American society, traditional cultures succumb. We fail our immigrants because of our own societal failure to preserve the child-parent relationship.

The absent quality is power, not love or knowledge or commitment or skill. Our predecessors had much more power than parents today.

The power to parent is slipping away.

In our present discussion of parenting and attachment, power means the spontaneous authority to parent.

That spontaneous authority flows not from coercion or force but from an appropriately aligned relationship with the child.

The more power a parent commands, the less force is required in day-to-day parenting. On the other hand, the less power we possess, the more impelled we are to raise our voices, harshen our demeanor, utter threats, and seek some leverage to make our children comply with our demands. The loss of power experienced by today’s parents has led to a preoccupation in the parenting literature with techniques that would be perceived as bribes and threats in almost any other setting. We have camouflaged such signs of impotence with euphemisms like rewards and “natural consequences.”

The power we have lost is the power to command our children’s attention, to solicit their good intentions, to evoke their deference and secure their cooperation. Without these four abilities, all we have left is coercion or bribery.

The power to parent does not arise from techniques, no matter how well meant, but from the attachment relationship.

The power to execute our parental responsibilities lies not in the neediness of our children but in their looking to us to be the answer to their needs.

Not one of these three children felt dependent on their parents, and that was at the root of the frustrations, difficulties, and failures experienced by all these mothers and fathers.

What to us looks like independence is really just dependence transferred.

They are disturbed by their child’s failure to comply with their reasonable expectations but seem unaware that the child no longer seeks their affection, approval, or appreciation.

When attachment is displaced, dependence is displaced. So is, along with it, the power to parent.

It takes three ingredients to make parenting work: a dependent being in need of being taken care of, an adult willing to assume responsibility, and a good working attachment from the child to the adult.

It seems much easier for parents today to confess incompetence rather than impotence, especially when our lack of skill can be conveniently blamed on a lack of training or a lack of appropriate models in our own childhood. The result has been a multibillion-dollar industry of parental advice-giving, from experts advocating time-outs or reward points on the fridge to all the how- to books on effective parenting.

Once we perceive parenting as a set of skills to be learned, it is difficult for us to see the process any other way. Whenever trouble is encountered the assumption is that there must be another book to be read, another course to be taken, another skill to be mastered. Meanwhile, our supporting cast continues to assume that we have the power to do the job. Teachers act as if we can still get our children to do homework. Neighbors expect us to keep our children in line. Our own parents chide us to take a firmer stand. The experts assume that compliance is just another skill away. The courts hold us responsible for our child’s behavior. Nobody seems to get the fact that our hold on our children is slipping.

We miss the essential point that what matters is not the skill of the parents but the relationship of the child to the adult who is assuming responsibility.

Parenthood is above all a relationship, not a skill to be acquired. Attachment is not a behavior to be learned but a connection to be sought.

The obvious alternative to blaming the parent is to conclude that there is something amiss or lacking in the child.

is no coincidence that the preoccupation with diagnoses has paralleled the rise in peer orientation in our society.

What we do object to is reducing childhood problems to medical diagnoses and treatments to the exclusion of the many psychological, emotional, and social factors that contribute to how these problems arise.