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

by Gordon Neufeld

Instead of trusting in their own intuition, learning from their own mistakes and finding their own way, they started to look to others for cues on how to parent.

When an assessment of a problem ignores the underlying relationship factors, it retards the search for genuine solutions.

My experience helping thousands of parents and children has convinced me that unless we completely get how and why things don’t work—and also how things are meant to work—our attempted solutions, no matter how well-intentioned, will only compound the problem.

Children properly placed in the hierarchy of attachment instinctively want to be taken care of.

Without that sense of dependence, behavior is difficult to manage.

the chief havoc caused by peer orientation is that it flattens the natural parent-child hierarchy.

So it happens that we lose our influence just at the time in our children’s lives when it is most appropriate and necessary for us to articulate our values to them and to encourage the internalization of what we believe in.

In this way peer orientation arrests moral development.

It is also too risky for the child to continue to want to be good for a parent or teacher who lacks faith in her intention to be good and thinks, therefore, that she, the child, must be tempted with bribes or threatened with sanctions.

External motivators for behavior such as rewards and punishments may destroy the precious internal motivation to be good, making leverage by such artificial means necessary by default.

Many current methods of behavior management, by relying on externally imposed motivations, run roughshod over this delicate drive. The doctrine of so-called natural consequences is one example. This disciplining method is meant to impress upon the child that specific misbehaviors will incur specific sanctions selected by the parent, according to logic that makes sense in the mind of the parent but rarely in the child’s. What the parent sees as natural is experienced by the child as arbitrary. If consequences are truly natural, why do they have to be imposed on the child?

If the desire to be good for us is not treasured and nurtured, the child will lose his motivation to keep trying to measure up.

Counterwill is an instinctive, automatic resistance to any sense of being forced. It is triggered whenever a person feels controlled or pressured to do someone else’s bidding.

Clinicians diagnose such children with oppositional defiant disorder. Yet it is not the oppositionality—the counterwill—that is out of order but the child’s attachments. These children are only being true to their instinct in defying people to whom they do not feel connected.

As vexing as dealing with an oppositional child can be for adults, in its appropriate context counterwill, like all natural instincts in their natural setting, exists for a positive and even necessary purpose. It serves a twofold developmental function. Its primary role is as a defense that repels the commands and influence of those outside the child’s attachment circle. It protects the child from being misled and coerced by strangers. Counterwill also fosters the growth of the young person’s internal will and autonomy.

By keeping out the parent’s expectations and demands, counterwill helps make room for the growth of the child’s own self-generated motivations and inclinations.

to get his own way. What is strong is the defensive reaction, not the child. The weaker the will, the more powerful the counterwill. If the child was indeed strong in her own self, she would not be so threatened by the parent.

Since counterwill is a counterforce, we invite it into being every time our wish to impose something on our child exceeds his desire to connect with us.

Counterwill is serving the purpose of protecting the child against becoming an extension of anyone else, even the parent. It helps to deliver an autonomous, emergent, independent being, full of vitality and able to function outside of attachments.

As genuine independence develops and maturation occurs, counterwill fades.

Another mistake is to interpret the child’s opposition as a power play or as striving for omnipotence.*

Instead of assuming responsibility for my own sense of weakness, I see the child as striving for control.

The problem with seeing our children as having power is that we miss how much they truly need us.

It is instinctive, when experiencing insufficient power for the task at hand, whether it is moving a rock or moving a child, to look for some leverage.

Parental efforts to gain leverage generally take two forms: bribery or coercion.

As our power to parent decreases, our preoccupation with leverage increases.

Euphemisms abound: bribes are called variously rewards, incentives, and positive reinforcement; threats and punishments are rechristened warnings, natural consequences, and negative reinforcements; applying psychological force is often referred to as modifying behavior or teaching a lesson.

These euphemisms camouflage attempts to motivate the child by external pressure because his intrinsic mo...

Attachment is natural and arises from within; leverage is contrived and...

In any other realm, we would see the use of leverage as manipulation. In parenting, such means of getting a child to follow our will have become em...

We apply force whenever we trade on a child’s likes or when we exploit a child’s dislikes and insecurities in order to get her to do our will.

Such tactics, if they are ever to be employed, should be a last resort, not our first response and certainly not our modus operandi.

Manipulation, whether in the form of rewards or punishments, may succeed in getting the child to comply temporarily, but we cannot by this method make the desired behavior become part of anyone’s intrinsic personality.

the more the behavior has been coerced, the less likely it is to occur voluntarily.

Plenty of evidence both in the laboratory and in real life attests to the power of counterwill to sabotage shallow behavioral goals pursued by means of psychological force or manipulation. One particular experiment involved preschool children who loved playing with Magic Markers. These children were divided into various groups: one group was promised an attractive certificate if they used the markers; one group was not promised anything but was rewarded for using the markers with the same certificate; one group was neither promised nor given a reward. When tested several weeks later but without any rewards being mentioned, the two groups in which positive coercion was used were far less inclined to play with the Magic Markers.1 The counterwill instinct ensured that the use of force would backfire.

“Rewards may increase the likelihood of behaviors,” Dr. Deci writes, “but only so long as the rewards keep coming. Stop the pay, stop the play.”2

the best response to a child’s counterwill is a stronger parental relationship and less reliance on force.

In the separate tribe many of our children have joined, the transmission of values and culture flows horizontally, from one unlearned and immature person to another.

The transmission of culture is, normally, an automatic part of child-rearing. In addition to facilitating dependence, shielding against external stress, and giving birth to independence, attachment also is the conduit of culture. As long as the child is properly attaching to the adults responsible, the culture flows into the child.

informed, in the sense of absorbing the cultural forms of the adult. According to Howard Gardner, a leading American developmentalist, more is spontaneously absorbed from the parents in the first four years of life than during all the rest of a person’s formal education put together.1

Peer-oriented children are not devoid of culture, but the culture they are enrolled in is generated by their peer orientation.

Seeking to be the same as someone else immediately triggers the need to be different from others.

The time we as parents and educators spend trying to teach our children social tolerance, acceptance, and etiquette would be much better invested in cultivating a connection with them.

The social values we wish to inculcate can be transmitted only across existing lines of attachment.

Peer-oriented youth actually glory in excluding traditional values and historical connections.

Children able to experience emotions of sadness, fear, loss, and rejection will often hide such feelings from their peers to avoid exposing themselves to ridicule and attack. Invulnerability is a camouflage they adopt to blend in with the crowd but will quickly remove in the company of those with whom they have the safety to be their true selves. These are not the kids I am most concerned about, although I certainly do have a concern about the impact an atmosphere of invulnerability will have on their learning and development. In such an environment genuine curiosity cannot thrive, questions cannot be freely asked, naive enthusiasm for learning cannot be expressed. Risks are not taken in such an environment, nor can passion for life and creativity find their outlets.

The only reason for a child not to be aware of his own vulnerability is that it has become too much to bear, his wounds too hurtful to feel.

The human brain is not capable of preventing a child from being wounded, only from feeling wounded. The terms defended against vulnerability and flight from vulnerability

A child becomes defended against vulnerability when being shut down is no longer just a temporary reaction but becomes a persistent state.

Attachment protects the child from the outside world.