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

by Gordon Neufeld

With the high premium we in our society place on independence—our own and our children’s—peer orientation looks good. We forget that growing up takes time. In our postindustrial culture we are in too much of a hurry for everything. We probably would not be taken in by false impressions if we weren’t so impatient for our children to grow up.

Peer orientation can make a child temporarily more school-friendly, owing to the effects of separation on learning.

School takes children out of the home, separating parent-oriented children from the adults to whom they are attached. For such children the separation anxiety will be intense and the sense of disorientation at school will be acute.

Children already peer-oriented by the time they enter school do not face such a dilemma. In the first days of school in kindergarten, a peer-oriented child would appear smarter, more confident, and better able to benefit from the school experience.

Peer-oriented kids have all the advantages in situations that are adult poor and peer rich.

In the long term, of course, the positive effects on learning of reduced anxiety and disorientation will gradually be canceled by the negative effects of peer orientation.

The very condition that usually creates the head start will ultimately trip these kids up.

Shyness is an attachment force, designed to shut the child down socially, discouraging any interaction with those outside her nexus of safe connections.

Adult-oriented children are much slower to lose their shyness around their peers.

With attachment in mind, it’s not shyness we ought to be so concerned about but the lack of shyness of many of today’s children.

Millions of children throughout the world today spend some if not most of their waking hours in out-of-home care.

The level of the stress hormone cortisol is higher in children at day care than at home.5

Most significant is the finding that the more the boys identify with their peers, the more resistant they are to contact with the adults in charge.

The more time a child had spent in day care, the more likely she was to manifest aggression and disobedience, both at home and in kindergarten.

Day care and preschool do not have to be risky, but to reduce the risk, we need to be aware of attachment.

The belief is that socializing—children spending time with one another—begets socialization: the capacity for skillful and mature relating to other human beings. There is no evidence to support such an assumption, despite its popularity.

When a child knows her own mind and values the separateness of another’s mind, then—and only then—is she ready to hold on to her sense of self, while respecting that of the other person.

The real challenge is helping children to grow up to the point where they can benefit from their socializing experiences.

By placing getting along at the top of the agenda for immature beings, we are really pushing them into patterns of compliance, imitation, and conformity.

Our time is more wisely spent cultivating relationships with the adults in our child’s life than obsessing about their relationships with one another.

When a person isn’t comfortable with his own company, he is more likely to seek the company of others—or to become attached to entertainment technology such as television or video games.

Boredom is what a child or adult feels who is unaware of the true causes of his emptiness.

The more prone to boredom they are, the more they need us and the more of their own selves needs to emerge.

Peer orientation actually exacerbates the problem of boredom. Children who are seriously attached to each other experience life as very dull when not with each other.

a time of boredom is a time to rein in the child and to fill the attachment void with those whom the child truly needs to be attached to—ourselves.

we should have modest expectations: play time with other kids is fun, and that’s it.

when a child has spent most of the week and most of each day in peer company, we are courting the competition if we then arrange play dates for after school and on the weekend as well.

the problem in our society is not simply that our kids hang out together, but that we actually encourage extensive peer contact, looking to it as the answer to such problems as socialization or boredom or, as I will soon explain, self-esteem.

Peers do indeed play a pivotal role in the self-esteem of many children. That is exactly what it means to be peer-oriented.

The ultimate issue in self-esteem is not how good one feels about oneself, but the independence of self-evaluations from the judgments of others.

The challenge in self-esteem is to value one’s existence when it’s not valued by others, to believe in oneself when doubted by others, to accept oneself when judged by others.

Our challenge is to use our influence with our children to break their dependence on popularity, appearance, grades, or achievement for the way they think and feel about themselves. Only a self-esteem that is independent of these things is going to truly serve a child.

We fill up their free time with play dates—or with videos, television, electronic games. We need to leave much more room for the self to emerge.

The majority of children in North America leave their homes almost every day to go to places where adults with whom they have no attachment connection assume responsibility for them.

We also need to put a high premium on creating customs and traditions that connect our children to extended family.

Who is to raise our kids? The resounding answer, the only answer compatible with nature, is that we—the parents and other adults concerned with the care of children—must be their mentors, their guides, their nurturers, and their models. We need to hold on to our children until our work is done. We need to hold on not for selfish purposes but so they can venture forth, not to hold them back but so they can fulfill their developmental destinies. We need to hold on to them until they can hold on to themselves.