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

by Gordon Neufeld

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.

Children may know what they want, but it is dangerous to assume that they know what they need. To the peer-oriented child it seems only natural to prefer contact with friends to closeness with family, to be with them as much as possible, to be as much like them as possible. A child does not know best. Parenting that takes its cues from the child’s preferences can get you retired long before the job is done. To nurture our children, we must reclaim them and take charge of providing for their attachment needs.

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.

Our power to parent rests not in how dependent our child is, but in how much

our child depends specifically on us. 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.

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.

ATTACHMENT ARRANGES THE PARENT AND CHILD HIERARCHICALLY The first business of attachment is to arrange adults and children in a hierarchical order. When humans enter a relationship, their attachment brain automatically ranks the participants in order of dominance.

ATTACHMENT EVOKES THE PARENTING INSTINCTS, MAKES THE CHILD MORE ENDEARING, AND INCREASES PARENTAL TOLERANCE As Jerry Seinfeld’s quip illustrates, attachment not only prepares a child to be taken care of, but also evokes the caregiving instincts in an adult. Training or education cannot do what attachment can do: trigger the instincts to take care of. Attachment also renders children more endearing than they otherwise would be. It increases our tolerance of the hardships involved in parenting and the unintentional abuse we may suffer in the process.

Children generally have no idea of their impact on us, the hurts they may have inflicted or the sacrifices we have made on their behalf. Nor should they—at least not until they learn through their own mature reflection what we have done for them. It is part of the task of parenting to be taken for granted.

ATTACHMENT COMMANDS THE CHILD’S ATTENTION It is immensely frustrating to manage a child who does not pay attention to us. Getting a child to look at us and to listen to us is foundational to all parenting.

Basically, attention follows attachment. The stronger the attachment, the easier it is to secure the child’s attention. When attachment is weak, the attention of the child will be correspondingly difficult to engage. One of the telltale signs of a child who isn’t paying attention is a parent having continually to raise his voice or repeat things.

ATTACHMENT KEEPS THE CHILD CLOSE TO THE PARENT Perhaps the most obvious task of attachment is to keep the child close. When the child experiences his need for proximity in physical terms—as very young children do—attachment serves as an invisible leash. Our offspring have this in common with many other creatures of attachment who must keep a parent in sight, hearing, or smell.

The child’s instincts to keep close to us can get in our way and frustrate us.

Our society is so topsy-turvy that we may actually come to value the child’s willingness to separate more than her instincts for closeness. Unfortunately, we cannot have it both ways. Parents whose young children are not properly attached face a nightmare scenario just keeping the child in sight. We should be thankful for the assistance attachment provides in holding our children close. If we had to do all the work, we would never be able to get on with the sundry other duties that parenting involves. We need to learn to parent in harmony with this design rather than fight against it.

ATTACHMENT CREATES A MODEL OUT OF THE PARENT Adults are often surprised and even hurt when the children under their care do not follow their lead in how they conduct themselves and live their lives. Such disappointment springs from the misbelief that parents and teachers are automatic models for their children and students. In reality, the child accepts as his models only those to whom he is strongly attached.

It is not our lives that make us models, no matter how exemplary, nor is it our sense of responsibility toward the child or our nurturing role in the child’s life. It is attachment that makes a child want to be like another person, to take on another’s characteristics. Modeling, in short, is an attachment dynamic. By emulating the person to whom he is attached, the child is maintaining psychological closeness with that individual.

ATTACHMENT DESIGNATES THE PARENT AS THE PRIMARY CUE-GIVER One of the fundamental tasks of parenting is to provide direction and guidance to our children. Every day we point out what works and what doesn’t, what is good and what’s not, what is expected and what is inappropriate, what to aim for and what to avoid. Until the child becomes capable of self-direction and of following cues from within, he or she needs someone to show the way. Children constantly search for cues to how to be and what to do.

ATTACHMENT MAKES THE CHILD WANT TO BE GOOD FOR THE PARENT The final important way we are assisted by our child’s attachment to us is the most significant of all: the child’s desire to be good for the parent. It deserves a close look.

The impulse to be good arises less from a child’s character than from the nature of a child’s relationships. If a child is “bad,” it’s the relationship we need to correct, not the child.