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

by Gordon Neufeld

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.

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.

Many also confuse power with force. That is not the sense in which we employ the word power in this book. 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 power to parent arises when things are in their natural order, and it arises without effort, without posturing, and without pushing. It is when we lack that power that we are likely to resort to force.

The secret of a parent’s power is in the dependence of the child. Children are born completely dependent, unable to make their own way in this world. Their lack of viability as separate beings makes them utterly reliant on others for being taken care of, for guidance and direction, for support and approval, for a sense of home and belonging. It is the child’s state of dependence that makes parenting necessary in the first place. If our children didn’t need us, we would not need the power to parent.

What to us looks like independence is really just dependence transferred. We are in such a hurry for our children to be able to do things themselves that we do not see just how dependent they really are.

Most parents are able to sense the loss of power when their child becomes peer-oriented, even if they don’t recognize it for what it is. Such a child’s attention is harder to command, his deference decreases, the parent’s authority is eroded. When specifically asked, the parents of each of the three children in our case examples were able to identify when their power to parent began to wane. That erosion of natural authority is first noted by parents as simply a niggling feeling that something has gone wrong.

In short, the attachment brain of the adult-oriented child renders her receptive to a parent who takes charge and assumes responsibility for her. To such a child, it feels right for the parent to be in the dominant position. If the arrangement is inverted or if it falls flat due to peer orientation, to be parented will run counter to the child’s instincts, no matter how great the need.

Many of our children are growing up bereft of the universal culture that produced the timeless creations of humankind: The Bhagavad Gita; the writings of Rumi and Dante, Shakespeare and Cervantes and Faulkner, or of the best and most innovative of living authors; the music of Beethoven and Mahler; or even the great translations of the Bible. They know only what is current and popular, appreciate only what they can share with their peers.

This brings us back to the essential hierarchical nature of attachment. The more the child needs attachment to function, the more important it is that she attaches to those responsible for her. Only then can the vulnerability that is inherent in emotional attachment be endured. Children don’t need friends, they need parents, grandparents, adults who will assume the responsibility to hold on to them. The more children are attached to caring adults, the more they are able to interact with peers without being overwhelmed by the vulnerability involved. The less peers matter, the more the vulnerability of peer relationships can be endured. It is exactly those children who don’t need friends who are more capable of having friends without losing their ability to feel deeply and vulnerably.

In the final analysis, the flight from vulnerability is a flight from the self. If we do not hold our children close to us, the ultimate cost is the loss of their ability to hold on to their own truest selves.

Attachment is the womb of maturation. Just as the biological womb gives birth to a separate being in the physical sense, attachment gives birth to a separate being in the psychological sense.

In short, we need to build routines of collecting our children into our daily lives. In addition to that, it is especially important to reconnect with them after any sort of emotional separation. The sense of connection may be broken, say, after a fight or argument, whether by distancing, misunderstanding, or anger. The context for parenting is lost until we move to restore what psychologist Gershon Kaufman has called “the interpersonal bridge.” And rebuilding that bridge is always our responsibility. We can’t expect children to do it—they are not mature enough to understand the need for it.

The ultimate gift is to make a child feel invited to exist in our presence exactly as he is, to express our delight in his very being.

Invite Dependence If the infant is old enough, we invite his dependence by extending our arms as if to pick him up, then waiting for a response before proceeding. If his attachment instincts are sufficiently engaged, he’ll respond, lifting his arms, indicating a desire for proximity and a readiness to depend. The mutual roles of parent and child in this choreography of attachment are intuitive.

And that brings us back to the question of peers as sibling-substitutes. Children need adults much more than they need other children. Parents have no reason to feel bad about children who do not have siblings, nor should they feel compelled to fill the void with peers.

Because childhood is a function of immaturity, the duration of childhood is increasing in our society. At the same time, since true parenthood is a matter of relationship and exists only while the child is actively attaching to us, the duration of hands-on parenthood is rapidly decreasing. This is where peer orientation comes in: when attachments are skewed, we lose our parenthood. For parenthood to fade before the end of childhood is disastrous for both parent and child. When we are stripped of our parenthood, our children lose the positive aspects of childhood. They remain immature, but are deprived of the innocence, vulnerability, and childlike openness required for growth and for the unfettered enjoyment of what life has to offer. They are cheated of their full legacy as human beings. 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 nurtures, 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.

The season for digital connection arrives when a child is sufficiently developed and mature to preserve her or his own personhood. When this is to occur cannot be formulaically prescribed but depends on the parents’ best intuitive knowledge of their child. The deeper we can cultivate the relationship with our children, the more they can hold on to us when physically not with us.

The ultimate resolution to being preoccupied with attachment is not to depend so much on attachments in order to function. The only way to get there is through becoming viable as a separate being. This is the ultimate yearning of development, but again requires a great deal of time and conditions that are favorable. The more individuated the child, the more emotionally self-reliant, the less in need he or she is of the digital solutions invented by a society that is coming undone. There is no shortcut to individuation. Personhood must be grown. Those adolescents who want to be themselves and can truly hold on to themselves when in the company of their peers do not need social networking to function.

to promote independence, we must invite dependence.