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

by Gordon Neufeld

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

The secret of a parent’s power is in the dependence of the child.

Our power to parent rests not in how dependent our child is, but in how much our child depends specifically on us.

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. The most critical of these is also the one most commonly overlooked and neglected: the child’s attachment to the adult.

Many parents and would-be parents still labor under the misconception that one can simply step into the role of parenting, whether as an adoptive parent, a foster parent, a stepparent, or the biological parent. We expect that the child’s need to be taken care of and our willingness to parent will suffice. We are surprised and offended when children seem resistant to our parenting.

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.

To regain the power to parent we must bring our children back into full dependence on us—not just physical dependence but psychological and emotional, too, as nature has ever intended.

Attachment, we have noted, does its work invisibly. People who out of pure instinct have created a good attachment relationship with their child will be successful and competent parents even if they have never formally learned a single parenting “skill.”

Children properly placed in the hierarchy of attachment instinctively want to be taken care of. They spontaneously look up to their parents, turn to them for answers, and defer to them. This dynamic is in the very nature of attachment. It’s what enables us to do our job. Without that sense of dependence, behavior is difficult to manage.

Without attachment, the parent succeeds at most in cowing a child into obedience, at the price of grave damage to the relationship and to the child’s long-term development.

Role reversal with a parent skews the child’s relationship with the whole world. It is a potent source of later psychological and physical stress.

When not primed by our children’s attachment to us, we are left to rely on our love and commitment alone and on our sense of responsibility as a parent. For some that is sufficient; for many it is not.

This urgent need to stay in touch interferes not only with family time but with the child’s studies, the development of talent, and most certainly with the creative solitude that is so essential for maturation.

We must never intentionally make a child feel bad, guilty, or ashamed in order to get him to be good. Abusing the attachment conscience evokes deep insecurities in the child and may induce him to shut it right down for fear of being hurt. The consequences are not worth any short-term gains in behavioral goals.

Parental values such as studying, working toward a goal, the pursuit of excellence, respect for society, the realization of potential, the development of talent, the pursuit of a passion, the appreciation of culture are often replaced with peer values that are much more immediate and short term.

Appearance, entertainment, peer loyalty, spending time together, fitting into the subculture, and getting along with each other will be prized above education and the realization of personal potential.

As an investment in easy parenting, trusting in a child’s desire to be good for us is one of the best.

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.