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.

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.

It is part of the task of parenting to be taken for granted.

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

It is children’s desire to be good for us that warrants our trust, not their ability to perform to our expectations.

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.

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.

We liberate children not by making them work for our love but by letting them rest in it. We help a child face the separation involved in going to sleep or going to school by satisfying his need for closeness. Thus the story of maturation is one of paradox: dependence and attachment foster independence and genuine separation.

To compensate for the cultural chaos of our times, we need to make a habit of collecting our children daily and repeatedly until they are old enough to function as independent beings.

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.

Unconditional acceptance is the most difficult to convey exactly when it is most needed: when our children have disappointed us, violated our values, or made themselves odious to us.

It is when things are the roughest that we should be holding on to our children the most firmly.

it is parents who first need to acquire discipline.

Our ability to manage a child effectively is very much an outcome of our capacity to manage ourselves.

In order to preserve our working relationship with a child, we need to indicate somehow that the relationship is not in danger.

The words, again, are less important than the tone, which should be friendly and warm, not threatening.

The key to adaptation is for futility to sink in whenever we are up against something that won’t work and we can’t change.

To facilitate adaptation, a parent must dance the child to his tears, to letting go, and to the sense of rest that comes in the wake of letting go.

These realities need to be presented firmly so they do not become the issue. To equivocate—to reason, to explain, to justify—is to fail to give the child something to adapt to.

The agenda should not be to teach a lesson but to move frustration to sadness.

Our objective, whenever possible, should be to solicit good intentions in the child.

Soliciting good intentions is a safe and highly effective parenting practice. It transforms kids from the inside out.

Mice whose reward circuits are continually electrically stimulated will die of starvation because they will not seek food. Stimulating our children’s brains with digital technology will similarly divert them from what will truly nourish them.

We want children to be fulfilled with what they truly need before they have access to that which would spoil their appetite for what they truly need.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau said that one of most significant responsibilities of parents is to act as buffers between the child and society.

What is normal is judged by what is typical, not by what is natural or what is healthy.

We return to the necessity of having rituals and routines and activities where we can collect their eyes, their smiles, and their nods, for no other purpose than to fill them up and help inoculate them against the attachment addictions that are plaguing their friends.

So by far the best prevention for an obsessive preoccupation with digital intimacy is healthy relational development.

In true play, the fun is in the activity, not in the end result.

This honors the natural developmental order of things: outflow before inflow.