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

by Gordon Neufeld

When our parenthood is secure, natural instincts are activated that dictate far more astutely than any expert how to nurture and teach the young ones under our care. The secret is to honor our relationship with our children in all of our interactions with them.

It is in their relationship with us that our children will reach their developmental destiny of becoming independent, self-motivated, and mature beings valuing their own self-worth and mindful of the feelings, rights, and human dignity of others.

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. When a child seeks contact and closeness with us, we become empowered as a nurturer, a comforter, a guide, a model, a teacher, or a coach.

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.

Attachment enables children to hitch a ride with adults who are, at least in the mind of a child, assumed to be more capable of orienting themselves and finding their way.

orienting in any realistic sense of that word. Our children’s peers are not the ones we want them to depend on. They are not the ones to give our children a sense of themselves, to point out right from wrong, to distinguish fact from fantasy, to identify what works and what doesn’t, and to direct them as to where to go and how to get there.

A child who experiences emotional intimacy with the parent can tolerate much more physical separation and yet hold the parent close. If attaching via the senses—the first and most primitive way—is the short arm of attachment, love would be the long arm. The child carries the image of the loving and beloved parent in his mind, and finds support and comfort in it.

Those who have loved and suffered hurt may retreat to less vulnerable modes of attaching.

When deeper forms of attachment appear too risky, the less vulnerable modes will predominate.

Parent-oriented children do not like to keep secrets from their parents because of the resulting loss of closeness.

One cannot get much more vulnerable than to expose oneself psychologically. To share oneself with another and then be misunderstood or rejected is, for many, a risk not worth taking. As a result, this is the rarest of intimacies and the reason so many of us are reluctant to share even with loved ones our deepest concerns and insecurities about ourselves.

The quest for sameness being the least vulnerable way of attaching, it is the one usually chosen by kids impelled to seek contact with their peers. Hence their drive to be as much like one another as possible: to resemble one another in look, demeanor, thought, tastes, and values.

Under normal circumstances the bipolar nature of attachment serves the benign purpose of keeping the child close to the nurturing adults. Its first expression occurs in infancy and is often termed stranger protest. The more strongly the infant bonds to specific adults, the more he will resist contact with those he is not attached to.

Peer orientation turns the natural, instinctual responses of stranger protest against the child’s own parents.

Peer-oriented kids are repelled by similarity to their parents and want to be as different as possible from them. Since sameness means closeness, pursuing difference is a way of distancing.

Nothing induces the child to seek only someone who looks like mom or dad or who seems nurturing, capable, and mature. There is no inherent preference for choosing the adult in charge, no respect in the primitive attachment brain for a person who has been certified by the government or trained for child-rearing.

Children often lack close relationships with older generations—the people who, for much of human history, were often better able than parents themselves to offer the unconditional loving acceptance that is the bedrock of emotional security.

Parents who compete with the other parent or treat the other parent as persona non grata place the child (or, more precisely, the child’s attachment brain) in an impossible situation: to be close to one, the child must separate from the other, both physically and psychologically.

Owing to the marital conflict that precedes divorce, attachment voids may develop long before the divorce happens. When parents lose each other’s emotional support or become preoccupied with their relationship to each other, they become less accessible to their children.

Robert Bly notes that “in 1935 the average working man had forty hours a week free, including Saturday. By 1990, it was down to seventeen hours. The twenty-three lost hours of free time a week since 1935 are the very hours in which the father could be a nurturing father, and find some center in himself, and the very hours in which the mother could feel she actually has a husband.”

Our society puts a higher value on consumerism than the healthy development of children.

It is for economic reasons that parenting does not get the respect it should.

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.

The manifestations of difficulty differ from child to child, but the chorus is remarkably the same: parenting is much harder than anticipated.

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

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.”

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.

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.

While it is important for their development that children be given choices appropriate to their age and maturity, parents who avoid giving direction on principle end up abdicating their parenting role. In the absence of parental direction most children will seek guidance from a substitute source, likely their peers.

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.

Counterwill first appears in the toddler to help in that task of individuation. In essence, the child erects a wall of no’s. Behind this wall, the child can gradually learn her likes and dislikes, aversions and preferences, without being overwhelmed by the far more powerful will of the parent.

In healthy rebellion, true independence is the goal. One does not seek freedom from one person only to succumb to the influence and will of another. When counterwill is the result of skewed attachments, the liberty that the child strives for is not the liberty to be his true self but the opportunity to conform to his peers.

As our power to parent decreases, our preoccupation with leverage increases.

Attachment is natural and arises from within; leverage is contrived and imposed from without. In any other realm, we would see the use of leverage as manipulation. In parenting, such means of getting a child to follow our will have become embraced by many as normal and appropriate.

Manipulation, whether in the form of rewards or punishments, may succeed in getting the child to comply temporarily, but we cannot by this method make the desired behavior become part of anyone’s intrinsic personality.

the best response to a child’s counterwill is a stronger parental relationship and less reliance on force.

According to Howard Gardner, a leading American developmentalist, more is spontaneously absorbed from the parents in the first four years of life than during all the rest of a person’s formal education put together.1

To the degree that this boy’s attachment to his father protects him against hurtful interaction with others, it also sensitizes him to the father’s own words and gestures.

Julius Segal, a brilliant pioneer of research into what makes young people resilient. Summarizing studies from around the world, he concluded that the most important factor keeping children from being overwhelmed by stress was “the presence in their lives of a charismatic adult—a person with whom they identify and from whom they gather strength.”

A child who suffers much insecurity in his relationship with his parents will adopt the invulnerability of defensive detachment as his primary way of being.

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.

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.

Unconditional parental love is the indispensable nutrient for the child’s healthy emotional growth.

This frustration-to-futility dynamic is most transparent in toddlers. A toddler makes demands that the parent, usually for valid reasons, is unwilling or unable to meet. After some unsuccessful attempts at changing things, the toddler should be moved to tears of futility. That response is a very good thing.

Only when the futility sinks in and we apprehend on the deepest emotional level the impossibility of preserving physical and emotional contact with someone forever gone from our lives do the tears come and adaptation begins.

In their grasp for superiority, bullies exploit any apparent inferiority in others, just as they mock and devalue any perceived superiority in others. Bullies cannot stand anyone to be more important than they are.

If, in summary, we were to describe the essence of the bully, we would speak of a tough shell of hardened emotion protecting a very sensitive creature of attachment, highly immature and hugely dependent, who seeks the dominant position.

four essential qualities are primary in determining a child’s teachability: a natural curiosity, an integrative mind, an ability to benefit from correction, and a relationship with the teacher. Healthy attachment enhances each of these; peer orientation undermines