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

by Gordon Neufeld

That is what parenthood is, a relationship.

Children are not quite the same as we remember being. They are less likely to take their cues from adults, less afraid of getting into trouble. They also seem less innocent and naive—lacking, it seems, the wide-eyed wonder that leads a child to have excitement for the world, for exploring the wonders of nature or of human creativity. Many children seem inappropriately sophisticated, even jaded in some ways, pseudo-mature before their time. They appear to be easily bored when away from each other or when not engaged with technology. Creative, solitary play seems a vestige of the past.

Parenting, too, seems to have changed. Our parents were more confident, more certain of themselves, and had more impact on us, for better or for worse. For many today, parenting does not feel natural.

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.

Instead, children are being brought up by immature persons who cannot possibly guide them to maturity. They are being brought up by each other.

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.

The more peers matter, the more children are devastated by the insensitive relating of their peers, by failing to fit in, by perceived rejection or ostracization.

In a world of increasing cultural turbulence, a consciousness of attachment is probably the most important knowledge a parent could possess. But it is not enough to understand attachment from the outside. We must know it from within. The two ways of knowing—to know about and to experience intimately—must come together. We must feel attachment in our bones.

Far from being qualified to orient anyone else, children are not even capable of self-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.

What does not work, and cannot work, is the coexistence of competing primary attachments, competing orienting relationships—in other words, orienting relationships with conflicting values, conflicting messages.

John Bowlby, British psychiatrist and a great pioneer of attachment research, wrote that “the behavioral equipment of a species may be beautifully suited to life within one environment and lead only to sterility and death in another.” Each species has what Bowlby called its “environment of adaptedness,” the circumstances to which its anatomy, physiology, and psychological capacities are best suited. In any other environment the organism or species cannot be expected to do so well, and may even exhibit behavior “that is at best unusual and at worst positively unfavorable to survival.”

Another attachment void has been created by the secularization of society. Quite apart from religion, the church, temple, mosque, or synagogue community functioned as an important supporting cast for parents and an attachment village for children. Secularization has meant more than the loss of faith or spiritual rootedness; it has brought the loss of this attachment community. Beyond that, peer interaction has become a priority for many churches. For example, many churches divide the family as they enter the door, grouping the members by age rather than by family.

When circumstances change more quickly than our culture can adapt to, customs and traditions disintegrate. It is not surprising that today’s culture is failing its traditional function of supporting adult-child attachments. Part of the rapid change has been the electronic transmission of culture, allowing commercially blended and packaged culture to be broadcast into our homes and into

the very minds of our children. Instant culture has replaced what used to be passed down through custom and tradition and from one generation to another.

It may be surprising to hear that parenting should be relatively easy. Getting our child to take our cues, follow directions, or respect our values should not require strain and struggle or coercion, nor even the extra leverage of rewards. If pressure tactics are required, something is amiss.

The absent quality is power, not love or knowledge or commitment or skill. Our predecessors had much more power than parents today. In getting children to heed, our grandparents wielded more power than our parents could exercise over us or we seem to have over our children. If the trend continues, our children will be in great difficulty when their turn comes at parenting. The power to parent is slipping away.

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.

It is when we lack that power that we are likely to resort to force. The more power a parent commands, the less force is required in day-to-day parenting. On the other hand, the less power we possess, the more impelled we are to raise our voices, harshen our demeanor, utter threats, and seek some leverage to make our children comply with our demands.

Power is absolutely necessary for the task of parenting. Why do we need power? Because we have responsibilities. Parenting was never meant to exist without the power to fulfill the responsibilities it brings. There is no way of understanding the dynamics of parenting without addressing the question of power.

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.

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.

At first glance, the dependence of children seems straightforward enough. But here is the glitch: being dependent does not guarantee dependence on the appropriate caregivers. Every child is born in need of nurturing, but after infancy and toddlerhood not all children necessarily look to the parent to provide it. 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.

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. Like power, dependence has become a dirty word. We want our children to be self-directing, self-motivated, self-controlled, self-orienting, self-reliant, and self-assured. We have put such a premium on independence that we lose sight of what childhood is about. Parents will complain of their child’s oppositional and off-putting behaviors, but rarely do they note that their children have stopped looking to them for nurturing, comfort, and assistance. They are disturbed by their child’s failure to comply with their reasonable expectations but seem unaware that the child no longer seeks their affection, approval, or appreciation. They do not notice that the child is turning to peers for support, love, connection, and belonging. 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.

Parenting impotence is hard to see because the power that parents used to possess was not conscious of itself. It was automatic, invisible, a built-in component of family life and of tradition-based cultures. By and large, the parents of yesteryear could take their power for granted because it was usually sufficient for the task at hand. For reasons we have begun to explore, this is no longer the case. If one does not understand the source of one’s ease, one cannot appreciate the root of one’s difficulty. Owing to our collective ignorance of attachment, our difficulty recognizing parental impotence, and our aversion to power itself, the most common affliction in parenting is left begging for an explanation.

Difficulty in parenting often leads to a hunt to find out what is wrong with the child. We may witness today a frantic search for labels to explain our children’s problems. Parents seek the formal diagnoses of a professional or grasp at informal labels—there are, for examples, books on raising the “difficult” or the “spirited” child. The more frustrating parenting becomes, the more likely children will be perceived as difficult and the more labels will be sought for verification. It is no coincidence that the preoccupation with diagnoses has paralleled the rise in peer orientation in our society. Increasingly, children’s behavioral problems are ascribed to various medical syndromes such as oppositional defiant disorder or attention deficit disorder. These diagnoses at least have the benefit of absolving the child and of removing the onus of blame from the parents, but they camouflage the reversible dynamics that cause children to misbehave in the first place. Medical explanations help by removing guilt but they hinder by reducing the issues to oversimplified concepts. They assume that the complex behavior problems of many children can be explained by genetics or by miswired brain circuits. They ignore scientific evidence that the human brain is shaped by the environment from birth throughout the lifetime and that attachment relationships are the most important aspect of the child’s environment. They also dictate narrow solutions, such as medications, without regard to the ...

ATTACHMENT ARRANGES THE PARENT AND CHILD HIERARCHICALLY

When humans enter a relationship, their attachment brain automatically ranks the participants in order of dominance. Embedded in our inborn brain apparatus are archetypal positions that divide roughly into dominant and dependent, caregiving and care-seeking, the one who provides and the one who receives.

But the chief havoc caused by peer orientation is that it flattens the natural parent-child hierarchy. Parents lose the respect and authority that, in the natural order of things, properly belong to their dominant role.

ATTACHMENT EVOKES THE PARENTING INSTINCTS, MAKES THE CHILD MORE ENDEARING, AND INCREASES PARENTAL TOLERANCE

Training or education cannot do what attachment can do: trigger the instincts to take care of.

There is nothing more appealing than the attachment behavior of an infant—the eyes that engage, the smile that pulls at the heartstrings, the outstretched arms, the melting into you when you pick him up. A person would have to be completely hardened for his attachment buttons not to be pushed. The attachment behavior serves the purpose of awakening the parent within us. It is designed not by the infant but by attachment reflexes that are automatic and spontaneous.

Actually, all parents are used, abused, taken for granted, and taken advantage of.

It is part of the task of parenting to be taken for granted. What makes it all worthwhile is the gesture of affection, the sign of connection, the desire for closeness—not necessarily out of appreciation for our dedication and effort, but from attachment pure and simple.

ATTACHMENT COMMANDS THE CHILD’S ATTENTION

It is no accident that attention deficit disorder was initially considered a school problem, a child’s failing to pay attention to the teacher. It is also no accident that the explosion in the number of diagnosed cases of attention deficit disorder has paralleled the evolution of peer orientation in our society and is worse where peer orientation is most predominant—urban centers and inner-city schools.

ATTACHMENT KEEPS THE CHILD CLOSE TO THE PARENT

We need to learn to parent in harmony with this design rather than fight against it.

ATTACHMENT CREATES A MODEL OUT OF THE PARENT

ATTACHMENT DESIGNATES THE PARENT AS THE PRIMARY CUE-GIVER

Some parents may avoid giving direction in the naive belief that they have to leave room for the child to develop his own internal guides. It doesn’t work like that. Only psychological maturity can grant genuine self-determination. 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. Managing a child who is not following our direction is difficult enough, but trying to control a child under someone else’s command is next to impossible. What was meant to replace us is not someone else giving orders but maturity—that is, a grown-up person’s own capacity to make decisions and to choose the best course of action for herself.

ATTACHMENT MAKES THE CHILD WANT TO BE GOOD FOR THE PARENT

Children do not internalize values—make them their own—until adolescence.

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.

The long transition from infancy to adulthood begins with the very young child’s tentative moves toward separation from the parents. Counterwill first appears in the toddler to help in that task of individuation.