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

by Gordon Neufeld

Part of my job was to investigate the psychological dynamics in children and adolescents who attempted suicide, successfully or not. To my absolute shock and surprise, the key trigger for the great majority was how they were being treated by their peers, not their parents. My experience was not isolated, as is confirmed by the increasing numbers of reports of childhood suicides triggered by peer rejection and bullying. 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.

The cause of Cynthia’s puzzling behavior becomes self-evident only if we picture the same scenario in the adult realm. Imagine that your spouse or lover suddenly begins to act strangely: won’t look you in the eye, rejects physical contact, speaks to you irritably in monosyllables, shuns your approaches, and avoids your company. Then imagine that you go to your friends for advice. Would they say to you, “Have you tried a time-out? Have you imposed limits and made clear what your expectations are?” It would be obvious to everyone that, in the context of adult interaction, you’re dealing not with a behavior problem but a relationship problem. And probably the first suspicion to arise would be that your partner was having an affair. What would seem so clear to us in the adult arena has us befuddled when it occurs between child and parent. Cynthia was entirely preoccupied with her peers. Her single-minded pursuit of contact with them competed with her attachment to her family. It was as if she were having an affair.

Today’s children are not only turning to their peers but, like Cynthia, are actively and energetically turning away from their parents. Nothing is neutral in attachment. To the degree that attachment governs the child, relationships will be highly charged.

Children well attached to their parents are eager to be like them. Until adolescence, at least, they take great pleasure when similarities and likenesses are noticed by others, whether it is the same sense of humor, the same preferences in food, the same ideas on a topic, the same reactions to a movie, the same taste in music.

There are no cultural customs in mainstream society that make it the first item of business for day-care workers and preschool teachers to form connections with the parents and then, through friendly introductions, to cultivate a working attachment with the child. Both parents and professionals are left to their own intuition—or more often the lack of it.

An attachment custom that used to be followed in many places—that of preschool and kindergarten teachers visiting the homes of future students—has largely been scrapped, except perhaps in well-funded private schools.

Attachment voids, situations when the child’s natural attachments are missing, are dangerous precisely because their results are so indiscriminate.

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. Kirsten’s mother and father had come to rely on force because, unawares, they had lost the power to parent.

Parental impotence is difficult to recognize and distressing to admit. Our minds seize on more acceptable explanations: our children don’t need us anymore, or our children are particularly difficult, or our parenting skill is deficient.

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.

There are all kinds of parenting courses now, and even classes teaching parents how to read nursery rhymes to their toddlers. Yet experts cannot teach what is most fundamental to effective parenting. The power to parent does not arise from techniques, no matter how well meant, but from the attachment relationship.

We cannot truly take care of a child who does not count on us to be taken care of, or who depends on us only for food, clothing, shelter, and other material concerns. We cannot emotionally support a child who is not leaning on us for his psychological needs.

They were still dependent—only they no longer experienced themselves as depending on their parents. Their dependency needs had not vanished; what had changed was only on whom they were depending. The power to parent will be transferred to whomever the child depends on, whether or not that person is truly dependable, appropriate, responsible, or compassionate—whether or not, in fact, that person is even an adult. In the lives of these three children, peers had replaced parents as the objects of emotional dependence.

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.

While reattaching our children may be easier to conceptualize than to do in practice, it is the only way to regain parental authority.

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.

Instead of trusting in their own intuition, learning from their own mistakes and finding their own way, they started to look to others for cues on how to parent. They were mechanically following the advice of others, employing contrived methods of behavior control that ran roughshod over the attachment relationship. Sometimes, they said, it felt as if they were relating to a syndrome rather than to a person. Instead of finding answers, they found as many opinions as there were experts to propound them.

To parents eager for advice on what to do, I say again that patient and heartfelt understanding of attachment is the first requirement. My experience helping thousands of parents and children has convinced me that unless we completely get how and why things don’t work—and also how things are meant to work—our attempted solutions, no matter how well-intentioned, will only compound the problem.

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.

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

Basically, attention follows attachment. The stronger the attachment, the easier it is to secure the child’s attention. When attachment is weak, the attention of the child will be correspondingly difficult to engage. One of the telltale signs of a child who isn’t paying attention is a parent having continually to raise his voice or repeat things. Some of our most persistent demands as parents have to do with their attention: “Listen to me,” “Look at me when I’m talking,” “Now look here,” “What did I just say?” or most simply, “Pay attention.”

This desire to be good is one of the first things I look for in a child whose parents are encountering trouble in their parenting. There are a number of reasons for a child to not be good, but by far the most crucial is the absence of the desire itself. Sad to say, some children can never measure up to their parents’ expectations because the standards demanded by the parents are hopelessly unrealistic. But if the child’s desire itself is lacking, it does not much matter if the expectations are realistic or not. When I queried the parents of Sean, Melanie, and Kirsten, they all reported that their child was short on this motivation. Yet the parents of each could recall a time in the not-too-distant past when the drive to be good had been much more in evidence.

conscience. We must never intentionally make a child feel bad, guilty, or ashamed in order to get him to be good.

External motivators for behavior such as rewards and punishments may destroy the precious internal motivation to be good, making leverage by such artificial means necessary by default. As an investment in easy parenting, trusting in a child’s desire to be good for us is one of the best.

Some parents perceive trust as having to do with the end result, not with the basic motivation. In their eyes trust is something to be earned rather than an investment to be made. “How can I trust you,” they may say, “if you don’t do what you said you would do or if you lied to me?” Even if a child was never able to measure up to our expectations or realize his own intentions, it would still be important to trust in his desire to be good for us. To withdraw that trust is to take the wind out of his sails and to hurt him deeply.

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 makes its most dramatic appearance in the second year of life—yes, the so-called terrible two’s. (If two-year-olds could make up such labels, they would perhaps describe their parents as going through the “terrible thirties.”) Counterwill reappears with a vengeance during adolescence but it can be activated at any age—many adults experience it.

In many children driven by counterwill we may observe a fascination with transgressing taboos and adopting antisocial attitudes. No matter what it looks like, the underlying dynamic is straightforward—instinctive resistance to being forced.

Figuring out what we want has to begin with having the freedom to not want. By keeping out the parent’s expectations and demands, counterwill helps make room for the growth of the child’s own self-generated motivations and inclinations. Thus, counterwill is a normal human dynamic that exists in all children, even those appropriately attached.

As genuine independence develops and maturation occurs, counterwill fades. With maturation human beings gain the capacity to endure mixed emotions. They can be in conflicting states of mind at the same time: wanting to be independent but committed also to preserving the attachment relationship.

The problem with seeing our children as having power is that we miss how much they truly need us. Even if a child is trying to control us, he is doing so out of a need and a dependence on us to make things work. If he was truly powerful, he would have no need to get us to do his bidding. Faced with a child they perceive as demanding, some parents become defensive and move to protect themselves. As adults, we react to feelings of being coerced much as children do—balking, resisting, opposing, and countering. Our own counterwill is provoked, leading to a power struggle with our children that becomes really more a battle of counterwills than a battle of wills. The sad part about this is that the child loses the parent she desperately needs. Our resistance only multiplies the child’s demands and erodes the attachment relationship that is our best and only hope.

We need to get past the symptoms. If all we perceive is the resistance or the insolence, we will respond with anger, frustration, and force. We must see that the child is only reacting instinctively whenever he feels he is being pushed and pulled. Beyond the counterwill we need to recognize the weakened attachment. The defiance is not the essence of the problem; the root cause is the peer orientation that makes counterwill backfire on adults and robs it of its natural purpose.

Attachment is both a shield and a sword. Attachment divides the world into those who can hurt you and those who can’t. Attachment and vulnerability—these two great themes of human existence—go hand in hand.

Studies have been unequivocal in their findings that the best protection for a child, even through adolescence, is a strong attachment with an adult.

In response to the intensifying cruelty of children to one another, schools all over this continent are rushing to design programs to inculcate social responsibility in youngsters. We are barking up the wrong tree when we try to make children responsible for other children. In my view it is completely unrealistic to believe we can in this way eradicate peer exclusion and rejection and insulting communication. We should, instead, be working to take the sting out of such natural manifestations of immaturity by reestablishing the power of adults to protect children from themselves and from one another.

Carl Jung explained that we tend to attack in others what we are most uncomfortable with in ourselves.

The love, attention, and security only adults can offer liberates children from the need to make themselves invulnerable and restores to them that potential for life and adventure that can never come from risky activities, extreme sports, or drugs.

Along the same lines, Peter could not assimilate the idea of work because the concept requires mixed feelings. Work is often not very attractive, but we generally do it because we can mix our resistance to it in the moment with a commitment or purpose we may have in mind for the long term. Too immature to hold on to a goal beyond immediate satisfaction, Peter worked only when he felt like it and that wasn’t very often. He was conscious of no more than one feeling at a time. In this sense, he was no different from any preschooler. His failure to endure conflicting thoughts, feelings, and purposes in his consciousness was a legacy of his peer orientation.

They were not given to reflecting on their inner experience, agreeing or disagreeing with themselves, approving or disapproving of what they saw within. Because their feelings and thoughts were not differentiated enough to withstand mixing, they were capable of only one feeling or impulse at a time. Neither of them was given to statements like “Part of me feels this way and part of me feels that way.” Neither of them had “on the other hand” kind of experiences, nor felt ambivalent about erupting in frustration or about avoiding things. Without the capacity for reflection, they were defined by the inner experience of the moment. They immediately acted out whatever emotions arose in them. They could be their inner experience but they could not see it. This inability made them impulsive, egocentric, reactive, and impatient. Because frustration did not mix with caring, they had no patience. Because anger did not mix with love, they showed no forgiveness. Because frustration did not mix with either fear or affection, they lost their tempers. In short, they lacked maturity.

The key to activating maturation is to take care of the attachment needs of the child. To foster independence we must first invite dependence; to promote individuation we must provide a sense of belonging and unity; to help the child separate we must assume the responsibility for keeping the child close. We help a child let go by providing more contact and connection than he himself is seeking. When he asks for a hug, we give him a warmer one than he is giving us. 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.

Attachment hunger is very much like physical hunger. The need for food never goes away, just as the child’s need for attachment never ends. As parents we free the child from the pursuit of physical nurturance. We assume responsibility for feeding the child as well as providing a sense of security about the provision. No matter how much food a child has at the moment, if there is no sense of confidence in the supply, getting food will continue to be the top priority. A child is not free to proceed with his learning and his life until the food issues are taken care of, and we parents do that as a matter of course. Our duty ought to be equally transparent to us in satisfying the child’s attachment hunger.

One of the first things I check for in my assessment of children is the existence of feelings of missing and loss. It is indicative of emotional health for children to be able to sense what is missing and to know what the emptiness is about. As soon as they are able to articulate, they should be able to say things like “I miss daddy,” “It hurt me that grandma didn’t notice me,” “It didn’t seem like you were interested in my story,” “I don’t think so and so likes me.”

The emergent child—the child who is self-motivated and not driven by needs for peer contact—seems like an anomaly, irregular, a little off the beaten track. The words that peer-oriented kids use for such a child are highly critical, words like weird, stupid, retarded, freak, and geek. Immature children do not understand why these emergent, maturing others are trying so hard to get along, why they seek solitude sometimes instead of company, why they can be curious and interested about things that don’t involve others, why they ask questions in class. There must be something wrong with these kids and for that they deserve to be shamed. The stronger a child’s peer orientation, the more intensely she will resent and assault another kid’s individuality.

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. The energy is being transformed from trying to change things to letting go.

The brain must register that something doesn’t work. It’s not enough to think something does not work—it must be felt. We have all had the experience of knowing something isn’t working but continuing to repeat the same action over and over. For example, many of us as parents have said to a child: “If I’ve told you once, I’ve told you a thousand times …” If, instead, we allowed our own sense of futility to sink in, we would not persist in parenting behaviors that we know don’t work and will not work, no matter how many times we repeat them.

Trying to douse the fires of aggression in our peer-oriented children is itself an exercise in futility. Until this futility sinks in, however, and we find our own sadness about this state of affairs, we are unlikely to change our ways. We are in a dreadful predicament with our peer-oriented children. The more they become so, the more inclined they are to aggression but also the less responsive to our discipline. The more aggressive they are, the more alienated and absent we become, leaving a still greater void to be filled with their peers. Our automatic tendency, under such circumstances, is to focus our attention and efforts on the aggression rather than on the underlying issue of our children’s misdirected attachments. No matter how upsetting and alienating the problem, we cannot afford to make aggression the central focus. Our only hope of turning things around is to reclaim our children and to restore their attachment to us.

As we all realize, sex is rarely about just sex—in the case of Jessica, it certainly wasn’t. Sometimes it is about a hunger to be desired. It may be an escape from boredom or loneliness. It may also be a way of staking territory or claiming a possession, or may serve as an attempt to lock into an exclusive relationship with another. Sex can be a powerful symbol of status and recognition. It can be about scoring or about belonging or fitting in or clinging and holding on. It may be about dominance or submission or may function to please someone. Sex, in some cases, reflects a lack of boundaries and an inability to say no. It can, of course, express love, heartfelt passion, and true intimacy. Nearly always, in one form or another, sex is about attachment. In the lives of our adolescents it is, most often, an expression of unfulfilled attachment needs.

mind. Just as depth perception requires two eyes, depth learning requires the ability to see things from at least two points of view. If the mind’s eye is singular, there is no depth or perspective, no synthesis or distillation, no penetration to deeper meaning and truth. Context is not taken into consideration; figure and background lack differentiation.

Get in the Child’s Face—or Space—in a Friendly Way The objective of this first step is to attract the child’s eyes, to evoke a smile, and, if possible, elicit a nod.

Even as we must be the guardians of our children’s safety and well-being, we need to keep getting in their faces in ways that are warm and inviting, that keep enticing them to stay in relationship with us.

Collecting our children is also important after the separation caused by sleep. Morning would be a lot different in many families if the parent did not insist on parenting until the child had been properly collected. One of our own most fruitful customs when our boys were young was to create what we called a morning warm-up time. We designated two comfortable chairs in our den as warm-up chairs. Right after the boys woke up my wife, Joy, and I put them on our laps, held them, played and joked with them until the eyes were engaged, the smiles were forthcoming, and the nods were working. After that, everything went much more smoothly.