Book Review: Hold on to Your Kids - Why Parents Matter
“Hold on to Your Kids: Why Parents Matter” is a recently published book written by Gordon Neufeld and Gabor Mate that offers parents a refreshing and enlightened message. This book is both hopeful and encouraging, yet explains a worrisome trend that is threatening the welfare of our children.
Written by two local and influential health care professionals, Hold on to Your Kids examines parenting from the perspective of attachment theory. It begins with the central premise that the parent-child relationship is pre-eminent, and is the single most important factor in our ability to parent successfully. It is this special relationship that we have with our children that allows them to be receptive to being parented, and empowers parents to become their comforter, guide, model, teacher, and coach.
The authors observe that our society has not supported children’s natural attachment to their parents, resulting in a growing and dangerous trend that is undermining parents’ ability to influence and protect their children. “Peer orientation, … the tendency of children to look to peers instead of their parents for direction, sense of right and wrong, values, identity, and codes of behavior …”, is seen as the most serious threat to our children. The danger is that peers, in addition to being equally immature, are not motivated by the same unconditional love and willingness to sacrifice and extend oneself for the sake of the other that parents are. Hence, those who do not genuinely have their best interests at heart are increasingly influencing our children. At the same time, our influence as parents is eroded.
Neufeld and Mate provide behavioral descriptions of a “peer-oriented” child so parents are able to recognize this damaging situation. Pre-occupation with peers, wanting to spend every minute with them and being bored and listless when away from them, adopting their manner of language, gestures, dress, and behaviors are some of the characteristics of peer-orientation. Similarly, when parents become the objects of contempt and scorn, and their children actively seek to be as different and distant from them as possible, the parent-child attachment relationship is in serious jeopardy.
Despite the very damaging nature of peer-orientation, the instinctive bond that children have with their parents is resilient and readily responsive to our efforts to rekindle this essential relationship. The authors direct parents in a variety of methods to “collect” children who may have begun to detach and slip away, to “draw them under our wing”. These methods are focused on cultivating a connection, and restoring and re-establishing a working relationship, even with alienated, defiant, and hostile teenagers who are the most in need of being “reclaimed”.
As a specialist in Developmental Psychology, Dr. Gordon Neufeld also explains why prevailing practices in child rearing, based on the goal of compliance, are actually damaging to children’s attachments and longer-term emotional functioning. Tactics that employ contrived leverage (e.g., imposed sanctions, artificial consequences, withdrawal of privileges, “1-2-3 magic”) and punitive separation (ignoring a child, isolation strategies, “time-outs”, withdrawing affection) are seen to insult the child, strain the relationship, undermine a child’s sense of security, and provoke counter will.
Rather than continuing to use these self-defeating interventions, Dr. Neufeld recommends “Seven Principles of Natural Discipline”. These principles are consistent with intuitive parenting instincts, and operate from a basis of compassion and insight into the true developmental needs of our children. Focusing on connection and the relationship; providing comfort during times of frustration; soliciting good intentions; avoiding confrontation; and fostering self-control, are alternative and effective responses to children’s offending behaviors.
As parents themselves, the authors of Hold on to Your Kids, offer the hopeful message that our children really do want and need to belong to us, even if their behaviors seem to indicate otherwise. They profess that “the relationship between the child and parent is sacred, deserving of our utmost reverence and respect”, and that “our relationship with our children should be our utmost priority”. Our job as parents is to “hold on to our children and help them hold on to us … until our work is done and they can hold on to themselves”. We can and must reclaim our proper role as their nurturers and mentors so that they can venture forth and fulfill their own developmental destinies.
Hold on to Your Kids: Why Parents Matter is a highly recommended resource for parents of children of all ages and is available at your local bookstore (published by Alfred A. Knopf Canada, 2004)
