International authority on child development Gordon Neufeld, Ph.D., joins forces with bestselling author Gabor Mate, M.D., to tackle one of the most disturbing trends of our time: Children today increasingly look to their peers for direction-their values, identity, and codes of behavior. This "peer orientation" undermines family cohesion, interferes with healthy development, and fosters a hostile and sexualized youth culture. Children end up becoming overly conformist, desensitized, and alienated, and being "cool" matters more to them than anything else.

Gordon Neufeld, Ph.D, is a clinical psychologist in private practice in Vancouver. He has spent much of his professional life creating coherent theories for understanding child development. He is nationally recognized for his work on aggression and violence among children and youth and appears regularly on radio and television, both in Vancouver and nationally.

Gabor Maté, M.D., is the bestselling author of When the Body Says No and Scattered Minds. His by-line is often seen in the Globe and Mail, for articles and commentary ranging from health to politics. He has worked in family practice, palliative care and psychotherapy. He is presently staff physician at a clinic in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside, where his patients are people with drug addictions, HIV and related problems.

From the Hardcover edition.

PART ONE THE PHENOMENON OF PEER ORIENTATION

Why Parents Matter More Than Ever

3

(12)

Skewed Attachments, Subverted Instincts

15

(16)

Why We've Come Undone

31

(16)

PART TWO SABOTAGED: HOW PEER ORIENTATION UNDERMINES PARENTING

The Power to Parent Is Slipping Away

47

(12)

From Help to Hindrance: When Attachment Works Against Us

59

(15)

Counterwill: Why Children Become Disobedient

74

(12)

The Flatlining of Culture

86

(11)

PART THREE STUCK IN IMMATURITY: HOW PEER ORIENTATION STUNTS HEALTHY DEVELOPMENT

The Dangerous Flight from Feeling

97

(13)

Stuck in Immaturity

110

(17)

A Legacy of Aggression

127

(12)

The Making of Bullies and Victims

139

(15)

A Sexual Turn

154

(11)

Unteachable Students

165

(14)

PART FOUR HOW TO HOLD ON TO OUR KIDS (OR HOW TO RECLAIM THEM)

Collecting Our Children

179

(17)

Preserve the Ties That Empower

196

(17)

Discipline That Does Not Divide

213

(22)

PART FIVE PREVENTING PEER ORIENTATION

Don't Court the Competition

235

(19)

Re-create the Attachment Village

254

(11)

Glossary

265

(10)

Notes

275

(6)

Index

281

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PART ONE: The Phenomenon of Peer Orientation

Chapter One: In Our Own Backyard

Something has changed. We can sense it, can feel it, just not find the words for it. Children are not quite the same as we remember being. They seem less likely to take their cues from adults, less inclined to please those in charge, less afraid of getting into trouble. Parenting, too, seems to have changed. Our parents were more confident, more certain of themselves and had more impact on us, for better -- or, sometimes, for worse. For many today, parenting does not feel natural. Through the ages adults have complained about children being less respectful of their elders and more difficult to manage than preceding generations, but could it be that this time it is for real?

Today’s parents love their children as much as parents ever have, but the love doesn’t always get through. We have just as much to teach them as parents ever did, but they seem less interested in following our direction. We can sense our children’s potential but do not feel empowered to guide them toward fulfilling it. Sometimes they live and act as if they have been seduced away from us by some siren song we do not hear. We fear, if only vaguely, that the world has become less safe for them and that we are powerless to protect them. The gap opening up between children and adults can seem unbridgeable at times.

We struggle to live up to our image of what parenting ought to be like. Not achieving the results we want, we plead with our children, we cajole, bribe, reward or punish. We hear ourselves address them in tones that seem harsh even to us and foreign to our true nature. We sense ourselves grow cold in moments of crisis, precisely when we would wish to summon our unconditional love. We feel hurt as parents, and rejected. We blame -- ourselves for failing at the parenting task, or our children for being recalcitrant, or television for distracting them, or the school system for not being strict enough. When our impotence becomes unbearable we reach for simplistic, authoritarian formulas consistent with the do-it-yourself/quick-fix ethos of our era.

The very importance of parenting to the development and maturation of young human beings has come under question. “Do Parents Matter?” was the title of a cover article in Newsweek magazine in 1998. “Parenting has been oversold,” argued a book1 that received international attention that year. “You have been led to believe that you have more of an influence on your child’s personality than you really do.”

The question of parental influence would not be of great moment if things were going well with our young. They are not -- and many of us feel that instinctively, even if we cannot explain exactly how and why. That our children do not seem to listen to us or to embrace our traditions and culture as their own would, perhaps, be acceptable in itself -- if we felt that they were truly self-sufficient, self-directed and grounded in themselves, if they had a positive sense of who they are and if they possessed a clear sense of direction and purpose in life. We see that for so many children and young adults those qualities are lacking. In homes, in schools, in community after community developing young human beings have lost their moorings. Many lack self-control and are increasingly prone to alienation, drug use, violence and a general aimlessness. They are less teachable and more difficult to manage than their counterparts of even a few decades ago. Many have lost their ability to adapt, to learn from negative experience and to mature. The crisis of the young has manifested itself ominously in the growing problem of bullying in the schools and, at its most extreme, in the murder of children by children, whether in British Columbia or New York, Quebec or Colorado.

Committed and responsible parents are frustrated. Our cues are not being taken, our directives are ineffective, and it appears our children would rather be elsewhere than at home. Despite our loving care kids seem highly stressed. Parents and other elders no longer appear to be the natural mooring point for the young, as used to be the case with human beings and is still the case with all other species living in their natural habitats. Senior generations, the parents and grandparents of the baby boomer group, look at us with incomprehension. “We didn’t need how-to manuals on parenting in our days, we just did it,” they say, with some mixture of truth and misunderstanding.

This state of affairs is ironic, given that more is known about child development than ever before. More courses and books are available on child rearing, and we can offer our children more things to do and explore. We probably live in a more child-centred universe than our predecessors did.

So what has changed? The problem, in a word, is context. Parenting is not something we can engage in with just any child, no matter how well intentioned, skilled or compassionate we may be. Parenting requires a context to be effective. A child must be receptive to our parenting for us to be successful in our nurturing, comforting, guiding and directing. Children do not automatically grant us the authority to parent them just because we are adults, or just because we love them or know what is good for them or have their best interests at heart. Those who parent other people’s children are often confronted by this fact, be they step-parents, adoptive parents, foster parents, grandparents, babysitters, nannies, daycare providers or teachers. Less obviously but of great importance is the fact that even with one’s own children the natural parenting authority can become lost if the context for it becomes eroded.

From the Hardcover edition.

Excerpted from Hold on to Your Kids: Why Parents Need to Matter More Than Peers by Gordon Neufeld, Gabor Mate
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