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

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Any peer-oriented child knows the deal: don't say or do anything that could reflect badly on others and risk pushing them away. They force conformity, create insecurity, wound, manipulate, accelerate sexual development/activity, etc.

Connection is so important and this book helped me to remember to keep making the effort to connect - ESPECIALLY when it seems really difficult! Latter half seems to have good information and solid advice, but even that is constantly cut by putting the blame to children's peers. Gordon Neufeld is a Vancouver-based developmental psychologist who consults with parents and professionals regarding children and their problems.

Sutinku, kad privertė suabejoti šiuolaikiniu požiūriu, kad tai tiesiog paauglystė, ir normalu atstumti tėvus ir mestis prie bendraamžių. But this situation is far from natural, and it can be dangerous - it undermines family cohesion, interferes with healthy development, and fosters a hostile and sexualized youth culture. When adult influence is cut out of their lives at such a young age, it's no wonder that these young people have stunted maturity.

Peer-oriented kids are expected to conform, to hide their differences, to not seem too interested in anything that is not "cool," to spend all of their time trying to connect and manage unwieldy relationships with their friends, to stay on top of who is doing what with whom, all the while burying their vulnerable feelings, their curiosities, their unique ideas. What is unnatural is not peer contact but that children should have become the dominant influence on one another's development" (6).He actually describes this as a problem for most of the people my age that are reading the book as they raise young children. Shaping values, identity, and codes of behavior, peer groups are often far more influential than parents. He says, "The greater the number of caring adults in a child's life, the more immune he or she will be to peer orientation.

This book seems like a rather lengthy tome to say, "attachment between children and parents is important in establishing and maintaining long-term relationship. I thought the first part of the book where the author gives examples of the horrors that can result when kids are "peer oriented" went on a bit too long, but did find the chapters where he eventually got around to explaining concrete steps to take to maintain parental attachment while avoiding or reversing peer attachment to be useful.Collect ’ your children: Spend time with them when they wake up, when they come in from school, at family meals, when they go to bed. I checked this book out from the library originally but ended up having to purchase it after the first few chapters because I couldn’t resist the urge to highlight. First, relationship of parents and children is describe as strictly hierarchical, patronizing and asymmetric.

Because peers are immature kids, they don't have the resources to help kids mature; in fact, they often thwart maturity. It is easier than I supposed for kids to become "unattached" to their parents, but then on the flip side it shouldn't be too hard to get them back if you catch this early. And he continues building his arguments on fictive stories like the Lord Of The Flies, murderous sociopath exceptions, and the behaviour of elephants. But this situation is far from natural, and it can be dangerous - it undermines family cohesion, interferes with healthy development and fosters a hostile and sexualised youth culture.This is when kids, instead of attaching to loving parents (maybe because parents are ill, uninvolved, dysfunctional, whatever; maybe because our society is so peer-oriented and pushes this direction), attach to other kids. If that sounds rich coming from someone who has co-authored a parenting book, Maté says his and Neufeld’s mission is simply “to validate parenting instincts” in the face of a cultural onslaught against them. Shaky parallels, sometimes even pseudo-science is used ("People orientation is like a compass needle - it cannot point to two different directions at once" etc.