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

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They're responsible for what happening with the kid, since the child can't place changes in the situation, but the parents can. By helping to reawaken our instincts, Maté and Neufeld empower parents to be what nature intended: a true source of contact, security and warmth for their children. With rare exceptions such as bank holidays, the book group meets on the first Wednesday of every month at 7. His theory is that we all have a basic instinct or need for attachment, and when that is not met or strong enough with parents, kids will shift that need to peers to fill it, with the costly loss of parental attachment, which causes parents to lose the power to parent their children because the children are no longer looking to them for cues about anything. As our kids grow up, they are put into far too many situations where they are expected to develop dependent relationships on their peers rather than on mature adults.

I think anyone could read it and gain an incredible understanding on the people we interact with every day. But the truth of what Mate and Neufeld lay out in very clear and easy to read language was apparent.A few pages later he even mention divorce as another thing predisposing children to turn to their peers; also as a fault of our culture. This book is full of authoritarian garbage, bleating about a long-lost golden age and reads like it was written by entitled conservative boomers. He even goes into better ways to discipline to help preserve your relationship with your kids rather than hurt it. The world our children live in is becoming increasingly unfriendly to the natural process of maturing.

Neufeld very clearly identifies the underlying problems in our culture that pull our children away from us. I work with teens and there are plenty of problems that teens work through that come from over dominance of parents who needs to equip their growing children to be successful on their own. We always had extended family around and always intermingled with the generations, playing games and talking. A visionary book that goes beyond the usual explanations to illuminate a crisis of unrecognized proportions. And he continues building his arguments on fictive stories like the Lord Of The Flies, murderous sociopath exceptions, and the behaviour of elephants.Just as he did in the beginning of the book saying that culture turns the children away, and later using himself as an example, writing about how his daughter asked him after they spent a holiday together: Father, why did you leave me? If you are concerned about losing your children to either their peers or modern technology this book is a must read. 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.

Now we have kids who have graduated from college with no idea who they are or what they are interested in.

I essentially believe that peers and parents play a complimentary role in growing up, and blaming parental failures on peers is a terrible hypocrisy. Hence parents must guard and closely guide the kids on every step, because if they don't do so the kids are swayed by their incompetent peers. It’s not about methods or recipes for parenting but a psychological explanation to what we should and probably already have innate in us from the start.

I recognize I didn't make it far into this text and perhaps I've misjudged it, but I couldn't stomach the start to see where it was all going. This book feels helpful for anyone working with kids and/or parents, or anyone part of a community that includes children (family, close friends, neighbors). By helping to reawaken parenting instincts innate to us all, this book will empower parents to be for their children what nature intended: a true source of contact, security, and warmth. The author blames such abstractions like 'society' 'culture' 'economics' 'technology' and claims that it is not the fault of the parents. Well, the parenting norms throught and between the first and second world war were based on enormous phisical abuse.

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. I can’t help wondering how many things, even as basic as warmth and a little latitude, parents should know, but have learned – or been taught – to ignore.