Hold On to Your Kids

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NATIONAL BESTSELLER

This parenting classic on one of the most disturbing and misunderstood trends of our time—peers replacing parents in the lives of children—is now more relevant than ever. The latest edition includes new material on how social media and video game culture are affecting our children, and what parents can do.
 
In Hold On to Your Kids, Dr. Neufeld and Dr. Maté explore the phenomenon of peer orientation: the troubling tendency of children and youth to look to their peers for direction—for a sense of right and wrong, for values, identity and codes of behaviour. But peer orientation undermines family cohesion, poisons the school atmosphere, and fosters an aggressively hostile and sexualized youth culture. It provides a powerful explanation for schoolyard bullying and youth violence; it is an escalating trend that has never been adequately described or contested until Hold On to Your Kids. Once understood, it becomes self-evident—as do the solutions.NATIONAL BESTSELLER

“A must-read for anyone with children.” —Ottawa Citizen

“[Maté and Neufeld’s] candidness and exposition lead to numerous solutions for reestablishing a caring adult hierarchy. Beautifully written . . . [a] terrific, poignant book.”—Publishers Weekly (starred review)

“Thoughtful, gentle, adaptive parenting.” —Calgary Herald

“With simple ideas and steps, this book is directed not only to parents, but to all those–educators, social workers, counsellors–whose lives and work bring them into contact with children.” —Quill & Quire

“May serve as a loud wake-up call for mothers and fathers…. Offers what many of the others do not–that rare commodity known as common sense.” —Winnipeg Free Press

“With the benefit of thirty years of research and experience, Neufeld has crafted a coherent, compelling theory of child development that will cause an immediate frisson of recognition and acceptance in its readers. His approach has the power to change, if not save, the lives of our children.” —National Post

“[Maté’s] precise and hard-hitting prose . . . makes complex ideas accessible without dumbing them down. The result is a book that grabs hard, with the potential to hit many parents where they live.” —Edmonton Journal

“Visionary. . . . [Hold On to Your Kids] goes beyond the usual explanations to illuminate a crisis of unrecognized proportions. . . . Most importantly [Neufeld and Maté] offer, through concrete examples and clear suggestions, practical help for parents to fulfill their instinctual roles. A brilliant and well-written book, one to be taken seriously, very seriously.” —Peter A. Levine Ph.D., author of the bestselling books Waking the Tiger, Healing Trauma and It Won’t Hurt Forever: Guiding Your Child through Trauma

“Boldly states the problem and maps out plans for its solution. Let us take its suggestions seriously now so that together we can improve the future for our children and their children as well.” —Daniel J. Siegel, M.D., author of The Developing Mind and Parenting from the Inside Out

Gordon Neufeld, Ph.D, is a Vancouver-based clinical psychologist, internationally renowned as a foremost authority on child development. His Neufeld Institute delivers many courses he has created for parents, educators and helping professionals on several continents. He is recognized for his unique ability to unlock the clues to seemingly complex problems of child rearing and education.
 
Gabor Maté, M.D., is a physician and the bestselling author of When the Body Says No, Scattered Minds and In The Realm of Hungry Ghosts. A sought-after authority on stress, mind-body health, ADHD, parenting, and addictions, he travels extensively, addressing health personnel, teachers and lay audiences across North America and internationally.

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.CA

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