Hold On to Your Kids: Why Parents Need to Matter More Than Peers Author: | Language: English | ISBN:
B007RFEX7W | Format: EPUB
Hold On to Your Kids: Why Parents Need to Matter More Than Peers Description
Like countless other parents, doctors Gordon Neufeld and Gabor Mat? have had to confront their children becoming secretive and unreachable. Focused more and more on their friends, they recoiled or grew hostile around adults. Why? The problem, Neufeld suggest, lies in attachment; children are increasingly forming stronger attachments to their friends than to the adults in their lives.
Dr. Neufeld has dubbed this phenomenon peer orientation, which refers to the 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. This 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; its effects are painfully evident in the context of teenage gangs and criminal activity, in tragedies such as in Littleton, Colorado; Tabor, Alberta; and Victoria, B.C. 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, none of which are impossible or even costly to undertake.
Hold On To Your Kids will restore parenting to ts natural intuitive basis and the parent-child relationship to its rightful preeminence. The concepts, principles and practical advice contained in Hold On to Your Kids will empower parents to parent and satisfy their children's inborn need to find direction by turning towards them for their source of authority, contact, and warmth. Daniel Mat?'s warm and sensitive narration, gift with dialogue, and engagement with the authors writing make this an enjoyable and informative listen.
- Audible Audio Edition
- Listening Length: 12 hours and 12 minutes
- Program Type: Audiobook
- Version: Unabridged
- Publisher: Post Hypnotic Press Inc.
- Audible.com Release Date: April 2, 2012
- Whispersync for Voice: Ready
- Language: English
- ASIN: B007RFEX7W
I've never seen this book's ideas put quite this way before, nor explained so thoroughly. Its time has definitely come.
Neufeld and his wife Joy have at least five children (he sprinkles their names through the book - he never adds them up for us) and he's had what sounds like a distinguished career first treating juvenile offenders, and then moving into family counseling. The overarching theme of the book is ATTACHMENT. To whom are your children more attached? Are they attached to you, their parents, and other adults? Or are they attached to their peers? To whom do they look for guidance? Whose star have they hitched their little wagons to? If children look to adults for guidance, in Neufeld's terminology they are "parent-oriented". If they reject adults in favor of their peers, they are "peer-oriented".
This book explained to me how the relationship between parents (all adults, really) and children has changed in the larger culture. This cultural change has made it difficult to talk to my parents and in-laws about our decision to homeschool. (Neufeld isn't necessarily pro-homeschool - he's pro-adult attachments as opposed to peer attachments.) There have been times when I've been reduced to vague, indistinct clichés like, "Times have changed, so we're homeschooling." They've been too polite to say so, but I just know they're thinking, maybe times have changed, but children haven't, and so you're saying your children don't need regular school? Well, yes, that is what I'm saying, and this book explains why better than I can.
I must say this book does stand on in that it presents a radically different view of parenting than most books I've read. It holds that the most important thing for kids is a very strong relationship with their parents, and that almost all of the woes of today's kids are caused by them being peer oriented instead of parent oriented. The authors make a very strong case for this being so. I was convinced by the time this part of the book was over. However, as with many books of this type, the section where we are told what to do about this problem is weaker. Most of the ideas would work best with a very young child that has not yet become peer oriented. If you already have a child who is rebellious and addicted to being with peers, I don't think that speaking to them kindly and looking them in the eyes is going to do much. The author gave an example with his own children of taking them away on a week's vacation with just the child and the parent. That sounds good, but I don't think his children had the severe problems of the other examples we are given.
The book also has the perspective of parents that are caring, kind, loving and have their childrens' best interests at heart. I know parents who read parenting books are more likely to fit this perspective, but I kept thinking that not all parents are that completely wonderful. I think many a child has been saved from a childhood that would otherwise be hellish BY their friends. The author also feels children's friendships are not really true friendships, that they are not mature enough to have true friendships. I respect their courage to say that peer relationships are not as important as we are always led to believe. But I do think that childhood friendships can be true ones.
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