Hold On to Your Kids: Why Parents Need to Matter More Than Peers by Gordon Neufeld and Gabor Maté is a brilliant book that stopped me in my tracks. By helping to reawaken our instincts, Mate and Neufeld empower parents to be what nature intended: a true source of contact, security and warmth for their children. This book gives great advice on how to keep this from happening to your own kids, or for reversing it if it has already happened.

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. Bet galvenais grāmatas vadmotīvs ir - kas notiek ar mūsu bērniem, ja mēs šo piesaisti neveidojam/pazaudējam. They are not the ones to give our children a sense of themselves, to point out right from wrong, to distinguish fact from fantasy, to identify what works and what doesn’t, and to direct them as to where to go and how to get there” (p 19).

Although it may be too complicated to explain to people who disagree in a social situation where this would come up, the book does give the reader encouragement to be counter-cultural and foster parental attachment way beyond the time most parents in our culture have relinquished that role to peers. We also need to encourage our kids to develop relationships with other children who have strong attachments to their own parents. August 15th: Rereading it, I can see how much this work has actually influenced so many of my parental decisions. The words that peer-oriented kids use for such a child are highly critical, words like weird, stupid, retarded, freak, and geek.

Today I want to share with you some sections in Hold On To Your Kids that I highlighted to save for later so I could go back and reference.

I think anyone could read it and gain an incredible understanding on the people we interact with every day. If all that seems moral to us, it’s only due to our own peer orientation…Most readers of this book will already have been raised in a society where the transmission of culture is horizontal rather than vertical” (p 10).