How Peer Orientation Stunts Healthy Development

Hold On To Your Kids: Why Parents Need to Matter More Than Peers by Gordon Neufeld, Ph.D., and Gabor Mate, M.D.

Part III - Stuck in Immaturity: How Peer Orientation Stunts Healthy Development

This part is six chapters long. Each of these aspects is explained more fully in the book.

The defining characteristic of teen culture is and always has been coolness and bravado, masking vulnerability. Cool detachment and emotional shutdown are the only permanent fixtures of faddish peer culture. It can result in permanent hardening and inability to feel emotion. This hardening has always been typical of traumatized kids who have been orphaned or abused as a defense, but it is increasingly common in peer-dependent kids for four reasons:

- The constant pressure to fit in with peers who are the child's whole world is too much chronic stress and causes emotional shutdown.
- Kids can be cruel, and rejection or bullying from those who mean the most to them causes kids to build emotional defenses.
- Kids are forced to hide their vulnerability to avoid teasing because insensitive, hardened people attack any sign of vulnerability like a shark scenting blood.
- Peer relationships can be fleeting and fickle, causing insecurity and risking hurt that must be defended against. Kids build walls to protect themselves from feeling pain.

Peer culture doesn't foster private reflection, so kids caught up in it tend to get stuck in impulsive and flighty behavior rather than developing maturity. They may look like grown-ups, but their maturity isn't genuine.

This is the key to this book:
True maturity, like a flourishing plant growing from a strong root system, is based on healthy attachment founded on loving connections. In the same way that birth happens when the baby separates from a strongly attached womb, maturity happens when the child separates at his own pace from a strongly attached love bond: parents have to allow children to be as dependent as they want [need] rather than forcing them into independence. Children who don't know where their next meal will come from tend to be hyper-focused on food, and hoard it. Children whose love is unsure, or conditional [to be earned] tend to be hyper-focused on securing acceptance. If the child can take love and attachment for granted, then he won't be preoccupied with trying to get those needs filled, and he can focus on maturing. "Unconditional parental love is the indispensable nutrient fot the child's healthy emotional growth." The child needs to be loved and accepted, and *feel* loved and accepted, even when he's not very lovable, and he needs to know that our love doesn't change or dimish based on his performance, in order to be secure enough to focus on his own personal growth. [Alfie Kohn stressed that, regardless of the love we know we feel for our child, it doesn't make any difference if the child doesn't feel it. And, speaking of other authors, Linda Folden Palmer pointed out some studies how early attachment impacts human maturity in her book "Baby Matters," which is the other "must read" in my parenting book list.]

When kids are peer oriented, our love can't get through to them. They can't/won't receive it.

Peer attachments, being fleeting and fickle, can't replace the need for secure, unconditional love that committed parents can. The peer oriented child must forever be seeking and maintaining peer acceptance.

Because peer oriented kids are emotionally protective, they can't allow themselves to be vulnerable - so their needs for emotional fulfillment and nurture can't be met. They stay forever hungry and unfulfilled. That craving makes them obsessed with being with those they desire most: their peers. Thus, they create a perpetual self-defeating cycle.

Sometimes, neglected children will finally realize that their parent won't come through for them and recognize their futility - and find strength within or from another source to mature. But peer obsession, like a golden ring, seems to promise acceptance, so the child can't recognize that he can't win and, therefore, move on to seek his needs elsewhere. Peer attachment keeps him 'searching for love in all the wrong places,' Peer oriented kids can't let go because they never get to that point of futility.

It takes an adult to recognize, nurture and protect emerging individuality. Immature children can't recognize and value originality in others. Therefore, as a group, peers discourage individuality and signs of growth and maturity. Peer groups force conformity, so individuality must be sacrificed for acceptance. Creative, gifted kids must decrease and become small enough to fit the peer group's sameness.

Peer culture is increasingly violent and aggressive - not just in the crimes and murders done by teens, but even their music, countenance, language, is comprised of aggression, hostility and irreverence. This is because teens are frustrated: the very nature of their fickle, shallow relationships makes them frustrated because their emotional needs are unfulfilled. Their own limitations [or parental limits] that hinder peer acceptance make them desperate and more frustrated. Yet, because peer acceptance is teasingly within reach, kids can't resign themselves to futilty and look elsewhere. Instead, they become frustrated and violent. Children who have shut off their vulnerability as a protection don't feel emotions the same way, and thus don't feel the hesitation/alarm that should stop them from lashing out and acting out their aggression. Add drugs and alcohol (also encouraged by peer culture), and the situation is even worse.

Peers without adult supervision regress into a Lord of the Flies mentality. Lack of compassion and responsibilty turns leadership qualities and dominance into tyranny, and the weakest is attacked. This is why bullying is such a problem in peer culture. Peer orientation makes virtual orphans of our children so that they live like the Lord of the Flies. Proper attachment is the solution. Bullying stops when the bully's emotional need for real attachment is met. Likewise, a victim with strong attachments to his parents is in a much better position to recover emotionally from being bullied.

Peer groups put pressure on kids to engage in acts of intimacy that they don't even desire for reasons unrelated to love - to dominate, to fit in, to avoid being teased, etc. Engaging in this kind of intimacy and then immediately severing the resulting bond hardens kids. They may dress alluringly or boast as a way of covering their vulnerability - by cheapening the act, they can pretend it doesn't matter.

Peer orientation, by crushing individuality and discouraging vulnerability, kills curiosity and the trial-and-error that learning needs. It pits students against teachers, thus jeopardizing the child's education.

Next: How to Hold On To Our Kids, or How to Reclaim Them (Stay Tuned!)