How Peer Orientation Undermines Parenting

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

Part II - Sabotaged: How Peer Orientation Undermines Parenting

This part covered four chapters, so this is very simplified. All of these points were much better developed (and with examples) in the book.

Parenting should be fairly easy, but in current times, parents have lost their power/authority to parent. There's been a power shift. Children in the past have unconsciously recognized their dependence, and accepted the guidance of the adults who care for them, but today's kids get their emotional needs and behavioral cues met by their peer group. Therefore, they don't feel a need to accept their parents' limitations or advice. Without children's cooperation, parenting is reduced to skill-training and techniques to coerce or bribe compliance. The solution isn't to find more effective ways to enforce rules, but ways to reattach, build relationship, and foster dependence.

Attachment is what makes parents enjoy their children even when they lose sleep or have to clean up children's messes. It works in seven ways.

1. Receptive attachment establishes rank: the child needs to be dependent on his caretakers and view them as authority figures, but peer groups turn that into dependence on peers, or even into dominance over peers - and make the child resent parental authority.

2. Attachment makes children loving and willing, which in turn motivates a positive reaction in the adult to lovingly care for the child. [Children were designed to be cute, affectionate and irresistable, and adults were designed to react to their charm with nurturing care.] But peer orientation replaces that endearing motivation with hostility towards parents and fails to draw loving responses from the adult caregiver.

3. Attachment makes parents important to children so that they pay attention and listen to them. But peer orientation makes kids deliberately tune out adults.

4. Attachment motivates the child to stay close to the caregiver, making the job of caring for them easier. What parent wants to have to chase down their kids all the time? Attached kids, even teens, want to know where their parents are, but peer-dependent kids want to be as far from parents as possible, forcing the parent to have to keep more vigilant tabs on where their kids are.

5. Attachment makes kids want to be like their parents, making it easy and natural to pass on desirable behaviors and rich culture, but peer oriented kids are role models for each other.

6. Attachment makes children want to follow parents' cues and guidance and get their input about decisions, but peer-dependent kids will do whatever their friends tell them to.

7. Attachment guides moral development because it makes the child want to be good to please the parent; the child carries a desire within him to be a good person and do the right thing, even if he sometimes fails in the follow-through. A child who is attached to peers will develop a conscience based on their values because his friends are the ones whose approval he wants. Behavior modification can never develop a child's morals because his morals grow internally, and behavior modification only works on external actions. Children need to want to live up to our trust.

People by nature resist being forced to do anything - they may consent to do something because they choose to please parents, but not because they're forced against their will. Expressing their own will is a necessary part of finding their own independence, but that counter-will can be subordinated to the parents he depends on. Children are naturally compliant in the context of connected attachment. When children lose their natural attachment for parents, the desire to obey in order to please them disappears; their parents' will becomes repulsive, and all that's left is force. Kids react to this force with hostility and rebellion. They may disobey just for spite. Peer orientation turns the child's natural desire for independence into an irrational forced unleashed against the parents, while hindering the child's development towards true independence by propelling him towards peer conformity. When leverage, bribes and coersion are needed to persuade the child to do what he used to do willinglyout of a pure desire to please his parents, it's a sign that the parent is losing his power.

Attached children will naturally and subconsciously absorb the culture of their parents without the parents deliberately doing anything, and that usually means a well-established culture rooted in traditions is passed on. But in today's peer culture, kids have their own isolated culture, and that culture is rich in irreverence, but shallow, fleeting and poor in substance. Teens in chat rooms share nothing meaningful or intimate about themselves; there's little content. Even their language is impoverished and lacking in meaning. Media encourages and feeds into this shallow teen culture, which grows into increasing hostility and sexuality. Peer culture is so based on fads that there's nothing to hold on to and pass on. Instead of building bonds between mankind, it splinters youths into even narrower isolated groups or "tribes" with their own music, movies, slang, dress: cliques, gangs, jocks, etc. Such groups don't foster understanding and tolerance, but exclusiveness.

Next: How Peer Orientation Stunts Healthy Development