Preventing Peer Orientation

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

Part V - Preventing Peer Orientation

This is the final section of the book, and contains two chapters. I found it hard not to just quote the entire thing, because it expresses one of my main reasons for homeschooling (although the author never says that homeschooling is a solution, or is even necessary.) It's also the reason why, as a homeschooler, I've resisted involvement in church youth groups, Little League, Scouts, to make up for lost socialization time - although it was just a nebulous, niggling feeling in my mind; this is the first time I've seen my vague reasons spelled out clearly.

So, now I have a Parental Must-Read list. I think every new parent ought to read Baby Matters by Linda Folden Palmer when their baby is an infant to explain how early parenting impacts the child later, and then Endangered Minds by Jane Healy when their child is a toddler to explain what their child's brain really needs, and then this book, Hold On To Your Kids, when their child is old enough for the parent to wonder whether their child should be enrolled in a playgroup or preschool for socialization. Perhaps these would make good baby shower gifts?

On to the book . . .

Peer orientation is like a Trojan Horse. It's perceived as a wonderful thing to be sought after, but it can set the stage for disaster because it's a threat to the parent/child attachment.

At first, peers free us up from our kids' demands, and our kids seem so happy, so social; they even seem happy and comfortable at school. But, ultimately, peers make kids strive to learn only enough to keep them from standing out. Preschool kids who are secure with peers from an early age "may have the best head start, but homeschooled kids have the best finish" because they aren't afraid to stand out by excelling.

Shyness indicates attachment - a child attached to adults will be shy and less cool around kids, but a peer oriented child will be the opposite: shy around adults and comfortable enough to fit in with other kids. Unfortunately, real social skills - kindness, consideration, caring - are learned from adults, not from being cool with peers.

Daycare puts toddlers under constant, chronic stress as it imposes people on the child that he doesn't feel at home with. The longer kids are in day care, the more often they sneak. talk back, have tantrums, and hit/fight. It isn't necessary to keep kids home to prevent the bad effects of peer orientation, but the child does need to feel attached to the adult caring for him. He needs to feel at home, and connected. The adult in charge needs to foster a connection with the child that gets beyond his discomfort level (shyness).

Spending lots of time with other kids doesn't teach kids to get along. "If socializing were the key to socialization, gang members and street kids would be the model citizens." The truth is, attachment to adults and genuine maturity is necessary for real socialization. "Social integration means much more than simply fitting in or getting along; true socialization requires not only a mixing with others but a mixing without losing one's separateness or identity."

How important are peers for kids? What is a friend? A true friend would respect our individuality and boundaries, and support our personal growth. Kids aren't mature enough to be real friends - they need to be attached to adults until they reach that level of maturity where they can have real friendships. Kids benefit more and experience more personal growth/maturity from time spent with adults than time spent with peers. Children also need time alone to reflect and learn to be their own friend.

Pacifying a bored child with peer time is like giving a hungry baby a pacifier instead of feeding him. It works temporarily, but it doesn't help the child address the real issue. Boredom is a sign that the child lacks curiosity, creativity and his own resources. He craves stimulation from outside himself to entertain him. Children need to learn to fill that void within themselves with their own interests, ideas, momentum. A fix from the outside will only be a temporary solution that exacerbates the problem, which is a problem with the child himself. Instead of sending our bored child off to seek friends to ease the void, we should encourage him to seek us, and to build his own inner resources.

Kids should have friends, but their friends should be within "the context of strong adult attachments." We should let them be with peers sometimes, but understand that peer time is merely fun, not truly helpful in helping the child to mature or be better adjusted. We should limit peer time - if kids are in school full time, they shouldn't spend evenings and weekends with friends as well. Their friends should be from families who share/support our values and reinforce the concept of family time. We shouldn't let their peer time be spent with technology/TV/electronic games - they should have free, imaginative play.

We shouldn't try to change eccentric or different kids by letting them spend more time with peers. That might force them to conform, but it would be better to value and protect their unique individuality.

What about only children? Parents need to remember that superficial peers can't take the place of real siblings. Siblings share the same compass point and have a stronger bond. It would be better to find the child a surrogate family - his cousins, or a family who will be like a surrogate aunt or uncle to him. A peer group is no substitute for close ties and adult connections. Creative solitude is healthier for children's development than social play. Imaginative children can create their own playmates, with the parent as an attachment anchor from which to build a world in his imagination. Social play isn't always harmful, but it can't meet the child's deepest needs. And, considering the detriments - the risk of increased aggression, disregard for authority, emotional hardening - it isn't something to seek urgently, either.

We should encourage and seek attachments to other adults who are interested in our children. We need other adults to help us parent our children by befriending our kids. We should start by using "attachment parenting" - carrying our infants, keeping them with us, allowing them to be dependent. If we have to work, we need to find surrogate parents for our kids that they can connect with and attach to, not just daycare workers. We should seek to get our kids attached to adults/mentors instead of other kids.

We can defuse the power of peer orientation by making friends with our kids' peers. This interjects some adult influence into a peer group that might prefer to pretend adults didn't exist. Our kids' peers should have a relationship with us as well as our kids, and they should have to acknowledge the same greeting rituals with us as everyone else. Don't let the peer group pressure you to be invisible. Befriend the peers' parents. Try to create a connected community with your child's peers that includes entire families.

How to Hold On To Our Kids, or How to Reclaim Them

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

Part IV - How to Hold On To Our Kids, or How to Reclaim Them

Three chapters here, including a chapter about discipline.

Attachment involves four basics:

- Get their attention and a friendly response. With babies, we'll do anything to make them smile, but when they get older, we tend to get their attention only when we need to correct them, and, later, not at all. Make it a habit to use a friendly greeting that includes eye contact and a smile to establish a connection.

- Offer something to attach to. With babies, we offer a finger for them to grasp. Hugs, something we have in common, or a shared interest work with older children. It must be an unexpected gift, an invitation to connect with us. Praise, which is conditional, doesn't count.

- Invite dependence without forcing your help. With babies, we hold out our arms as an offer to pick them up. Don't push children to be independent, but don't jump in to help without asking. It will be seen as interfering. Children are created to mature towards independence; we needn't fear that allowing them to depend on us will prevent them from growing up.

- Act as the child's compass point. With babies, we carry them around and talk to them, explaining what they're seeing. With older children, tell them what's going on, who's who, what's going to happen, what to expect. Inform, introduce, be a guide. Peer culture makes adults feel lost, but teen confidence is deceptive - they're more lost than they let on.

Children who are already lost to peer culture can still be won back. We can invite and entice, although it's up to the child to respond. We can't force it. But be encouraged: even the most hardened, hostile teen needs a nurturing parent, and needs to be parented in order to truly grow up. Separating children from peers in order to create an attachment void is necessary. Restrict peer time, and be there yourself instead. Weekend excursions, family vacations, even grounding can provide opportunities to connect in a positive way.

Make the relationship a priority, and reinforce how much you love your child when he needs it most (and deserves it least). As parents, our first priority should be the attachment. Next should be the child's long-term maturing process, and society's behavioral expectations should come after that.

When our kids reject us, it's easy to give up and resign them to their peers. But our kids interpret that as abandonment. If tough love is necessary, it's better to provide a place for the child to go - a relative, or a good school. Kids are all different. Some need hugs, some need loyalty, some need time, some need to be understood - know your child's 'love language.' Become close and intimate with your child. Remember, peer groups rarely open up to each other or allow themselves to be vulnerable to each other. Find an activity that invites conversation. "A child who feels known and understood is not likely to be satisfied with the poorer fare that peer orientation offers."

Limit TV/phone/computer time, and time with peers. Protect family time, family outings, meals together, bedtime rituals, walking together. Plan things to do together to interfere with peer-bonding times. Encourage friends whose families cherish their family time. Peer-addicted kids will protest vehemently when we come between them and their peer group, but it's for their own good. Use the time away from peers to court your child back to you.

Discipline should teach and train without putting distance in the attachment relationship, and driving our kids towards peers. Use the "Seven Disciplines for Parents:"

1. Use connection, not separation. Time-out can be interpreted as abandonment, making the child insecure so that he promises to be good out of fear of loss. Eventually, the child will shut us out and move towards peers. Separation triggers detachment in the child.

2. When there are problems, work on the relationship rather than the behavior or incident, especially when the child is mad and tries to push our buttons. 'Teaching the kid a lesson' won't work in these situations.

3. Try to turn frustration into sadness of resignation instead of using it to 'teach a lesson.' Kids need to learn to accept disappointment and adapt.

4. Value good intentions (heart) over desired actions (behavior). It needs to be the child who chooses to do right, not us forcing him.

5. Impulsive behavior can't be cured by telling/nagging a child to stop. Children need to reflect and think through what they do and learn to temper their impulses, so try to make them conscious of what they're doing.

6. Help impulsive children by scripting and modeling the proper behavior. Give cues. Explain how to do what he needs to do; walk him through the steps and show him what it looks like.

7. If you can't change the child, change his world. Reduce his frustration when possible. This should be a last resort, because children need to learn to do right rather than expecting the world to conform to them.

Next: Preventing Peer Orientation

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!)

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

Hold On To Your Kids: A Book Every Adult Should Read

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

I started reading this book because a number of moms on a parenting forum I frequent were reading it, and then I started reading it to dh because it was so good, and now I think this is a book that every parent should read in order to understand the forces creating a generation gap and undermining parental attempts to guide their own children. I'm only blogging each "part" rather than each chapter. This first part actually includes three chapters.

Part I - The Phenomenon of Peer Orientation

It's common for kids to be absorbed in instant messaging, email, hanging out with friends. Meanwhile they keep their parents at a distance, or are even hostile to their parents. Parents feel less confident, less respected, and often resort to harsher discipline in a desperate attempt to bring their children back. Yet children continue to reject their parents' values or have respect for parents or accept guidance from them. Is this a normal part of the maturing process? Hormones? Individuating? The author says no, it's not normal (although it's so routine that we no longer are even alarmed by it) or healthy.

What's happened is that society has changed, and the context for parenting - the context of an attachment relationship - is missing. Parents don't earn respect because they do everything by the right method. They have their children's respect because of who they are to their children - because they're the parents (at least, that's how it's supposed to be, and how it was for hundreds of years). That attachment starts in infancy and develops so that the child isn't even aware of it, but it provides context for parental respect throughout the child's development. The problem is that our culture no longer values or supports that attachment. In fact, it tries to undermine it. In place of parental attachment, children orient to their peers, but peers can't provide the love, acceptance, stability and guidance that experienced adults can.

Orientation is a person's need to find their bearings - we get cues about how to dress, what to say, what to value, our own identity, on whatever we're oriented to. With animals, the young orient to the mother, and she teaches the young how to survive. If ducklings orient to the wrong thing, they may not learn what they need to know. If humans orient to peers instead of to parents, they may not learn what they need to know, either. Humans weren't designed to have other children as the dominant influence in their lives, and to take their cues from other young in the species.

But society, largely motivated by money, has created a youth culture that encourages kids to orient to peers rather than adults, and trends in our society (also motivated by money, as in moving for jobs, and moms needing to work) have resulted in peer orientation in place of parental attachment. The momentum is so strong that even dedicated parents are having a hard time holding onto their kids. Peer dependency fuels aggression, bullying, drug use, depression, even suicide and murder because kids aren't mature enough to guide themselves, much less each other. Dr. James Coleman warned about what he saw coming back in the 1960's, but nobody took him seriously - and now we're living in the midst of it.

People can't have competing attachments: Jesus said we can't serve two masters, and no love relationship can survive if one person has an outside lover. One must be rejected, and become an object of scorn and hatred. When children have an attachment to peers whose values differ from parents, they're placed in a position of having to choose one and reject - hate and mock - the other. They reject their parents and become the opposite of everything their parents are, not to be individuals, but to conform to 'another master' - their peer group.

Parents unwittingly set their children up to form alternate attachments when they force their protesting infant to go to a care-giver without establishing an attachment with the care-giver first. Daycares where infants and toddlers outnumber caregivers forces children to attach to each other, and public schools where children are segregated by age guarantee it. Even our churches exacerbate peer orientation by dividing members into age-appropriate ministries rather than encouraging family togetherness (even church "family activities" usually have adults gathered in one area, and children elsewhere, either playing games or watching videos).

Appropriate parent/adult attachment doesn't have to eliminate schools. In Provence, France, they still have proper parent/child relationships even though the children go to public schools. But lunchtimes are spent at home, and the teachers reinforce the parent bond and support adult attachment; children are never thrown together to fend for themselves and create their own support network exclusive of adults. The whole community encourages bonding among families.

Next section: How Peer Orientation Undermines Parenting