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

A bit of Millay, please

Well, I'm back from a long weekend! Thursday night the internet went out here and it was sporadic for a couple of days. Friday afternoon I had a freshmen exam--not a graded one, thankfully, but something the college does for its own purposes. It wasn't difficult (like an easier version of the SAT) but it reminded me anew how much I hate really, really dislike standardized tests.

Right after the exam I left with the rest of the choir to go on an overnight retreat. We stayed at a lodge in the Appalachian mountains, playing games and worshiping God and getting to know each other better. Saturday morning, before we left, I got to go on a gorgeous hike to see a waterfall in the woods.

Today was what I'm coming to call my Long Day. From nine to five: Speech, Old Testament, Humanities, Lunch, Photography, Theater Work, Choir. I actually have so much (especially when you add to that two or more hours of music practice) that I'm considering dropping something. I visited my mentor today and talked it over with him. He said that I should at least wait until after the exams next week (yes, next week; they sure come fast!). Then I'll know better how I'm doing with studying, and if I still want to withdraw from a class I can do it then and it still won't affect my GPA.

This evening after choir I had my first experience accompanying a singer on the piano. Two singers, actually; I'm accompanying their duet. It was...interesting. I'd only practiced the piece twice, so I wasn't able to play it and ended up playing the chords. The practice went alright, but I wasn't happy. I need to learn the music.

Tonight I went to the library because I decided that I needed some Edna St. Vincent Millay to read. It's not good for a person to go too long without poetry. I did end up finding a book, after long looking (they use the Library of Congress cataloguing system rather than the Dewey Decimal). I also did some studying and met somebody new. He was working the night shift at the library desk, studying a bilingual Beowulf between helping students like me find the books they wanted. When I brought my Millay to the counter and I commented on his Beowulf he asked if I was an English major. So we talked a little. He's an English major, a junior this year; and his name is also Tim. (Which makes three Tims and a Tom now at this college...)

I'm finding that you learn more here than they teach you in classes. Like the impossibility of doing all you want to do in twenty-four hour days; or the way tears can sneak up on you at unexpected moments. Or how you need God always, whether you remember it or not. As one of my professors said: "The purpose of college is not to prepare you for a career. It is to teach you how to live."

History Repeats Itself

About 15 years ago, I had a little cowboy. Well, sometimes he was a cowboy, and sometimes he was Timmy Martin, with his faithful dog Lassie. I'd have to be Ruth Martin and he'd ask me for a sandwich and a glass of milk so he could have a lunch just like Timmy on the TV. But he was sometimes a cowboy, too, with a horse and a bent stick in his homemade holster for a gun.

That little boy grew up and is in college now, but now I have another Timmy Martin asking me to be Ruth Martin and make a sandwich and glass of milk, and I hear yells of, "LASSIE!" ("woof woof!") "LASSIE!"

And now the chaps, boots and cowboy hat are being used again . . . only this time, it's a little girl, and she wants to be Roy Rogers. I like how the smiles are almost identical.


And this is ten years ago, when I had three cowboys:

Evening Walk

The light was great yesterday evening - I still don't know what I'm doing with my camera and lighting, but these caught some of the golden/rose anyway.

Miss M in Motion

This is an accidental shot, snapped randomly before all the light was gone as we went home from a walk a few weeks ago.

Camera Experiments: ISO

I'm trying to figure out what difference ISO settings make. I remember that you were supposed to use 100 film when you were going to take pictures in bright light, and 800 or even higher (1000!) for low light, although that would make the resulting picture grainier. But on a digital camera that uses no film? Hmmm.

So I stayed up late last night and played with my camera, using the subject I happened to have at hand - a sleeping child laying next to a stuffed dog. I didn't use a flash, although the camera's auto-focus works by shining a light on the subject, so she still ended up getting light in her eyes. She didn't stir, though.

The main difference I noticed is that, using 100 ISO, the lens/shutter stayed open longer - it took longer to take the picture.

[Images Moved]

I'll do more now that I have natural light.

I think I've learned that, in order to get the crisp, clear portraits I want, I need to select 100 ISO instead of letting the camera decide which ISO it wants.




I also think that, if I'm going to do any more of this, I need to do it somewhere other than my blog. How about a blog for this kind of silly stuff? It'll just be for my photo experiments.

In which I get wet and don't mind

Some mornings you can just tell when you get up that it's going to be a good day. The sun is shining, you feel clear-headed and refreshed, and the hint of some happy dream tickles your memory. Some mornings, on the other hand, you wake up long after your alarm with only thirty minutes before you have to be somewhere, and you have a shower to take and somebody has left the bathroom door locked on the inside, so that you have to stand there with a screwdriver for ten minutes trying to get it open.

Guess which sort of morning this was. But luckily it was not a portent of the day ahead. Of course, I did leave my umbrella in my room because the weather looked fine, and of course it did rain this afternoon, but what can you expect when you go out without your umbrella? (And I promised myself yesterday I would never again live in an umbrellaless state.)

Today was another full day of classes--similar to Monday, except with a piano accompaniment lesson in the morning and a voice lesson instead of theater work in the afternoon. I received my instructions for accompaniment today: I'm to accompany two students during their lessons, as well as practicing with them during the week and doing performances with them. Which could be a great experience, or could be nearly impossible depending on how many and how difficult are the pieces the students are doing.

Our humanities class was assigned the first few books of the Odyssey today, and our professor strongly recommended that we get together in groups and read it aloud. I found another student who was interested in doing that, so he and I met in the cafeteria after dinner and read the first three books, taking turns reading aloud. It was great fun. I think we're going to try to do the same with future assignments. (We actually heard that another group of students got together and did the same thing this evening, so maybe in the future we could collaborate. Beowulf is coming up...)

Tonight I've been working on a paper for my photography class (on Jacques-Henri Lartigue), organizing and scheduling and shopping-list-making, and listening to Berlioz's Requiem and some Rachmaninoff with my roommate.

Currently listening to: Mozart's Haydn Quartets

In which I enter on a course of serious study

Today was my first full day of classes: Speech at 9:00, Old Testament at 10:00, Humanities at 11:00, lunch at 12:00, Photography from 1:00 to 3:00, work in the theater from 3:00 to 4:30 (they're still moving into their new theater; today we moved a bookshelf full of old scripts from upstairs to downstairs), choir practice from 4:30 to 5:30, and then dinner. My classes are all great--in Humanities we sat in a large circle and narrated / discussed things from our readings; in photography we learned about shutter and aperture and the other basic functions of the camera, and I had my first quiz--not a difficult one. In Old Testament we've been reading the first few chapters of Genesis, and today we discussed what we can learn (merely from the first part of the OT) about the natures of God and man. The best part was when the professor first asked what we learn that God is, and two people simultaneously said "just" and "merciful".

A selection of cameras in the photography classroom.

But it was a long day. My first experience with nine-to-five, I guess you could say. After dinner I was listless, until at twilight I decided to take some homework outside and read. I met my voice professor and we talked a while. Then I went back to my room and one of my suitmates played some Broadway for me (I may be helping him to prepare a piece for an audition). After that my roommate got in from music practice, and we've been listening to Cecilia Bartoli and some of Chopin's ballades and discussing Salieri and Stravinsky.

"I have formed my plan, and am determined to enter on a course of serious study. ...By reading only six hours a day, I shall gain in the course of a twelvemonth a great deal of instruction which I now feel myself to want."

Sunday

Another short post, 'cause I have a 9:00 class in the morning. I stayed at home last night, which was nice, although everyone was tired after the fair. This morning I went to a friend's church, which is near the college, and then went back to the college to study. Studied all afternoon; went to the library (checked out my first book, for a photography assignment); had dinner at the restaurant, 'cause the cafeteria closes early on Sundays. At 9:00 I went to the vespers on campus, which was an out-of-doors worship service. Afterwards they had a bonfire and everyone roasted marshmallows. (A friend and I tried to start a game of duck-duck-goose, but for some reason it didn't catch on...)

Kind of blurry, but you get the idea.

After that I went back to my dorm room and met my roommate, who's been gone for the weekend. And then I finished my homework. When I've posted this I'm going to go pack my backpack for tomorrow morning.

The Fair

Today we went to our local fair. We met Tim and Giselle and her family, which includes Miss M's best friend, C. Miss M was thrilled to see Tim.



The big kids went off by themselves, so all of my pictures are of Miss M and C on the kiddie rides. Miss M was a bit of a surprise - she wasn't scared of any of the rides, as I expected from my experience with her brothers (although she was afraid in a wildlife exhibit that looked like the inside of a cave, and she thought the loud rock music blaring in the midway was scary).




And Miss M had some ice cream just before we left.