Hold On to Your Kids

Like countless other parents, authors Gordon Neufeld and Gabor Maté have had to confront their kids becoming secretive and unreachable. Focused more and more on their friends, they recoiled or grew hostile around adults. Why?

The problem, Neufeld suggests, lies in attachment: Kids are increasingly forming stronger attachments to their friends than to the adults in their lives. He dubbed this phenomenon “peer orientation”, which refers to the tendency of children and youth to look to their peers for direction: for a sense of right and wrong; for values, identity, and codes of behaviour.

According to Neufeld, this peer orientation undermines family cohesion, poisons the school atmosphere, and fosters an aggressively hostile and sexualized youth culture. It provides a powerful explanation for school-yard bullying and youth violence; its effects are painfully evident in the context of teenage gangs and criminal activity, in tragedies such as in Littleton, Colorado; Tabor, Alberta; and Victoria, B.C. It is an escalating trend that has never been adequately described or contested until Hold On to Your Kids. Once understood, it becomes self-evident – as do the solutions, none of which are impossible or even costly to undertake.

Hold On to Your Kids: Why Parents Need to Matter More Than Peers will restore parenting to its natural intuitive basis and the parent-child relationship to its rightful pre-eminence. The concepts, principles, and practical advice contained in Hold On to Your Kids will empower parents to parent and satisfy their children's inborn need to find direction by turning towards them for their source of authority, contact, and warmth.