Hold on to Your Kids

"Neufeld is a child developmental psychologist from Canada. He talks in this book about what I’ve been talking about a lot: about how maintaining your relationship with your child is the most important thing you can do as a parent. He talks about how there’s a lot of emphasis on the importance of attachment for babies and toddlers, but that attachment is equally important as kids grow older. It continues right through adolescence. Neufeld is very clear that we shouldn’t be outsourcing our attachment role to a teen’s peers. Of course, peer relationships are important but, actually, Neufeld feels that in many cases there’s been a breakdown of parental influence: there’s a problem if your teens are more attached to their friends than you. So, again, Neufeld’s emphasis is not on discipline or behavioural techniques, which he says can actually cause children to lose trust in their parents. The quality of the parent-child relationship is at the heart of Neufeld’s book, as it is in Five Deep Breaths. Yes, because they can see through it. Those strategies – if you’re using them all the time – like the sanctions, the groundings, the time-outs, they can lead to more problems. Rather than just controlling the behaviour, you need to look at the underlying relationship. How do we connect with our kids again? Because if the child has that connection – they feel like they are loved by you and they are respected by you – then it’s going to be easier to get their attention. They want to be guided by you. It’s about knowing that you’re the leader. One of the most traumatic things that I see for teenagers is friendships that go wrong. If they are attached to you you’re their safe harbour that they can go back to. But many of the young people that I see don’t have that relationship with their parents. And it’s something you have to work on, isn’t it? Like a relationship with a partner: it’s not something that you can just take for granted. Sometimes they do want to spend more time with their friends which is natural. But you want them to come back to you and know that you’re there. You need to be friendly but I think parenting is about being a leader as well. Children feel safe when someone is setting boundaries without being overly controlling. Yes. It’s a negotiation. It’s much easier when they’re children to sort of tell them what to do. But it’s harder when they’re teenagers. Yes, and they’re changing aren’t they? They’re always in flux. Neufeld very much talks about relationship being at the heart of our current challenges as parents and as teachers. But it’s also the heart of the solution. We see parenting in the same way: that it’s all about relationship, not trying to control another person. Also, Neufeld talks about the importance of young people having opportunities to feel disappointment and frustration and learn that it’s okay. I think a lot of us can feel uncomfortable with watching that. It’s understandable that, as a parent, you want to take the pain away from your children. But Neufeld is saying it’s essential for them to experience a degree of hardship or disappointment to develop resilience. They need to experience setbacks for their brains to develop properly. Obviously, you need to keep children safe, but it’s important that they are allowed sometimes to fail. It’s how they become resilient. And, at the end of the day, you want to raise a child who can go out there into the world and be competent and manage themselves. And it’s best to learn this young, because a lot of young people don’t learn those skills and then they may get to university and really struggle. Gordon Neufeld emphasises that it’s the parents who have to reconnect with their teenagers, not the other way round. The parent has to take the lead. We have to ask ourselves how we would approach a friend or a partner if we’re trying to rebuild a relationship? How would we be? How would we communicate? It’s no different with your children. Only it’s more difficult with your own children because they know just where to press your buttons."