Parents Matter Now More Than Ever

Neufeld and Maté, child psychologist and physician respectively, collaborated in this book to provide an excellent treatment of why parents are a child’s best bet and why parents need to matter more to children than their peers do. Why do friends begin to matter more than parents? Outside of a secure attachment to one’s parents, young people are susceptible to becoming ‘peer-oriented’, looking primarily to their peers for direction. This is happening in our culture earlier and earlier as young people who feel disconnected from their parents cannot endure an orientation void. Well-intentioned parents can and do miss this point.

It is critical to keep children adult-oriented until the job of raising them is done. If there was a way to get a copy of this book in the hands of every parent, I would do it.

Read this book.

You may be thinking, well not my kids. They are not ‘peer-oriented’. They’re in the other room, right now, reading a classic book. But, yes, this applies to your kids, and if not in this very hour, soon. Furthermore, this book will help you understand more deeply what is happening in their peer group right now and why. This behavior can pass down from generation to generation, running through families like a dominant gene: if one parent is peer-oriented themselves, it is like the phenomena of complete dominance in genetics – it is passed on.

Parents, you may not know this, but you are on the 3 pm-11 pm shift.

I will explain.

And yet…

Some parents are not hustling 3:00 pm-11:00 pm; they may have misunderstood the assignment. Some parents believe that they are on from 7:00 am-3:00 pm in a remote location, an improvised ‘rear detachment’ from the headquarters element. This looks like checking grades, emailing teachers frequently, orchestrating play dates that occur over long stretches of time, or planning elaborate birthday celebrations, or even conducting the college search, saying, “You know, I get it, she wants that big college football game experience.” They’re researching the best way to write a college essay, writing college essays, well, the first draft, or even the last!

People often redeem wounded parts of themselves in adulthood, the parts that felt unliked, unseen, and unpopular during childhood or adolescence, and oftentimes they do this by encouraging their own children to foster deep bonds with their peers. I have tremendous compassion for people who find themselves burdened in this way. It’s as if these wounded parts believe they are getting a do-over, a chance to make an authentic connection that will last, transcending space and time. 

It’s not genuine friendship that is problematic. It’s just that friendship means nothing between immature people. Thank you, Drs. Perry and Maté, we knew this to be true, we just never put it so succinctly. 

To have a friend, one must identify what makes a true friend and then learn how to become a true friend. This process takes time and it begins within the family. Children learn this primarily through role-modeling, and adult-oriented children can be influenced in this way. The foundational work is in the parent-child relationship. 

Dr. Bruce Perry, psychiatrist and trauma researcher says, “the capacity to love cannot be built in isolation” and it is a miscalculation to believe otherwise. Children need more face-to-face time with their parents. Their capacity to love hinges on it. They need more experiences, yes, and also more down time with you, more permission to be in your presence. They need that sense of permissiveness, that emotional hospitality is key to avoid limiting the self-expression of the child – so the child has the experience of being delighted in, cherished, a felt sense of being good, because he or she is good, a uniquely dignified human person – unrepeatable for all of eternity. What I know deep in my bones is that we are social beings, indeed, relational beings, created by God to grow in virtue within those personal relationships: husband, wife, mother, father, sister, brother, grandparent, aunt, uncle, and of course friends. Because the most traumatic part of any human adversity is the shattering of human connections, those very relationships can oftentimes counteract severe adverse childhood experiences.

Secure attachment improves health outcomes.

Secure attachment helps facilitate our filial dependence on God.

We, as humans, need other humans to flourish.

Loving God, loving people, and loving the world begins with the capacity to love. The best odds of raising children who have this capacity to love deeply is to refuse to weaken the natural lines of attachment and responsibility because peer orientation undermines healthy development. Take courage, you have inside of you exactly what your child needs.