Hold on to Your Kids: Why Parents Need to Matter More Than Peers

Gordon Neufeld, Gabor Mate
Paperback, 352 pages
9781785042195

Children take their lead from their friends: being 'cool' matters more than anything else. In shaping values, identity and codes of behaviour, peer groups are often far more influential than parents.

But this situation is far from natural, and it can be dangerous - it undermines family cohesion, interferes with healthy development, and fosters a hostile and sexualized youth culture. Children end up becoming conformist, anxious and alienated. In Hold on to Your Kids, acclaimed physician and bestselling author Gabor Mate joins forces with Gordon Neufeld, a psychologist with a reputation for penetrating to the heart of complex parenting.

Together they pinpoint the causes of this breakdown and offer practical advice on how to 'reattach' to sons and daughters, establish the hierarchy at home, make children feel safe and understood, and earn back your children's loyalty and love. This updated edition also addresses the unprecedented parenting challenges posed by the rise of digital devices and social media. By helping to reawaken our instincts, Mate and Neufeld empower parents to be what nature intended: a true source of contact, security and warmth for their children.

Contents
Part One: The Phenomenon of Peer Orientation
1. Why Parents Matter More Than Ever
2. Skewed Attachments, Subverted Instincts
3. Why We've Come Undone
Part Two: Sabotaged: How Peer Orientation Undermines Parenting
4. The Power to Parent Is Slipping Away
5. From Help to Hinderance: When Attachment Works Against Us
6. Counterwill: Why Children Become Disobedient
7. The Flatlining Culture
Part Three: Stuck in Immaturity: How Peer Orientation Stunts Healthy Development
8. The Dangerous Flight from Feeling
9. Stuck in Immaturity
10. A Legacy of Aggression
11. The Making of Bullies and Victims
12. A Sexual Turn
13. Unteachable Students
Part Four: How to Hold on to Our Kids (Or How to Reclaim Them)
14. Collecting Our Children
15. Preserve the Ties that Empower
16. Discipline That Does Not Divide
Part Five: Parenting Peer Orientation
17. Don't Court the Competition
18. Re-create the Attachment Village
Part Six: A Postscript for the Digital Age
19. The Digital Revolution Bent Out of Shape
20. A Matter of Timing