One of the most remarkable aspects of childrearing is how miserable it can make people. No one chooses to have children with the intention of bickering with a surly 11-year-old and grumbling through seemingly meaningless days of drudgery. And yet, how often does it veer in that direction?
Developmental psychologist Gordon Neufeld’s book “Hold On to Your Kids: Why Parents Need to Matter More than Peers,” written with Gabor Maté, offers the big picture view of parenting. What is happening in the parent-child dynamic when a child of 12 behaves with blatant disrespects, flouts family rules, and withdraws from family closeness? Neufeld describes the peer-oriented child as one who draws meaning and validation from his peer group rather than from trusted adults responsible for his care. The parent no longer is recognized as providing and sustaining.
This phenomenon accurately explains the cult of cool that afflicts many high schools, in which, like prison, clout is gained through aloof indifference and the absence of true vulnerability. In the face of the disrespect and disobedience that follow, parents often attempt to “lay down the law.” People cavalierly suggest that such a child should not have a single spot of fun in his life: no bedroom door, living off bread and water, isolated from the outside world until he shapes up. This sounds extreme, but it’s surprising how quickly people resort to such “punishments.”
Yet, a serious fact to ponder before jumping to absolutely no fun and living on bread and water: does this ever actually work? Frustrated parents love to escalate, proclaiming just how ungrateful the child is, how difficult, how exasperating. But when has denying all niceties and making life less fun won over someone in an intimate, interpersonal relationship? What Neufeld convincingly argues for is the restoration of intimacy between the parent and child.
Where does intimacy grow? Fun! Using the prerogative of a parents to separate the child from destructive peers is necessary, but after that, success requires reconnection through enjoyment and positive experiences. There is so much hope in this book. For anyone ensnared in a sad conversation in which a parent lists the many grievous sins of the child and proclaims to anyone listening that he, the parent, as been sorely ill-used, Neufeld outlines a path forward that is proactive and positive.
The means of fostering intimacy remain the same: constructive, meaningful activity and true fun. Stories, which can bond the very young to their parents who read, continue to knit together people through shared experiences and deep and mysterious brain processes that foster closeness. In her book, “The Enchanted Hour: The Miraculous Power of Reading Aloud in the Age of Distraction,” Megan Cox Gurdon describes reading aloud to her teenage son. It’s memorable in part because it is so countercultural. While, of course, her son could have read the book to himself, by laboriously and inefficiently reading aloud, the experience became effortless for the child and provided a shared experience of enjoyment with topics of conversation at the ready. Could it be that the exasperating child of 12 or 15 would benefit more from a hike or a book read aloud than from a complaining parent who institutes bread-and-water fasts?
And yet, the warped vision in our culture of the child who has power to dictate the terms of engagement with parents is so hard to shake that it even crops up in Neufeld’s own work! Overall, I enjoyed the book and gained much from a speedy read through. As a minor aside, not so much to criticize the authors but to suggest how deeply ingrained and insidious is our destructive and wrongheaded view of children, allow me to offer an absurd example. At one point, in highlighting the remarkable turnarounds, Neufeld describes an 11-year-old boy who was disrespectful and grouchy. The authors claim that the child’s unpleasant attitude made the atmosphere of the house so draining that it put a strain on the parents’ marriage and contributed to their divorce.
What a laughable claim! While on the one hand, you might be tempted to accept this explanation, it is a disgraceful abdication of responsibility. We would be foolish to put into the hands of a young child the power to make or break a marriage. Did it occur to no one that perhaps the boy was so unhappy because his parents were on the brink of denying their marriage vows and breaking up the family?
Retraining ourselves to see children as children and treat them as dependent people who desire intimacy and fun requires disengaging from a culture that treats them as dictators, underaged confidantes, and miniature adults. Children, when in a rightly ordered environment, can bring so much joy. It remains for the adults to do the ordering.
