#010 Hold on to Your Kids
Helping kids build attachment with the people who can support them
It’s hard to believe the summer is half-done. July is coming to a close, August starts next week, and school will be back before we know it. I told my wife that I would take the summer as a bit of downtime from work, so that I could spend some time with the kids (and hopefully tidy up the house and the yard a little bit).
I had forgotten how challenging it was to try to work and have the kids at home at the same time. Some days, it’s okay. I can close the study room door, the kids can entertain themselves for a few hours, and everything works out. Other times, they just want time with me, and work goes out the window. And it’s impossible to know which kind of day I’m going to get when I wake up in the morning.
When COVID hit in 2020, and we had to balance work- and learn-from-home, I broke down within a few months. I turned to Hunt, Gather, Parent by Michaeleen Doucleff for help teaching the kids to be helpful with one another and with me. This summer, I’m following a recommendation to read Hold on to Your Kids, by Dr. Gordon Neufeld & Gabor Maté.
In 2020, we moved to the country. We were being told to self-isolate, the local parks were closed, and despite living in a sub-division with hundreds of neighbours, we realized that we didn’t really know any of them. When we moved to the country, we were faced with the prospect of having to do everything together, all the time. All of a sudden, the kids had to learn to play with each other, and we had to learn to work together as a family to get things done. Being helpful was no longer optional—without helpfulness, our family could no longer function.
It may be surprising to hear that parenting should be relatively easy. Getting our child to take our cues, follow directions, or respect our values should not require strain and struggle or coercion, nor even the extra leverage of rewards.
Hold on to Your Kids, Dr. Gordon Neufeld & Gabor Maté, Chapter 4
Using some of the tools from Hunt, Gather, Parent, our lives with the kids became a bit easier. We started to encourage helfulness, especially from our (then) 3-year-old. It turns out that the best way to train helpful kids is simply to accept their offers to help. We learned to nod and agree to the kids’ requests, while using the line “Let’s talk about it when …”. As in: “Sure, we can go to the park! Let’s talk about it when everyone is showered.” It made us (parents) a lot easier for the kids to get along with.
We also developed a helpful set of monsters in the house. For example, a Jimmy-Jammy monster, that takes kids away if they are making too much noise while they are in their jammies.
We also had some half-science-half-fantasy lessons on earwigs, which like to live in cool, damp places. Though the kids had never actually found an earwig in a towel they’ve left lying on the floor, they are now convinced that if they leave a damp towel on the floor, they will come back to an earwig nest.
These new traditions have made relating with the kids easier, and enabled us to get along better as a family. A lot of the unhelpful behaviours simply disappeared. (As Michaeleen Doucleff noted, when a kid is acting up, they need a job in the family! Kids get antsy when they are undereployed.)
As society has opened back up again, we’ve started to do more activities. As I write this, there isn’t a single day of the week that we don’t have a practice, a game, or an event. As the kids are getting older, they want to hang out with friends more and more. As much as the pandemic isolated us from our support network, all of these activities are sort of doing the same thing. Instead of being isolated by a pandemic, we are isolated by being pulled in different directions.
The contrasts between traditional multigenerational cultures and today’s North American society are striking. In modern urbanized North America—and in other industrialized countries where the American way of life has become the norm—children find themselves in attachment voids everywhere, situations in which they lack consistent and deep connection with nurturing adults. There are many factors promoting this trend.
One result of economic changes since the Second World War is that children are placed early, sometimes soon after birth, in situations where they spend much of the day in one another’s company. Most of their contact is with other children, not with the significant adults in their lives. They spend much less time bonding with parents and adults. As they grow older, the process only accelerates.
Hold on to Your Kids, Dr. Gordon Neufeld & Gabor Maté, Chapter 3
The interesting paradigm in Hold On to Your Kids is that, by allowing ourselves to be pulled in all these different directions, we risk creating attachment voids for our kids. This is where the child doesn’t have a mature person to attach to. When this happens, the child turns to the closest person around them for support: a peer. Unfortunately, peers aren’t able to provide the unconditional love and support that enables kids to mature. I am oversimplifying here for the sake of brevity—it’s not a single event or commitment that creates this risk. At the same time, these repeated decisions become patterns that contribute to creating an attachment void.
Teacher training completely ignores attachment; thus educators learn about teaching subjects but not about the essential importance of connected relationships to the learning process of young human beings.
Hold on to Your Kids, Dr. Gordon Neufeld & Gabor Maté, Chapter 3
When a child orients on a peer, they start to fight with their parent. It creates an unhealthy relationship. Now that I’m reading this book, I think that’s what I was feeling at the start of the pandemic. The kids weren’t oriented on my wife and I. They didn’t know how to help. They were confused about how we can work together easily.
What I originally thought were behaviour problems that needed to be corrected, or problems with my parenting style or strategy, were actually nothing of the sort. The source of the conflict was actually a relationship problem.
In health, the wrong diagnosis can lead to unnecessary problems and complications. The correct diagnosis creates space for everything to simplify.
The same thing can happen in parenting, in education, in leadership and in management. When we believe we are dealing with a behaviour issue, we try to correct it with training, or with rewards and punishment. And if we’ve missed our diagnosis—if it’s actually a relationship issue—we can spend a lot of needless time and energy working to correct a symptom, instead of addressing the root cause.
Next week, I want to chat about some of the implications of this at work, where we are dealing with adults who have grown up with this peer orientation. I’ve left a ton of stuff untouched in this week’s post. If you see anything that would benefit from clarification, hit up the comments.