Summary | Excerpt | Reviews | Readalikes | Genres & Themes | Author Bio
Why Parents Need to Matter More Than Peers
by Gordon Neufeld, Gabor MatéPart One: The Phenomenon of Peer Orientation
Chapter One: In Our Own Backyard
Something has changed. We can sense it, can feel it, just not find the words
for it. Children are not quite the same as we remember being. They seem less
likely to take their cues from adults, less inclined to please those in charge,
less afraid of getting into trouble. Parenting, too, seems to have changed. Our
parents were more confident, more certain of themselves and had more impact on
us, for better -- or, sometimes, for worse. For many today, parenting does not
feel natural. Through the ages adults have complained about children being less
respectful of their elders and more difficult to manage than preceding
generations, but could it be that this time it is for real?
Today's parents love their children as much as parents ever have, but the
love doesn't always get through. We have just as much to teach them as parents
ever did, but they seem less interested in following our direction. We can sense
our children's potential but do not feel empowered to guide them toward
fulfilling it. Sometimes they live and act as if they have been seduced away
from us by some siren song we do not hear. We fear, if only vaguely, that the
world has become less safe for them and that we are powerless to protect them.
The gap opening up between children and adults can seem unbridgeable at times.
We struggle to live up to our image of what parenting ought to be like. Not
achieving the results we want, we plead with our children, we cajole, bribe,
reward or punish. We hear ourselves address them in tones that seem harsh even
to us and foreign to our true nature. We sense ourselves grow cold in moments of
crisis, precisely when we would wish to summon our unconditional love. We feel
hurt as parents, and rejected. We blame -- ourselves for failing at the
parenting task, or our children for being recalcitrant, or television for
distracting them, or the school system for not being strict enough. When our
impotence becomes unbearable we reach for simplistic, authoritarian formulas
consistent with the do-it-yourself/quick-fix ethos of our era.
The very importance of parenting to the development and maturation of young
human beings has come under question. "Do Parents Matter?" was the title of a
cover article in Newsweek magazine in 1998. "Parenting has been oversold,"
argued a book1 that received international attention that year. "You have been
led to believe that you have more of an influence on your child's personality
than you really do."
The question of parental influence would not be of great moment if things
were going well with our young. They are not -- and many of us feel that
instinctively, even if we cannot explain exactly how and why. That our children
do not seem to listen to us or to embrace our traditions and culture as their
own would, perhaps, be acceptable in itself -- if we felt that they were truly
self-sufficient, self-directed and grounded in themselves, if they had a
positive sense of who they are and if they possessed a clear sense of direction
and purpose in life. We see that for so many children and young adults those
qualities are lacking. In homes, in schools, in community after community
developing young human beings have lost their moorings. Many lack self-control
and are increasingly prone to alienation, drug use, violence and a general
aimlessness. They are less teachable and more difficult to manage than their
counterparts of even a few decades ago. Many have lost their ability to adapt,
to learn from negative experience and to mature. The crisis of the young has
manifested itself ominously in the growing problem of bullying in the schools
and, at its most extreme, in the murder of children by children, whether in
British Columbia or New York, Quebec or Colorado.
Excerpted from Hold On to Your Kids by Gordon Neufeld, Ph.D., and Gabor Mate, M.D. Copyright © 2004 by Gordon Neufeld Ph.D. and Gabor Maté M.D.. Excerpted by permission of Ballantine Books, a division of Random House, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Harvard is the storehouse of knowledge because the freshmen bring so much in and the graduates take so little out.
Click Here to find out who said this, as well as discovering other famous literary quotes!
Your guide toexceptional books
BookBrowse seeks out and recommends the best in contemporary fiction and nonfiction—books that not only engage and entertain but also deepen our understanding of ourselves and the world around us.