Hold on to your kids is co-written by Dr Gordan Neufeld and Gabor Maté. It looks at how children today are increasingly looking to their peers for guidance and direction. This ‘peer orientation’ can be at odds with families and get in the way of development. So often families today see their own parental influence start to wain from and early age and this book looks at some of the reasons why children today are re-attaching themselves with peers. It then goes on to explore how you can ‘re-awaken parenting instincts innate to us all’.
It is one of my favourite parenting books and I recommend it to many of the families that I work with. It’s not a book focused on strategies and different ways of interacting with children but it’s about who parents need to be for their children and why.
“The secret of parenting is not what a parent does but rather who the parent is to a child”
The book itself is split up into five sections: The phenomenon of peer orientation, how peer orientation undermines parenting, how peer orientation stunts healthy development, how to hold onto our kids and preventing peer orientation. It’s filled with information on healthy child development, what it looks like and some of the reasons why we may of lose touch with our children so early. An integration of this knowledge into ones daily life may not be easy, but it’s more work then just reading this book but there is the opportunity to re-create that relationship where as the caregiving parent you are back in the lead and are more free from relying on coercion and artificial consequences to gain cooperation.
“The modern obsession with parenting as a set of skills to be followed along lines recommended by experts is, really, the result of lost intuitions and of a lost relationship with children previous generations could take for granted”
I’ve followed the work of Dr Gabor Maté for a number of years now and am luckily enough to have trained under him studying Compassionate Inquiry. A renowned speaker and bestselling author he speaks to many audiences and is a wonderful source of wisdom in what can seem a crazy world at times. Dr Gordan Neufeld is a quite brilliant developmental psychologist based in Canada. They have come together to write a quite brilliant book on parenting and I encourage you to read it.
‘The parental role has to be supplemented with all kinds of parenting techniques - or so many experts seem to believe”
To find out more about Compassionate Inquiry and the work of Dr Gabor Maté please check out my website www.joeatkinson.co.uk or email on mail@joeatkinson.co.uk