Fresh Take: Dr. Gabor Maté and Dr. Gordon Neufeld on Maintaining Healthy Connection with Our Kids

Amy: [00:00:00] Hey, everybody. Welcome to Fresh Take from What Fresh Hell: Laughing in the Face of Motherhood. This is Amy. Today, I'm talking to Dr. Gordon Neufeld and Dr. Gabor Maté. Dr. Gordon Neufeld is an internationally renowned psychologist and foremost authority on child development and founder of the Neufeld Institute.

Dr. Neufeld is recognized for his unique ability to unlock the clues to seemingly complex problems of child rearing and education. Dr. Maté is a renowned speaker and bestselling author, highly sought after for his expertise on a range of topics, including addiction, stress, and childhood development. Dr. Maté has written several bestsellers, including the international bestseller, "The Myth of Normal Trauma: Illness and Healing in a Toxic Culture" and "Scattered Minds: the Origins and Healing of Attention Deficit Disorder." Today, I'll be talking to Dr. Neufeld and Dr. Maté about the newly released and updated version of their book, "Hold On To Your Kids: Why Parents Need To [00:01:00] Matter More Than Peers."

Thank you, Dr. Neufeld, Dr. Maté for talking to me today.

Gordon Neufeld: Pleased to be here.

Amy: So let's start with peer orientation, which is the sort of central thesis of this book, this thing we need to focus on. Can you define for us, Dr. Neufeld, what that means?

Gordon Neufeld: It needs to be differentiated from peer relationships or peer attachments.

There's nothing wrong with peer relationships or peer attachments. It's when a child is orbiting around peers or peer groups where it pulls them out of orbit from the adults responsible for them. And that has profound implications and that competes with the attachments to the adults that are responsible for them.

Amy: It's a "being cool matters more than anything else." What the peers think of your behavior becomes more important and you start to shape it towards your peers.

Gordon Neufeld: [00:02:00] Yes. They matter. Whether it's being cool or not would have to do with whether your peers are cool. So it doesn't really have to do with that.

That would be a particular manifestation, but definitely peers matter more. You take your cues from your peers as to how to talk, how to dress, what's important, what's valued you're looking to your peers for cues as to how to be and how to act.

Gabor Mate: I think it's really important to add Gordon's insight, and this book is based on his insights and research that when kids become peer oriented there's an automatic resistance and pulling away from the adults. So it makes parenting extraordinary difficult because now the peer values and the peer influence show up as a countervailing force to the influence and relationship with the adults.

So peer-oriented kids become very difficult to parent, and [00:03:00] parents are then constrained and, very often in society, advised to use punitive or controlling or coercive methods which further envenoms their relationships. So peer orientation, quite apart from distorting child development, also undermines the basis of of the family and of the parents' capacity to in a healthy way influence their children.

Amy: And understanding this, this is such a departure from so much of what I've read and understood about development because we're led to believe that this is a natural and inescapable part of development that adolescence comes and kids pull away and that's how it is and you have to let it happen even if it's hard. Even if they scream they hate you, it's just how it goes. But you're suggesting that in fact it is not always been how it goes and that it is becoming in fact accelerated.

Gordon Neufeld: It's been confused, or what confuses things is our love affair with a construct of [00:04:00] independence.

And so we're confusing that when they transfer their dependence to peers, they're truly more independent. They're not. In fact, it arrests their development. They may be more independent from us, but they're not more independent at all. True independence is a natural outcome of healthy development.

And it's always rooted in a fulfilled dependence. Fulfilled dependence is not possible if you look at it this way, the purpose of attachments is to create the infrastructure of caring. And so that really justifies an attachment, whether it's a marriage, a friendship, and particularly with a parent and a child. If it doesn't deliver care, if it doesn't lead to the receiving of care, it's not really a viable attachment, but it is our [00:05:00] love affair of independence and our misunderstanding of how it comes about that has eclipsed this phenomena so we don't see it for what it is.

Gabor Mate: As to being natural I make this point in my book "The Myth of Normal" as well, but we very much emphasize it in "Hold On To Your Kids" is that many things that are normal in this society, in the sense that they are the norm, are far from natural or healthy.

And if you look at human evolution, children used to live around their parents, really from birth until adolescence and adulthood. And they were always initiated into independence by adults. And independence didn't mean a hostile pushing away from or rejection of the adults. And so very often, what we consider to be healthy teenage rebellion is neither healthy in this society, nor is it genuine rebellion.

Because genuine rebellion is intended [00:06:00] for freedom and independence. But as Gordon says, these independent kids just want to fit in and conform and become other cookie cutter pictures of each other within the peer group. So it's not genuine independence at all. Genuine independence comes again, as Gordon points out, when you've individuated, when you become your own person, and that can only happen in the context of safe adult attachments.

So if anything, peer orientation undermines genuine liberation and freedom and genuine individuation. By the way, there's a lot of research showing that this is normal, but that research is ethnocentric. That research is based on the assumption that whatever happens in our culture is not only the norm, but it's also healthy and natural.

So that's far from the case.

Amy: Talk a little bit more about that, because this idea that youth have their own culture and that they [00:07:00] individuate, you suggest that's really something that came into play even in our culture, what, like in the 1950s? When did this start, this idea that youth are their own thing?

Gordon Neufeld: There was a short period of it, the flappers in New York where you are, that was in the 1920s. But that was that was limited to really New York. As far as a culture apart yes, it begins in the 1950s. The 1960s is where it really takes off in in the youth culture, having its own...the hippies in the United States and Canada, North America was a prime example.

Gabor Mate: And, there was a slogan in the 60s, which had a certain political validity to it, given the Vietnam War and the lies that were being told about it, but: never trust anybody over 30. But in [00:08:00] traditional - and, until I was 30, I used to say it myself, then I realized maybe it's not such a good idea, but traditionally there was always the concept of transgenerational transmission of values and culture.

And there were elders. If you look at the indigenous cultures, the reverence with which elders are held, so this idea of the younger generation have to figure out all on their own without and even in opposition to the adult world, an automatic compulsive opposition that's fairly new and that came along very much in the middle of the 20th century in response to the breakdown of community and multigenerational families.

Gordon Neufeld: If you look at it, Amy, as what's supposed to happen in adolescence there is this myth, this faulty assumption [00:09:00] that peers replace parents, but always in developmental psychology, always has been the premise that what is to replace parents is a sense of personhood, is selfhood. And that is always been the developmental task of adolescence, and only when you have a strong enough sense of self that you don't lose it with your peers, and you have a strong enough relationship with your parents that you don't lose them when you're with your peers, are you ready for peer interaction. And we should look at a sense of readiness if the developmental task is accomplished and the relationships with the parents run deep they've given their hearts to those that are responsible for them, their deep emotional attachments will peers have any positive effect on development whatsoever, but it's a finishing touch and other things have to be in place first of all, and that's what the [00:10:00] danger is that we have many parents these days of young children who are rushing out to try and get enough social interaction with their children, thinking that this is required. This is not only not required, it's dangerous.

Gabor Mate: Not to mention, as we point out in some new chapters in the book, there's the pervasive and malicious influence of social media and the digital technology that connects kids to one another, even when they're not in each other's physical presence.

So the peer influence doesn't just happen when kids leave the home and go to kindergartens or schools, or it happens actually in the home where the children, it's difficult to peel our kids off the digital media because they're so hooked on being with each other all the time. And it literally, I've worked with severe drug addicts and I can tell you that trying to peel kids off the digital media is like trying to deal with a drug addict and withdrawal. [00:11:00] And it has the same effects on the brain actually.

Amy: So this book first came out in 2005, is that correct?

Gabor Mate: Something like that. And it's been published in dozens of languages around the world since then.

Amy: But this is, this has been updated. And so why now? So why is it time to revisit this material and put it in front of a new generation of parents? Do you think social media is accelerating the peer orientation?

Gordon Neufeld: I think what happened is there was a shift from how to parent and ease of parenting in the pandemic and before to the wellbeing of children, the well being - and this is a very welcome shift. And the shift is what is behind emotional health and mental health, and if we're probably writing the book now, we would have started with answering that question that is rooted in the deep [00:12:00] infrastructure of attachment. Its roots are in the attachments with the adults responsible, and it's when attachments are awry that they don't receive the care.

And that's really at the core of what is happening in our runaway problems very much with mental health is that the care isn't getting through and it's meant to get through. That is at the very root. So in 2013 we wrote two more chapters on peer orientation and the digital revolution.

Because again, the book was released in Canada, at least, the year before Facebook came out. It seemed quite appropriate for its approximate 20th anniversary, which it is from the Canadian publication, to address this new new phenomena where our focus had shifted to [00:13:00] wellbeing, to again look at the huge implications of children orbiting around each other for the emotional health and wellbeing.

Gabor Mate: If you look at how human beings evolved again, we evolved in small band hunter gatherer groups. We lived that way for millions of years until the blink of an eye ago, where kids were with the parents the whole day. And not just with the parents, but with other nurturing adults. And we've got far away from that now.

And so in the United States, this is unbelievable, but 25 percent of women have to go back to work within two weeks of giving birth, which amounts to a massive abandonment which is how the child experiences the parenting presence. And these children spend most of their time from an early age running in the company of other peers so that, there's [00:14:00] been vast social changes that have robbed parents of their proximity to their children in a way that they could deliver their influence and that care that they have to offer, that Gordon talks about, just no longer gets through.

And so children are relying on each other now, and when you have immature creatures influencing each other, what you're going to get is immature development. And that's what we're seeing. Young people are immature longer and longer. They're having to stay home longer and longer. They're less capable of making way in the world, have more difficulty forming relationships.

This is largely a product of the lost influence of the adults and the burgeoning influence of the peers, this burgeoning of an epidemic of immaturity, you might say.

Amy: Dr. Neufeld, you have actually done some work with incarcerated youth, and you said something in relation to that work that I thought made sense in terms of all of this, which [00:15:00] was, you said, today's kids are equipped to function in a wounding environment.

You were talking about prison in particular, but I think that does apply to what you're saying here, that our kids go to school, or they're looking at their phones and they are equipped to function in an environment that wounds them.

Gordon Neufeld: Yes. Our brains are equipped, of course, to reduce suffering. And they do so by inhibiting feeling. And feeling is the feedback mechanism of the brain. You can imagine a brain operating without any feedback, all that it has to do. But what it does is because our suffering is in our feelings, when feelings are inhibited, we don't suffer as much and we are able to perform better.

We are able to perform in this. So in our minds, from an adult-centric point of view, and from an expert point of view, the kids are doing better. We call it resilience. We [00:16:00] call it all kinds of things, which we shouldn't be calling it. Because we're watching the brain do what it does very well, which is defend against the vulnerability too much to bear, but at great cost because feelings are what make us human and humane.

Feelings are what grow us up. And the brain is greatly compromised in its ability to perform its task. But yes, this what is supposed to protect a child in a wounding world is that child's attachmentwith a caring adult. Because when the adult matters more, the stings, the rejections, all of the wounding matters less from others that is.

And that is the natural protection. And peer oriented children are unshielded. And [00:17:00] again, it's the very, it's the defense of their brain. And these kids were incredibly defended, but absolutely stuck emotionally, developmentally, and many of them bearing two to six diagnoses that they qualified for as a result.

Gabor Mate: I can only add that in my work, I work a lot with traumatized adults, people who were really abused in childhood, have been through horrendous times. The results on physical and mental health are both horrendous and well documented. One of the impacts, as Gordon suggests, of emotional pain is a kind of emotional shutdown an organismic self protection against vulnerability, against pain.

We're seeing that kind of shutdown in families where kids are not abused. Where kids are [00:18:00] not badly treated by the parents, where the parents really do their best, but because the parents have lost the contact and the kids have become peer oriented, and because the peer world is so hazardous, there's this emotional shutdown, and defense against vulnerability in children who have not suffered the kind of adversity that some of my patients have.

It's a strange phenomenon. And you can see this in the cruelty of the peer culture. The rise in bullying and the horrendous things that kids can do to each other. Because their hearts are shut down and their hearts are shut down because they've lost the protection of the adult world.

Amy: So anybody listening is thinking, okay I get this.

I see this. I have to right this course. How early can and should parents start doing this work of connection and safety?

Gabor Mate: The bit before birth. [00:19:00] Before birth. I can tell you, already during pregnancy, the emotional states of the mother have an impact on the child's brain development.

You can't start this work too early. And you know what? You don't have to tell a mother cat to do this, or a mother rat, or a mother orangutan. It's natural. It's natural. It used to be natural to human beings as well. It's really the toxicity of this culture that has interfered with that instinctive natural relationship.

As Gordon points out, we have these parenting instincts, but instincts have to be evoked by the environment and really functioning in a society that doesn't evoke, it doesn't evoke the parenting instinct. In fact, it inhibits it and even makes it wrong. So look at how many parents are told, just as a small example, not to pick up the kids when they are crying.

And this goes back to Dr. Spock who talked about the tyranny of the [00:20:00] infant who wanted to be picked up. And his response was just walk out, shut the door on the crying infant. Any mother or father who's tried to do that, their heart is breaking, but they're doing it because they're following the expert advice that shuts down their own parenting instinct.

Amy: It's our own peer orientation.

Gabor Mate: Sorry, I missed what you just said.

Amy: It's our own peer orientation. I want the doctor to think that I'm being a good parent, so I'm going to override my own instincts.

Gabor Mate: Partly it is, yeah, and partly it's our own helplessness in the face of a society that stresses us so much that we're looking for any kind of easy way out.

Gordon Neufeld: I talk a lot about our loss of confidence as parents to be the answers to our children. And I say to be the answers, not to have the answers, not to know what to do, to be the answer. It requires a certain [00:21:00] confidence to step up to the plate, just like in marriage to be the answer to your partner.

It's not to have the answers. It's to be the answer, and the relational needs of children, they don't go away - to be to be invited, to exist in another's presence, to be delighted in, to be significant, to belong to. These are relational needs that are with us as humans for as long as we live. And to think that these should be used against a child was ridiculous.

They should be fulfilled. And who was to be the answer? I'd have so many parents coming to me and saying: I feel embarrassed. My 12 year old is still looking to me to be his answer. He should be looking to his peers. You'd hear so many parents say this and no, you are very fortunate indeed and what is hell, so to speak, [00:22:00] what is hell is that when you've lost both the confidence and the ability to be the answer to your child, because there's no fulfillment there anymore. It's work. There's no ease anymore.

Gabor Mate: And one of the most satisfying feedbacks we get for this book from really all around the world is thank you. I've known what you're talking about in my heart, but everybody tells me I'm wrong. And having read your book, I have the courage to follow my own parenting guidance and instincts.

So even if we don't convince anybody who needs to be convinced, which actually, we have fortunately convinced many, but even if all we do is validate parents whose own gut feelings are crying out to hold on to their kids in the face of a culture that would pull them away from them, we'll have succeeded with this book.

And we get that [00:23:00] feedback all the time.

Amy: The solution, it's so important, but the solution, to quote you both again, is that the kids need deep attachment. They need to fall deeply into attachment and our work as parents is to make it easy for them to do.

Gordon Neufeld: Yes. To make it easy and safe for them to do, not use their relational needs against them. And so that's part of being safe because when you're deeply attached, it sets you up for facing separation, which is the greatest wounding of all. And believing that you really are your child's best bet, that you are best positioned to answer their deepest needs, their deepest yearnings, their deepest longings.

And it's only when those needs are met is there the luxury to become their own person. That's when development spontaneously unfolds. We don't have to work at it. We don't have to push it. Like a [00:24:00] plant, it flowers, it blooms when the roots are taken care of and ours is root work. This is where we come in and when our children are attached to us they're, it is so much easier to carry them, to take care of them.

It's a dance that has been going on for tens of thousands of years. And it's a dance. But we've been thinking that it's about what we do and not thinking about what creates it is the child's attachment to us, and that's why the idea of holding on to it, preserving it, making sure that that we take care of their attachment to us because in so dong, we enable us to do our own work of answering their deepest needs.

Gabor Mate: By the way, I think I've had the thought, I think [00:25:00] Gordon maybe agrees with me, that were we to retitle the book, were we to write it again, we might not call it "Hold On" which denotes a bit of forcefulness perhaps.

You would call it "Keep Them Close." They're meant to be close to us and we need to keep them close so that they can become independent.

Amy: There's an idea that you provide that our provision of this attention to our children and our attachment needs to be stronger than the pursuit. Yes. Can you explain that?

Gordon Neufeld: It's just, you think of just a hug, right? If you give a perfunctory hug, there's no letting go. The answer to letting go is to have a sense of security and the provision to know that there's more than is needed. So if you don't have that, then you become preoccupied with it. And that's one of the tragedies of peer relations is, there's nothing more addictive than something that almost works, and something that almost [00:26:00] works is to know where you get it, but you never get enough, and so it gets you going, and that's exactly what you see. The provision has to be greater than the pursuit. That's a fundamental characteristic of a fulfilling parent/child dance because there's release in it. There's fulfillment for both. You have the great fulfillment of being able to make your child purr, so to speak, to feel satiated, to feel, ah, all is well.

And they have the sense of being able to know that they're being, they're truly being held on to, they're truly being met, so they don't have to be preoccupied with getting it elsewhere.

Gabor Mate: Even in adult relationships, what's it like when you have to keep looking for the relationship and you're not totally secure that it's available for you unconditionally? It's deeply unsettling.

Amy: Yes, that makes [00:27:00] a lot of sense and I think I know the answer to this, but I'm going to ask: if the beginning date for this work is before our children are born, what's the end date on this? I'm somebody with two kids in college who are sometimes home, but often off individuating.

How do I keep that connection and that safety going for older children?

Gabor Mate: You know what? You don't need to. It's not work. So far as I can tell, if you got the relationship with your kids, it'll just... Look. My son and I are just writing a new book on adult child and parent relationships, and so often it's a matter of repair, but if you've kept that relationship warm and close, then these kids will gradually individuate.

They make their way in the world, but they'll want to hold [00:28:00] onto you. They'll want to stay close with you. You don't have to keep working at it. You have to just be available for it, if the basis is there. That's how I would answer that. So it's less of a problem than... if the basis is there, if the grounding is set in the early years and throughout the adolescent years, adulthood will take care of itself.

Gordon, what would you say about that?

Gordon Neufeld: Yes, the relationship is meant to grow deeper, to be able to hold on when apart. And so an emotional connection does a lot more than just being able to be with or to be the same as or to belong to. So you have a deeper connection and a deeper sense of intimacy.

And so when it is true, when the attachment is deep, you can go long periods of time without being with, and it does't threaten the relationship. But when something does, when there is differences that divide, when [00:29:00] there is conflict, that is when we need to go to the bottom line and the bottom line is relationship here, not behavior.

It's relationship. It is giving the message that we'll be okay. We'll get through this. You are invited to exist in my presence, whether you feel it right now or not, or whether my eyes have too many daggers in them right now for you to feel it.

It's still true. It's still true. And so the good thing about family relationships is that they're only relationships that are forever. Your mother is your mother dead or alive for better or for worse. And that's the beautiful thing about attachment is that when you get to deeper attachments, it actually even transcends death.

And so often parents [00:30:00] would think: when do I get to retire? It's not like that. We are meant to be arranged in cascading care where we always have a sense of somebody taking care of us so we can take care of others so they can take care of others. It's an arrangement of cascading care and even our ancestors, those who have gone on, will be able to serve us if we preserve the relationship with them.

Gabor Mate: And actually, if you look at indigenous cultures, like here in Canada, the First Nations people, they have a deep sense of ancestry. And when you ask them, who are you? They'll say, my name is so-and-so and my mother is so-and-so and my grandmother is so-and-so and my great grandmother was so-and-so, so that their sense of Identity is not individualized in that rugged American sense, but actually they see themselves as the descendants of ancestors still present in their consciousness.

It's a very [00:31:00] beautiful thing to see.

Gordon Neufeld: Who are still taking care of them.

Gabor Mate: That's right.

Amy: That is, that's beautiful. And this need is so deep and these problems seem so profound, but the solution is I think simple and it's there all along. And it's available for us. It's

Gordon Neufeld: very simple. It isn't always easy, but it's simple.

It's simple. It's so simple, it escapes our notice.

Amy: I've been talking to Dr. Gordon Neufeld and Dr. Gabor Maté about the newly released, updated version of their book "Hold Onto Your Kids: Why Parents Need to Matter More Than Peers." I'll put the link to the book in the show notes so everybody can buy the book. But Dr. Neufeld and Dr. Maté, can you please tell our listeners where else they can find you?

Gordon Neufeld: For me, it's neufeldinstitute.org. They can find my work, the courses that I've created at that place. [00:32:00]

Gabor Mate: And if I can toot my friend's horn at his website, there's a lot of videos that he's prepared on all kinds of issues, the sensitive child or the troubled child or the adopted child.

And, I work in, I move in the psychological and therapeutic world. And I can tell you without bias that Gordon's understanding of child development, it's just deeper than anybody else on the planet. And so I highly recommend his work. As to my work, drgabormate.com, my website, Instagram, Facebook, books.

You can also find me all over on YouTube. I'll just finish by saying that my own work has been so deeply informed by Gordon's that I can't even imagine it without it, this has been, at least for me, an essential partnership and I'm so glad to be able to write this book with Gordon.[00:33:00]

Amy: It's been a real privilege to speak to both of you today. Thanks, Dr. Neufeld. Thanks, Dr. Maté.

Gordon Neufeld: Thanks. Thank you.