Name: Hold on to Your Kids
Rating: 4.4 (5 reviews)
ISBN: 9780375760280

Gabor Maté

Gordon Neufeld

Argues that the growing phenomenon of peer orientation is undermining family cohesion and explains how parents and teachers can reverse the trend to serve as a source of guidance, love, and security for children.

Why Parents Need to Matter More Than Peers

Hold on to Your Kids

The rapid growth of technology and society in recent decades have lead to a breakdown of ‘The village’. Families have become secluded and independent forcing children to turn to peers for community. 

Nicole Neuman

When circumstances change more quickly than our culture can adapt to, customs and traditions disintegrate. 

A psychologist with a reputation for penetrating to the heart of complex parenting issues joins forces with a physician and bestselling author to tackle one of the most disturbing and misunderstood trends of our time -- peers replacing parents in the lives of our children. Dr. Neufeld has dubbed this phenomenon peer orientation, which refers to the tendency of children and youth to look to their peers for direction: for a sense of right and wrong, for values, identity and codes of behaviour. But peer orientation undermines family cohesion, poisons the school atmosphere, and fosters an aggressively hostile and sexualized youth culture. It provides a powerful explanation for schoolyard bullying and youth violence; its effects are painfully evident in the context of teenage gangs and criminal activity, in tragedies such as in Littleton, Colorado; Tabor, Alberta and Victoria, B.C. It is an escalating trend that has never been adequately described or contested until Hold On to Your Kids. Once understood, it becomes self-evident -- as do the solutions. Hold On to Your Kids will restore parenting to its natural intuitive basis and the parent-child relationship to its rightful preeminence. The concepts, principles and practical advice contained in Hold On to Your Kids will empower parents to satisfy their children’s inborn need to find direction by turning towards a source of authority, contact and warmth. Something has changed. One can sense it, one 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 seemed more confident, more certain of themselves and had more impact on us, for better or for worse. For many, parenting does not feel natural. Adults through the ages 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? -- from Hold On to Your Kids

Hold On to Your Kids

I think this book had very good points and is definitely worth a read; however it could have been significantly condensed. Much of the thesis was just repeated throughout most paragraphs. 

Jenni Pertuset

This is one of the parenting books that I’ve most appreciated. It discusses the need children have to form attachments with caring adults and the positive results it creates: the self-worth that comes from unconditional love and the sense of identity that accompanies the transmission of culture.

The book seems most concerned with older children, and the dangers of peer-orientation for teens in particular, though I find the information about the value of children’s connection to adults to be important and useful reading for any age.

Two ideas that especially resonated with me were the instructions for “collecting” children –behaviors that draw our children to us and encourage attachment – and the call for an “attachment village” – a group of caring adults who support each other in nurturing children and passing down values.

Nadine 

This book has been a game-changer for me in understanding so many things. I stumbled across it as a friend had been to a Gabor Mate talk in London, and I'd read many of his other books but not this one. Then a lot of people were polarised on what John Marsden has been saying about Bullying and this appeared to provide a counter-argument.
It's a very long read (listen) and some of it is repetitive, and despite this supposed to be an updated version there are still references to defunct technology like msn etc. but the underlying logic and theories seem to be spot on to what I have seen and experienced with my own children and those I teach. 
There are no simplistic dynamics, but a very complicated dance of the need for attachment and recognition, changing family patterns, mobile families, digital alternatives for socialising and more. Once I finish listening to this, I'll be buying a hard copy of the book and go through it again as a post-mortem of the last 5 years of my life and a pre-mortem of how I want my relationships to be in the future.

Courtney Patterson

I had heard so many good things about this book and was disappointed while reading it. I found it slightly hard to read and took forever to read the book. While there are quite a few good points there was just as many points I did not agree with and was confused on what the message was supposed to be...overall I thought they were trying to push that kids having friends was bad and that they shouldn't be in public school where they can't be controlled and monitored but in the next chapter that friends are great and they aren't trying to say friends are bad which I felt was the general overall message

Hold on to Your Kids Why Parents Need to Matter More Than Peers

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