Gordon Neufeld > Quotes

“Children learn best when they like their teacher and they think their teacher likes them.”
― Gordon Neufeld, Hold On to Your Kids: Why Parents Need to Matter More Than Peers

“Children do not experience our intentions, no matter how heartfelt. They experience what we manifest in tone and behavior.”
― Gordon Neufeld, Hold On to Your Kids: Why Parents Need to Matter More Than Peers

“The key to activating maturation is to take care of the attachment needs of the child. To foster independance we must first invite dependance; to promote individuation we must provide a sense of belonging and unity; to help the child separate we must assume the responsibility for keeping the child close. We help a child let go by providing more contact and connection than he himself is seeking. When he asks for a hug, we give him a warmer one than he is giving us. We liberate children not by making them work for our love but by letting them rest in it. We help a child face the separation involved in going to sleep or going to school by satisfying his need for closeness.”
― Gordon Neufeld, Hold On to Your Kids: Why Parents Need to Matter More Than Peers

“Unconditional parental love is the indespensible nutrient for the child's healthy emotional growth. The first task is to create space in the child's heart for the certainty that she is precisely the person the parents want and love. She does not have to do anything or be any different to earn that love - in fact, she cannot do anything, since that love cannot be won or lost...The child can be ornery, unpleasant, whiny, uncooperative, and plain rude, and the parent still lets her feel loved. Ways have to be found to convey the unacceptability of certain behaviors without making the child herself feel unaccepted. She has to be able to bring her unrest, her least likable characteristics to the parent and still receive the parent's absolutely satisfying, security-inducing unconditional love.”
― Gordon Neufeld

“Absolutely missing in peer relationships are unconditional love and acceptance, the desire to nurture, the ability to extend oneself for the sake of the other, the willingness to sacrifice for the growth and development of the other.”
― Gordon Neufeld, Hold On to Your Kids: Why Parents Need to Matter More Than Peers

“In thousands of little ways, we pull and push our children to grow up, hurrying them along instead of inviting them to rest. We could never court each other as adults by resisting dependance...Perhaps we feel free to invite the dependance of adults becuase we are not responsible for their growth and maturity. We don't bear the burden of getting them to be independant. Here is the core of the problem: we are assuming too much responsiblity for the maturation of our children. We have forgotten that we are not alone - we have nature as our ally. Independance is the fruit of maturation; our job in raising children is to look after their dependance needs. When we do our job of meeting genuine dependance needs, nature is free to do its job of promoting maturity. In the same way, we don't have to make our children grow taller; we just need to give them food. By forgetting that growth, development and maturation are natural processes, we lose perspective. We become afraid our children will get stuck and never grow up. Perhaps we think that if we don't push a little, they will never leave the nest. Human beings are not like birds in this respect. The more children are pushed, the tighter they cling - or, failing that, they nest with someone else.”
― Gordon Neufeld

“Carl Jung explained that we tend to attack in others what we are most uncomfortable with in ourselves. When vulnerability is the enemy, it is attacked wherever it is perceived, even in a best friend.”
― Gordon Neufeld, Hold On to Your Kids: Why Parents Need to Matter More Than Peers

“But my child is strong-willed,” many parents insist. “When he decides that he wants something he just keeps at it until I cannot say no, or until I get very angry.” What is really being described here is not will but a rigid, obsessive clinging to this or that desire. An obsession may resemble will in its persistence but has nothing in common with it. Its power comes from the unconscious and it rules the individual, whereas a person with true will is in command of his intentions. The child’s oppositionality is not an expression of will. What it denotes is the absence of will, which allows a person only to react, but not to act from a free and conscious process of choosing.”
― Gordon Neufeld, Hold On to Your Kids: Why Parents Need to Matter More Than Peers

“As children grow, they have an increasing need to orient: to have a sense of who they are, of what is real, why things happen, what is good, what things mean. To fail to orient is to suffer disorientation, to be lost psychologically—a state our brains are programmed to do almost anything to avoid. Children are utterly incapable of orienting by themselves. They need help. Attachment provides that help. The first business”
― Gordon Neufeld, Hold On to Your Kids: Why Parents Need to Matter More Than Peers

“We used to think that schools built brains. Now we know that it is play that builds the brains that school can then use.”
― Gordon Neufeld

“Increasingly, children’s behavioral problems are ascribed to various medical syndromes such as oppositional defiant disorder or attention deficit disorder. These diagnoses at least have the benefit of absolving the child and of removing the onus of blame from the parents, but they camouflage the reversible dynamics that cause children to misbehave in the first place.”
― Gordon Neufeld, Hold On to Your Kids: Why Parents Need to Matter More Than Peers

“Soliciting good intentions in older children involves sharing with them your own values or finding within them the seeds of your values.”
― Gordon Neufeld, Hold On to Your Kids: Why Parents Need to Matter More Than Peers

“thus educators learn about teaching subjects but not about the essential importance of connected relationships to the learning process of young human beings.”
― Gordon Neufeld, Hold On to Your Kids: Why Parents Need to Matter More Than Peers

“What to us looks like independence is really just dependence transferred. We are in such a hurry for our children to be able to do things themselves that we do not see just how dependent they really are. Like power, dependence has become a dirty word. We want our children to be self-directing, self-motivated, self-controlled, self-orienting, self-reliant, and self-assured. We have put such a premium on independence that we lose sight of what childhood is about. Parents”
― Gordon Neufeld, Hold On to Your Kids: Why Parents Need to Matter More Than Peers

“Peer relationships are safest when they are the natural offspring of attachments with the parents.”
― Gordon Neufeld, Hold On to Your Kids: Why Parents Need to Matter More Than Peers

“In response to the intensifying cruelty of children to one another, schools all over this continent are rushing to design programs to inculcate social responsibility in youngsters. We are barking up the wrong tree when we try to make children responsible for other children. In my view it is completely unrealistic to believe we can in this way eradicate peer exclusion and rejection and insulting communication. We should, instead, be working to take the sting out of such natural manifestations of immaturity by reestablishing the power of adults to protect children from themselves and from one another.”
― Gordon Neufeld, Hold On to Your Kids: Why Parents Need to Matter More Than Peers

“phenomenon. For the child to feel full he must first feel empty, to feel helped the child must first feel in need of help, to feel complete he must have felt incomplete. To experience the joy of reunion one must first experience the ache of loss, to be comforted one must first have felt hurt. Satiation may be a very pleasant experience, but the prerequisite is to be able to feel vulnerability. When a child loses the ability to feel her attachment voids, the child also loses the ability to feel nurtured and fulfilled.”
― Gordon Neufeld, Hold On to Your Kids: Why Parents Need to Matter More Than Peers

“Adults who ground their parenting in a solid relationship with the child parent intuitively. They do not have to resort to techniques or manuals but act from understanding and empathy. If we know how to be with our children and who to be for them, we need much less advice on what to do. Practical approaches emerge spontaneously from our own experience once the relationship has been restored.”
― Gordon Neufeld, Hold On to Your Kids: Why Parents Need to Matter More Than Peers

“The secret of parenting is not in what a parent does but rather who the parent is to a child.”
― Gordon Neufeld, Hold On to Your Kids: Why Parents Need to Matter More Than Peers

“The secret of parenting is not in what a parent does but rather who the parent is to a child. When a child seeks contact and closeness with us, we become empowered as a nurturer, a comforter, a guide, a model, a teacher, or a coach. For a child well attached to us, we are her home base from which to venture into the world, her retreat to fall back to, her fountainhead of inspiration. All the parenting skills in the world cannot compensate for a lack of attachment relationship. All the love in the world cannot get through without the psychological umbilical cord created by the child’s attachment.”
― Gordon Neufeld, Hold on to Your Kids: Why Parents Need to Matter More Than Peers

“Our society is so topsy-turvy that we may actually come to value the child’s willingness to separate more than her instincts for closeness. Unfortunately, we cannot have it both ways. Parents whose young children are not properly attached face a nightmare scenario just keeping the child in sight. We should be thankful for the assistance attachment provides”
― Gordon Neufeld, Hold On to Your Kids: Why Parents Need to Matter More Than Peers

“Here our new-world preoccupation with independence gets in the way. We have no problem inviting the dependence of infants, but past that phase, independence becomes our primary agenda. Whether it is for our children to dress themselves, feed themselves, settle themselves, entertain themselves, think for themselves, solve their own problems, the story is the same: we champion independence—or what we believe is independence. We fear that to invite dependence is to invite regression instead of development, that if we give dependence an inch, it will take a mile. What we are really encouraging with this attitude is not true
independence, only independence from us. Dependence is transferred to the peer group.
In thousands of little ways, we pull and push our children to grow up, hurrying them along instead of inviting them to rest. We are pushing them away from us rather than bringing them to us. We could never court each other as adults by resisting dependence. Can you imagine the effect on wooing if we conveyed the message “Don't expect me to help you with anything I think you could or should
be able to do yourself”? It is doubtful that the relationship would ever be cemented. In courtship, we are full of “Here, let me give you a hand,” “I'll help
you with that,” “It would be my pleasure,” “Your problems are my problems.” If we can do this with adults, should we not be able to invite the dependence of children who are truly in need of someone to lean on?”
― Gordon Neufeld, Hold On to Your Kids: Why Parents Need to Matter More Than Peers

“whom”
― Gordon Neufeld, Hold On to Your Kids: Why Parents Need to Matter More Than Peers

“The secret of reducing the damage is in the timing of things. We want children to be fulfilled with what they truly need before they have access to that which would spoil their appetite for what they truly need.”
― Gordon Neufeld, Hold On to Your Kids: Why Parents Need to Matter More Than Peers

“The time we as parents and educators spend trying to teach our children social tolerance, acceptance, and etiquette would be much better invested in cultivating a connection with them. Children nurtured in traditional hierarchies of attachment are not nearly as susceptible to the spontaneous forces of tribalization. The social values we wish to inculcate can be transmitted only across existing lines of attachment.”
― Gordon Neufeld, Hold On to Your Kids: Why Parents Need to Matter More Than Peers

“As we mature, our brain develops the ability to mix things together, to hold different perceptions, senses, thoughts, feelings, and impulses all at the same
time without becoming confused in thinking or paralyzed in action. This is the capacity I called “integrative functioning” when, just above, I mentioned the preschooler syndrome. Reaching this point in development has a tremendous transforming and civilizing effect on personality and behavior. The attributes of childishness, like impulsiveness and egocentrism, fade away and a much more balanced personality begins to emerge. One cannot teach the brain to do this; the integrative capacity must be developed, grown into. The ancient Romans had a
word for this kind of mix: temper. That verb now means “to regulate” or “to moderate,” but originally referred to the mingling of different ingredients to
make clay. (...) Being untempered—unable to tolerate mixed feelings at the same time—is the hallmark of the immature.”
― Gordon Neufeld

“For the first time in history young people are turning for instruction, modeling, and guidance not to mothers, fathers, teachers, and other responsible adults but to people whom nature never intended to place in a parenting role—their own peers. They are not manageable, teachable, or maturing because they no longer take their cues from adults.”
― Gordon Neufeld, Hold On to Your Kids: Why Parents Need to Matter More Than Peers

“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. If pressure tactics are required, something is amiss. Kirsten’s mother and father had come to rely on force because, unawares, they had lost the power to parent.”
― Gordon Neufeld, Hold On to Your Kids: Why Parents Need to Matter More Than Peers

“Invite dependence… here our new world preoccupation w independence gets in the way. Independence becomes our primary agenda. Whether it is for our children to dress themselves, feed themselves, settle themselves, entertain themselves… the story is the same. We champion independence, or what we believe is independence. We fear that to invite dependence is to invite regression instead of development. What we are really encouraging is not true independence, but independence from *us*. Dependence is transferred to the peer group. We are pushing them away from us, instead of bringing them to us.”
― Gordon Neufeld, Hold On to Your Kids: Why Parents Need to Matter More Than Peers

“The safest sex, from the perspective of attachment and vulnerability, would occur not as a way of forming a relationship, but in the context of a relationship that is already satisfying and secure. One would want to be as sure as possible that the relationship is exactly where one wants to be. Sex would be the final attachment act, the commencement exercise for exclusivity, creating closure as a couple. Sex can be only as safe as the individuals are wise. What is needed more than anything is exactly what peer-oriented adolescents lack: maturity.”
― Gordon Neufeld, Hold On to Your Kids: Why Parents Need to Matter More Than Peers