Hold On
to Your Kids
Why Parents Need to Matter
More Than Peers
This parenting classic on one of the most disturbing and misunderstood trends of our time - peers replacing parents in the lives of children - is now more relevant than ever. The latest edition includes new material on how social media and video game culture are affecting our children, and what parents can do.
Written by Dr. Gordon Neufeld, this book is about the pivotal importance of children’s relationships to those responsible for them and the devastating impact in today’s society of competing attachments with peers. However it is much more than a book on peer orientation: it is about parenting with relationship in mind. This book restores parents to their natural intuition, confronting such relationship-devastating devices as time-outs and using what children care about against them.
Offering effective strategies for preserving and restoring the child-to-parent relationship, this book provides refreshing natural alternatives to today’s contrived methods of behaviour control. The content is relevant to parents of children of any age, from infants right through to adult children. Readers have commonly commented on how much hardship and confusion they could have avoided had this material been available to them right from the beginning.
“Hold On To Your Kids is a visionary book that goes beyond the usual explanations to illuminate a crisis of unrecognized proportions. The authors show us how we are losing contact with our children and how this loss undermines their development and threatens the very fabric of society. Most importantly they offer, through concrete examples and clear suggestions, practical help for parents to fulfill their instinctual roles. A brilliant and well written book, one to be taken seriously, very seriously.”
- Peter A. Levine, PH.D.
International teacher and author of the best selling books:
Waking the Tiger, Healing Trauma and It Won’t Hurt Forever: Guiding Your Child through Trauma
“With original insights on parent-child attachments and how parents can restore them, this is a book for revitalizing families and rekindling the song in their children’s hearts.”
- Raffi Cavoukian, CM, OBC
Singer, author, founder of Raffi Foundation for Child Honouring
“This book represents a great step forward in grasping the sorrow and suffering that our kids are experiencing. Gordon Neufeld locates this suffering in the child’s loss of attachment to parents and increasing preoccupation with peers. Neufeld’s mind is powerful, capable of understanding the disastrous direction in which our culture is going. This is a brilliant book on the level of Paul Goodman’s Growing Up Absurd. Give a copy of this book to every parent you know.”
- Robert Bly
Author of The Sibling Society and Iron John
About the Authors
Before he retired, Dr. Gordon Neufeld had accumulated more than 40 years of experience as a clinical psychologist with children and youth and those responsible for them. A foremost authority on child development, Dr. Neufeld continues to be an international speaker, a best-selling author (Hold On to Your Kids) and a leading interpreter of the developmental paradigm. Dr. Neufeld has a widespread reputation for making sense of complex problems and for opening doors for change. While formerly involved in university teaching and private practice, he has devoted the best part of the last two decades to creating courses for parents, teachers and helping professionals. These courses are offered primarily through the Neufeld Institute – an online educational institute and world-wide charitable organization devoted to applying developmental science to the task of raising children. Dr. Neufeld’s lifes work has been to help adults provide the conditions for children to flourish. He is a father of five and a grandfather to six.
Rather than offering quick-fix solutions to these complex issues, Dr. Gabor Maté weaves together scientific research, case histories, and his own insights and experience to present a broad perspective that enlightens and empowers people to promote their own healing and that of those around them.
After 20 years of family practice and palliative care experience, Dr. Maté worked for over a decade in Vancouver’s Downtown East Side with patients challenged by drug addiction and mental illness. Gabor is an internationally renowned speaker highly sought after for his expertise on addiction, trauma, childhood development, and the relationship of stress and illness. For his groundbreaking medical work and writing he has been awarded the Order of Canada, his country’s highest civilian distinction, and the Civic Merit Award from his hometown, Vancouver. His books include In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts: Close Encounters With Addiction; When the Body Says No; The Cost of Hidden Stress; Scattered Minds: The Origins and Healing of Attention Deficit Disorder; and (with Dr. Gordon Neufeld) Hold on to Your Kids: Why Parents Need to Matter More Than Peers. He is currently writing his next book, The Myth of Normal: Illness and Health in an Insane Culture, out in late 2021. Gabor is also co-developer of a therapeutic approach, Compassionate Inquiry, now studied by hundreds of therapists, physicians, counselors, and others internationally.