![]() So what can parents do to reconnect with their children? The key, Maté says, is to reconnect with intuition and ignore the sort of books that portray parenting as expertise to be acquired. If you have listened to yourself, as I have recently, command a child to brush their teeth or put on shoes, and flinched at the terseness, discourtesy or despair in your voice, Maté’s book will make you examine your behaviour in a new light. Others include using a nagging, angry or cold voice, wielding adversarial discipline or neglecting to spend sufficient time with your children. Some of these mistakes are specific, such as using time out, a technique Maté rejects as “based on fear”. “But it happened.”īy the time he wrote Hold On To Your Kids, Maté says, he had made every mistake in the book. It took years for his daughter to turn to him for advice, “which would have been the natural thing for her to do all along,” he says. Sometimes the dinners went badly, but the next week they’d be back again, Maté says. But he wanted to be with her and she liked the idea of eating out, so once a week they went for dinner. Can a relationship really be forged so unilaterally? “Well, she wasn’t that concerned about spending time with me in general,” Maté admits. “I decided, ‘I’m just going to reclaim her,’” he says. This is what Maté did with his own daughter when she was 15. And what should you do if you have lost your child to their peers? Reclaim them, he says. Not so, Maté says, if that attachment supplants the primary one to caregivers. Some may view an increasing attachment to peers as a sign of maturation. ![]() But what parents need to understand, Maté and Neufeld argue, is that challenging behaviours are in fact “not behavioural problems, but a relationship problem”.Īt the heart of this relationship problem is something Neufeld and Maté call “peer orientation”. The authors’ sense that children are slipping from adult grasp, becoming a sort of lost generation, will resonate with parents, especially those battling with excessive screen time or teenage estrangements.
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