Hold on to Your Kids

All quotes from Hold On to Your Kids, Gordon Neufeld and Gabor Maté. ix - The book is meant to reawaken “people’s natural parenting instincts.” In other words, the authors believe that parents and children have a natural relationship that has been twisted by a variety of factors. (As they say on page 4, “For many today, parenting does not feel natural.”) All they mean to do is direct us back to that natural relationship. “Our focus is not on what parents should do but on who they need to be for their children.” The whole book is about what they call the “attachment relationship” between parents and children:
For a child to be open to being parented by an adult, he must be actively attaching to that adult, be wanting contact and closeness with him.
And:
The attachment relationship of child to parent needs to last at least as long as a child needs to be parented. (6)
On the next page (7):
It is the thesis of this book that the disorder affecting the generations of young children and adolescents now heading toward adulthood is rooted in the lost orientation of children toward the nurturing adults in their lives. […] We use the word disorder in its most basic sense: a disruption of the natural order of things.