Episode 179: Parents Matter More Than Peers In Childhood

"Peer pressure isn’t just a teenage phase anymore. More and more, we’re seeing kids treat their peer group as the final authority, which can leave parents feeling rejected, powerless, and worried about the choices their children make at school and beyond. As I close out season 4, I revisit a line my parents used to say when I was a teen: “We are your peer pressure.” After reading 'Hold On to Your Kids' by Gordon Neufeld and Dr. Gabor Maté, that advice lands with fresh urgency.

I dig into the authors’ big idea of peer orientation, in which children attach to peers for direction, values, and identity rather than to parents and other trusted adults. I walk through what may be driving the shift, why kids can’t truly follow two competing “compass points,” and how peer-centered attachment can increase sensitivity to rejection, secrecy, and risky behavior. If you’ve noticed your child becoming harder to guide or less open with you, this language helps you name what’s happening without defaulting to shame or blame.

Then we get practical. I break down the six ways children attach (from proximity and sameness to loyalty, significance, warm feeling, and being known) and the four-step practice of “collecting” your child after separations to keep the relationship strong. The throughline is simple: relationship first, then behavior. If you want more peace at home and more influence where it counts, start by restoring connection on purpose, every day.

Listen now, share this with a parent who needs it, and subscribe so you’re ready for season 5. After you listen, leave a review and send me a message through the “Send Me a Text Message” link on the episode page with your biggest takeaway.

Love my show? Consider being a regular subscriber! Just go to https://tinyurl.com/podcastsupport. 

Transcript

Welcome And Why This Matters

SPEAKER_00 0:11

Welcome to another episode of K-12 Public Education Insights, Empowering Parents of Color Podcast. The podcast that converges at the intersection of educational research and parental actions. It's about making the trends, topics, and theories in public education understandable so that you can implement them into practical, actionable strategies that work for your children. My name is Dr. Kim J. Fields, former corporate manager, turned education researcher, and advocate, and I'm the host of this podcast. I got into this space after dealing with some frustrating interactions with school educators and administrators, as well as experiencing the microaggressions that I faced as an African-American mom raising my two kids who were in the public school system. I really wanted to understand how teachers were trained and what the research provided about the challenges of the public education system. Once I gained the information and the insights that I needed, I was then equipped to be able to successfully support my children in their educational progress. This battle-tested experience is what I provide as action steps for you to take. It's like enjoying a bowl of educational research with a sprinkling of motherwit wisdom on top. If you're looking to find out more about the current information and issues in education that could affect you or your children, and the action steps you can take to give your children the advantages they need, then you're in the right place. Thanks for tuning in today. I know that staying informed about K-12 public education trends and topics is important to you, so keep listening. Give me 30 minutes or less, and I'll provide insights on the latest trends, issues, and topics pertaining to this constantly evolving K-12 public education environment. As I close out season four with this last episode, I'm pondering the advice that my parents gave my siblings and I when we were teenagers. That advice was that they were our peer pressure. Turns out there may have been wisdom behind their statement. I'm

Peer Pressure Overtakes Adult Influence

SPEAKER_00 3:10

reflecting on this advice because of the increased influence I see of peer pressure on young people in my community. Do your children seem to be overly influenced by their peers? For the first time in recent decades, the horizontal or peer influence on children seems to be more prevalent than the vertical influence that is from parents, grandparents, and other adult relatives on shaping the development and maturity of children. We've all seen stories in the news about extreme cases where children have lost their lives due to peer pressure. In this episode, I discuss the reasons that may have led to this increased peer orientation from my review of the book Hold On to Your Kids, Why Parents Need to Matter More Than Peers by Gordon Newfeld and Dr. Gabor Mate. Let's gain some insight on this. Here are my insights from this book. Today's parents love their children as much as parents ever have, but the capacity to get that knowledge across to their children has somehow diminished. Many parents feel hurt and rejected. They also blame themselves for failing at the parenting task for digital devices that are distracting their children and for the school system because it doesn't seem to be strict enough on them. Many children lack self-control and are increasingly prone to general aimlessness, drug use, conflicts, and even violence. They are less teachable and more difficult to manage than their counterparts a couple of decades ago. Many have lost their ability to adapt, to be resilient, to learn from negative experiences, and to mature. Unprecedented numbers of children and adolescents are being prescribed medications for depression, anxiety, and a host of other diagnoses. This all leads to committed and responsible parents being frustrated. No longer are parents and other elders the natural mentors for the young, as always used to be the case with human beings and is still the case with all of the species living in their natural habitats. So what's changed? The problem is the context. Parenting requires a context to be effective. Only the attachment relationship can provide the proper context for child rearing. All the parenting skills in the world cannot compensate for a lack of attachment relationship. This attachment begins

Why Culture Breaks Parent Attachment

SPEAKER_00 6:32

with the child from birth. Parenting hasn't really changed, and the fundamental nature of children hasn't really changed either. What has changed is the culture in which children are now being raised. Children's attachments to parents are no longer getting the support required from culture and society. And children are increasingly forming attachments that compete with parents, and this happens through peer relationships. This is the thesis of this book. Young people are increasingly turning to their peers for instruction, modeling, and guidance and not deferring to their parents, teachers, and other responsible adults. This is what the authors call peer orientation. Children have an innate orienting instinct. They need to get their sense of direction from somebody. However, children cannot be oriented to both adults and other children simultaneously. They cannot follow two sets of conflicting directions at the same time. The child's brain must automatically choose between parental values and peer values, parental guidance and peer guidance, parental culture and peer culture whenever the two appear to be in conflict. This is not to say that children shouldn't have friends in their age group. They should. And it's a necessary part of development because these friendships are natural and can serve a healthy purpose. The issue of peer influence becomes more noticeable when peer relationships become a child's primary source of orientation. And according to these authors, there is nothing healthy or natural about peer orientation or the attachment that children have to their peers versus their parents. Peer orientation is foreign to many indigenous societies and even in places in the Western world outside of the industrialized countries. The vertical transmission of values and culture is how influence has been oriented for humans for generations. Who we want to be and what we want to be like is defined by that orientation, who we appoint as models of how to be and how to act. Unfortunately, for this generation of children, peers have replaced parents in creating the core of their personalities. And it's not so much what happens in the parent-child relationship that has the greatest impact on the child. What is missing in that relationship is what leaves the greatest scar on the child's personality. What's missing in the relationships may be unconditional love and acceptance, the desire to nurture, the ability to extend oneself for the sake of the other, a willingness to sacrifice for the growth and development of the other. When looking at and comparing peer relationships with parent relationships for what's missing, parents come out looking like saints, and the results of what's missing in peer relationships can spell disaster for many children. The more peers matter, the more children are devastated by the insensitivity of their peers, by failing to fit in by perceived rejection or ostracism. Fitting in with the immature expectations of a peer group is not how young people grow to be independent, self-respecting adults. While the effects of peer orientation are most obvious in teenagers, early signs are visible by the second or third grade. These origins go back to even before kindergarten, and this is why peer orientation needs to be understood by all parents, especially parents of young children who want to avoid the problem or to reverse it as soon as it appears. One perspective from the book really stands out. Children may know what they want, but it is dangerous to assume that they know what they need. To the peer-oriented child, it seems only natural to prefer contact with friends compared to closeness with the family, to be with friends as much as possible, and to be as much like them as

Peer Orientation And The Hidden Costs

SPEAKER_00 11:31

possible. A child does not know what's best. Parenting that takes its cues from the child's preferences can get you retired long before the job is done. To nurture your children, you must reclaim them and take charge of providing for their attachment needs. With all that's been said, there is good news. There is much that can be done in your homes and in classrooms to keep parents from being prematurely replaced. Because vertical culture no longer leads children in the right direction toward genuine independence and maturity. Parents and other child rearing adults matter more now than ever before. The other thing is that your children want to belong to you, even if they don't feel that way, and even if their words or actions seem to signal the opposite. Understanding attachment is the single most important factor in understanding your children. It also helps to identify the warning signs when a child is becoming peer-oriented. Attachment provides the help that children need to orient themselves. The main piece of attachment is creating a compass point that a person can attach to. As

The Six Ways Kids Attach

SPEAKER_00 12:55

long as a child can find himself or herself in relation to this compass point, he or she will not feel lost. Instincts activated in a child impel that child to keep that working compass point close. Children are meant to revolve around their parents and other adults responsible for them just as the planets revolve around the sun. Attachment is what keeps the planets in orbit around the sun. There are six ways of attaching, and each of them provides a clue to the behavior of your children, and often to your own behavior as well. There's attachment through physical proximity, including smell, sight, sound, and touch. The second way of attaching is through sameness. A child seeks to be like those he or she feels closest to. Identification is another way of attaching through sameness. Identifying with someone or something is to be like that person or thing. One's sense of self emerges with the optic of identification. This entity may be a parent, a hero, a group, a role, a country, a sports team, an entertainer, an idea, or even one's work. The third way of attaching is through belonging and loyalty. The fourth way of pursuing closeness and connection is to seek significance, meaning that a person matters to someone else. The fifth way of being attached is through feeling. Warm feelings, loving feelings, affectionate feelings. The sixth and last way of attaching is through being known. To feel close to someone is to be known by them. Parent-oriented children don't like to keep secrets from their parents because of the resulting loss of closeness. But for a peer-oriented child, his best friend is the one he has no secrets from. These six ways of attaching all connect to one underlying drive for connection. Whomever a child is most attached to will have the greatest impact on that child's life. A child will not typically simultaneously use both peers and parents as working compass points. A child will orient either by the values of the peer world or the value of the parents, but not both. Either the peer culture dominates or the culture of the parent takes the lead. And in my case, from my opening scenario, the culture of my parents took the lead. Parents today can no longer assume, as parents in older days could, that a strong early bond between themselves and their children will endure for as long as needed. To compensate for the cultural chaos of these present times, parents need to make a habit of collecting their children daily and repeatedly

Four Daily Steps To Reconnect

SPEAKER_00 16:29

until they're old enough to function as independent people. There are four steps to follow in the task of collecting your children from infancy through adolescence. The first step is to get in the child's face or space in a friendly way. The primary goal in all connections with your children should be the relationship itself, not the conduct or the behavior. This means that the first interaction with your children after there has been some separation, either through school or work or other experiences, even sleep, should be simply to acknowledge and greet your child. The first interaction should be to reestablish connection. The bottom line is that you need to build routines of collecting your children into your daily lives from the start of the day to the end of the day. The second principle of collecting your children is to provide something for the child to hold on to in order to engage your child's attachment instincts. This means giving hugs and embraces, speaking with warmth in your voice, or anything to make your child feel invited to exist in your presence exactly as he or she is. This does not mean indulging your child's demands, whether for attention, for affection, for recognition, or for significance. In collecting your child, the element of initiative and surprise is vital. Providing something to hold on to is most effective when it's least expected. And just so you know, you can't collect a child or offer him something to hold on to by showering him or her with praise. Praise is usually about something a child has done and is neither a gift nor spontaneous. Praise originates in the achievements of the child, and a child cannot hold on to praise because it is subject to cancellation with every failure. This is not to say that children shouldn't be praised because it is helpful and good for the relationship, but it shouldn't be overdone. The child's self-image should not rest on how well or how poorly he or she succeeds in gaining a parent's approval by means of achievement for compliant behaviors. The foundation of a child's true self-esteem is the sense of being accepted, loved, and enjoyed by the parents exactly as the child is. The third way of collecting your children is to invite dependence. And here's a surprising twist. Your job in raising your children is to look after their dependence needs. When you meet your child's genuine dependence needs, nature is free to do its job of promoting maturity. Only when the dependence needs are met does the quest for true independence begin. Disrupting children's attachment routes only cause them to transplant themselves into other relationships. To push children to handle separation before they are ready, whether it's at bedtime or outside the home, is to initially evoke panic and more clinging, not less. Think on this. The only way for your child to become independent is through being dependent. The fourth and final way to engage the attachment instincts in collecting your children is to act as your child's compass point. Parents are the guides to their children who are still dependent on them, whether they are young children or older children. Children are automatically inclined to keep close to their working compass point. With older children, parents still need to introduce them to those around them, familiarize them with their world, inform them of what's going to happen, and interpret what certain things mean. Orienting your child reactivates your child's instincts to keep you close. In the end, no matter what problem or issue you are facing in parenting, your relationship with your children should be the highest priority. Children don't experience your intentions. They experience what you manifest in tone and behavior. Even when your children have disappointed you, violated your values, or are just being annoying, it is at those times that you must indicate in word or gesture that your child is more important than what he or she does,

Relationship First Then Behavior

SPEAKER_00 21:44

and that the relationship matters more than their conduct or their achievements. It's critical to make the relationship safe before you address behavior. I know. This may feel unnatural because it seems as if. You are condoning your child's misconduct. But the reality is that your child knows what is expected and is either unable or unwilling to deliver. The inability to deliver is usually a maturity problem. And the unwillingness to deliver is usually an attachment problem. The natural sequence of development is this attachment, then maturity, then socialization. When experiencing issues with your children, you should first address the relationship, which is the same thing as preserving the context for maturation. And only afterward you can focus on the child's behavior or socialization. The more children feel known and understood by you, the less risk you run of being replaced by peers. This sense of psychological intimacy is best done as a preventive measure. The overarching emphasis of this book is that parenting is not a set of skills and behaviors, but it is, above all, a relationship. Even in this age of technology and digital devices, the primary and dominant need of children as well as adults is togetherness. It is connection that we all seek. And that connection comes through attachment. The assurance that we belong to those who matter most to us.buzzsprout.com. You can leave

Season Finale Wrap And Next Steps

SPEAKER_00 23:59

that text message by going to the episode description page and clicking on the Send Me a Text Message link. Again, it's K12Education Insights.buzzsprout.com. If you enjoyed this episode, why not listen to another episode from my cat law? It could take as little as 15 minutes of your day. And remember, new episodes come out every Tuesday. Thanks for listening today. Be sure to come back for more insights on K-12 educational topics that impact you and your children. And remember to share my podcast with anyone that you think will find it valuable. That includes your friends, family, and your community. As a reminder, this is the last episode for season 4. I'll be back September 8th with the first episode of season 5. I will still be reaching out to you via emails weekly. So you want to be included in those email communications, be sure to contact me at Kim at Liberation Through Education.com to let me know you want in. Enjoy your summer. Until next time, learn something new every day.