Gordon Neufeld Quotes

Children learn best when they like their teacher and they think their teacher likes them.

Children do not experience our intentions, no matter how heartfelt. They experience what we manifest in tone and behavior.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Soliciting good intentions in older children involves sharing with them your own values or finding within them the seeds of your values.

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

thus educators learn about teaching subjects but not about the essential importance of connected relationships to the learning process of young human beings.

Peer relationships are safest when they are the natural offspring of attachments with the parents.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

We liberate children not by making them work for our love but by letting them rest in it.

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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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

When we spoil something, we deny it the conditions it requires. . . . The real spoiling of children is not in the indulging of demands or the giving of gifts, but in the ignoring of their genuine needs. —Gordon Neufeld, PhD, and Gabor Maté, MD, Hold On to Your Kids

We only feel like being good for those to whom we are attached to. We weren't meant to raise and teach children whose hearts we did not have. We have resorted to all kinds of tricks with our children because we don't have enough natural attachment power to do our job. When we use these tricks, we insult the relationship.

Years of research and study show that a child was designed to be raised and educated at home because the most important element in a child's development towards maturity is his attachment to those who are responsible for him (a.k.a. parents)

Auklėjimo paslaptis - ne tai, ką tėvai daro, o tai, ką jie reiškia savo vaikui.

Attachment is both a shield and a sword.

those who can’t. Attachment and vulnerability—these two great themes of human existence—go hand in hand.

Mes labiau rūpinamės pamaitinti savo vaikus ir nekreipiame dėmesio į patį valgymo ritualą, kurio paskirtis - palaikyti šeimos narių tarpusavio ryšį.

Children do not automatically grant us the authority to parent them just because we are adults, or just because we love them or think we know what is good for them or have their best interests at heart.

The critical issue was that she was peer dependent, which, given her psychological immaturity, delivered a devastating blow to parenting.

less mature a person is, the more he will rely on this basic mode of attaching. Peer-oriented kids like Cynthia are preoccupied with being together, occupying the same space, hanging out, and staying in touch. When attachment is this primitive, the talking can be gibberish and nonsense. “My

Children parented in such a manner never come up against the necessary frustration that accompanies facing the impossible. They are deprived of the experience of transforming frustration into feelings of futility, of letting go and adapting.

On a street around the corner from my coauthor’s house the parents have organized themselves into what they call “the little block that can.” Social relations are deliberately cultivated among the families living on this block. There are benches and picnic tables outside several of the homes where parents and kids of all ages gather. The children have learned to relate to all the adults on this street as attachment figures, surrogate aunts and uncles. Once a year the street is shut off to traffic for what, in effect, is a village festival. There are games, food is served, music is played from loudspeakers. The local fire department drives up with a red engine and children frolic in the spray of the fire hose.

The secret of a parent’s power is in the dependence of the child. Children are born completely dependent, unable to make their own way in this world. Their lack of viability as separate beings makes them utterly reliant on others for being taken care of, for guidance and direction, for support and approval, for a sense of home and belonging. It is the child’s state of dependence that makes parenting necessary in the first place. If our children didn’t need us, we would not need the power to parent.

being dependent does not guarantee dependence on the appropriate caregivers. Every child is born in need of nurturing, but after infancy and toddlerhood not all children necessarily look to the parent to provide it. Our power to parent rests not in how dependent our child is, but in how much our child depends specifically on us. The power to execute our parental responsibilities lies not in the neediness of our children but in their looking to us to be the answer to their needs. We cannot truly take care of a child who does not count on us to be taken care of, or who depends on us only for food, clothing, shelter, and other material concerns. We cannot emotionally support a child who is not leaning on us for his psychological needs. It is frustrating to direct a child who does not welcome our guidance, irksome and self-defeating to assist one who is not seeking our help.

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 will complain of their child’s oppositional and off-putting behaviors, but rarely do they note that their children have stopped looking to them for nurturing, comfort, and assistance. They are disturbed by their child’s failure to comply with their reasonable expectations but seem unaware that the child no longer seeks their affection, approval, or appreciation. They do not notice that the child is turning to peers for support, love, connection, and belonging. When attachment is displaced, dependence is displaced. So is, along with it, the power to parent.

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.

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?

Carl Jung explained that we tend to attack in others what we are most uncomfortable with in ourselves.

The threat of abandonment is ever present in peer-oriented interactions, and it is with emotional detachment that children automatically respond.

Peer orientation creates an appetite for anything that would reduce vulnerability. Drugs are emotional painkillers. And, in another way, they help young people escape from the benumbed state imposed by their defensive emotional detachment. With the shutdown of emotions come boredom and alienation.

Drugs provide an artificial stimulation to the emotionally jaded. They heighten sensation and provide a false sense of engagement without incurring the risks of genuine openness. In fact, the same drug can play seemingly opposite functions in an individual. Alcohol and marijuana, for example, can numb or, on the other hand, free the brain and mind from social inhibitions. Other drugs are stimulants—cocaine, amphetamines, and ecstasy; the very name of the latter speaks volumes about exactly what is missing in the psychic life of our emotionally incapacitated young people.

Because frustration did not mix with caring, they had no patience. Because anger did not mix with love, they showed no forgiveness. Because frustration did not mix with either fear or affection, they lost their tempers. In short, they lacked maturity.

Frustration is the emotion we feel when something doesn’t work. What doesn’t work may be a toy, a job, one’s body, a conversation, a demand, a relationship, the coffeemaker, or the scissors. Whatever it is, the more it matters to us that “it” should work, the more stirred up we become when it doesn’t. Frustration is a deep and primitive emotion, so primitive, in fact, that it exists in other animals as well. Frustration is not something that is necessarily conscious, but like any emotion it will move us nonetheless. There are many triggers for frustration, but because what matters most to children—as to many adults—is attachment, the greatest source of frustration is attachments that do not work: loss of contact, thwarted connection, too much separation, feeling spurned, losing a loved one, a lack of belonging or of being understood. Because we are generally unconscious of attachment, we are also often unconscious of the link between our frustration and our attachments not working.

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.

There is a season for digital connection but mainly later and mostly after nature is able to have its way with our children. Our job is to be a midwife to this process, making it as easy as we can for our children to fall into attachment with us. The ultimate resolution to being preoccupied with attachment is not to depend so much on attachments in order to function.

No matter what problem or issue we face in parenting, our relationship with our children should be the highest priority. Children do not experience our intentions, no matter how heartfelt. They experience what we manifest in tone and behavior.

Precisely at such times we must indicate, in word or gesture, that the child is more important than what he does, that the relationship matters more than conduct or achievement. We make the relationship safe before we address behavior.

The principle behind the next step is simple: in order to engage children’s attachment instincts, we must offer them something to attach to. With infants, this often involves placing a finger in the palm of their hand. If the child’s attachment brain is receptive, she will grasp the finger; if not, she will pull her hand away. It is not an involuntary muscle reflex such as that elicited by tapping below the knee but an attachment reflex, one of many present from birth that enable such activities as feeding and cuddling. It indicates that the attachment instincts have been activated. The child is now ready to be taken care of.

connection. Signs of affection are potent. Researchers have identified emotional warmth, enjoyment, and delight at the top of the list as effective activators of attachment.

The ultimate gift is to make a child feel invited to exist in our presence exactly as he is, to express our delight in his very being. There are thousands of ways this invitation can be conveyed: in gesture, in words, in symbols, and in actions. The child must know that she is wanted, special, significant, valued, appreciated, missed, and enjoyed.

Repeated experiences of separation or rejection following the powerful attachments created by sex can create a vulnerability that is too much to bear. Such experiences induce emotional scarring and hardening.

One needs to know one’s own mind enough to extend an invitation to another, or to turn down another’s invitation. We need a self-preserving instinct to value autonomy, to experience personal boundaries, to be able to say no. For healthy sexuality we need the freedom not to become sexually involved or at least not to feel compelled to make things work at all costs. Not having reached the place where it is more important to be one’s own person than to belong to someone or to possess someone, the adolescent is dangerously susceptible.

children are teachable by even those to whom they are not attached. When these crucial learning processes are suppressed, learning becomes dependent on one dynamic alone: attachment. Students hamstrung by their lack of emergence, integration, or adaptability can learn only when attachment is somehow involved.

One of the ultimate costs of emotional hardening is that sex loses its potency as a bonding agent. The long-term effect is soul-numbing, impairing young people’s capacity to enter into relationships in which true contact and intimacy are possible. Sex eventually becomes a nonvulnerable attachment activity. It can even be addictive because it momentarily pacifies attachment hunger without ever fulfilling it. The divorce of sex from vulnerability may have a liberating effect on sexual behavior, but it derives from a dark place of emotional desensitization.

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.

We have to be able to manage mixed feelings, thoughts, and impulses. The yearning to belong to another has to coexist with the desire to be one’s own person; the maintaining of boundaries must mix with the passion to merge with another. Also required, of course, is the ability to consider both the present and the future.

The power we have lost is the power to command our children’s attention, to solicit their good intentions, to evoke their deference and secure their cooperation. Without these four abilities, all we have left is coercion or bribery.

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.

Attention given at the request of the child is never satisfactory. It leaves an uncertainty that the parent is only responding to demands, not giving herself voluntarily to the child. The solution is to seize the moment, to invite contact exactly when the child is not demanding it. The foundation of a child’s true self esteem is being accepted, loved, and enjoyed by the parents exactly as he is.

We must not wait for their confused look, but confidently assume our position in their life as guide and interpreter. A little bit of orienting at the beginning of the day can go a long way in keeping them close: “this is what we’re doing today… this is where I’ll be… what is special about this day is… what I had in mind for this evening is… I’d like you to meet so and so… this is who will be taking care of you… this is who to ask if you need help… only 3 days until so and so”. Acting as a child’s compass point engages the attachment instincts.

The secret of parenting is not in what a parent does but rather who the parent is to a child.

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Managing a child who is not following our direction is difficult enough, but trying to control a child under someone else’s command is next to impossible. What was meant to replace us is not someone else giving orders but maturity—that is, a grown-up person’s own capacity to make decisions and to choose the best course of action for herself.