When Gabor Maté’s eldest son was eight, his angry outbursts troubled his parents so much that they took him to see the renowned developmental psychologist, Gordon Neufeld. He talked to Maté and his wife, Rae. Then he talked to their son, Daniel. And he told them, “Your son doesn’t have a problem. You do.” Instead of having “this troubled kid” on their hands, Maté and Rae needed to address their own behaviour – a revelation that was both “daunting and empowering”, Maté says.
Nearly 20 years later, Maté, an author and physician based in Vancouver, teamed up with Neufeld to write a book based on the latter’s ideas, Hold On To Your Kids: Why Parents Need To Matter More Than Peers. It has been translated into 15 languages and is now finally published in the UK.
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. But what parents need to understand, Maté and Neufeld argue, is that challenging behaviours are in fact “not behavioural problems, but a relationship problem”.
At the heart of this relationship problem is something Neufeld and Maté call “peer orientation”. Some may view an increasing attachment to peers as a sign of maturation. Not so, Maté says, if that attachment supplants the primary one to caregivers. And what should you do if you have lost your child to their peers? Reclaim them, he says.
This is what Maté did with his own daughter when she was 15. “I decided, ‘I’m just going to reclaim her,’” he says. Can a relationship really be forged so unilaterally? “Well, she wasn’t that concerned about spending time with me in general,” Maté admits. But he wanted to be with her and she liked the idea of eating out, so once a week they went for dinner. For years, they kept their date. Sometimes the dinners went badly, but the next week they’d be back again, Maté says. Those evenings became a sacred space. 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. “But it happened.”
By the time he wrote Hold On To Your Kids, Maté says, he had made every mistake in the book. “And I mean every mistake in this book.”
Some of these mistakes are specific, such as using time out, a technique Maté rejects as “based on fear”. Others include using a nagging, angry or cold voice, wielding adversarial discipline or neglecting to spend sufficient time with your children. 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.
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. “They’re useless,” Maté says.
If that sounds rich coming from someone who has co-authored a parenting book, Maté says his and Neufeld’s mission is simply “to validate parenting instincts” in the face of a cultural onslaught against them. The advice to leave a baby to cry at night, to isolate a child who has misbehaved are examples of “parenting practices [that] ride roughshod over a parent’s instincts,” Maté says, sounding passionate. “Talk to mothers and see how they feel when they’re doing that. They do it. But how do they feel? They are told by the parenting experts to ignore their own gut feelings at a child’s desperation.”
When you get down to the nitty-gritty, instinctive parenting sounds pretty straightforward: speak nicely to your kids, treat them as you would any loved one, be ready with a hug, avoid overuse of your phone in their company, spend time with them, solicit their good intentions. Essentially, think of yourself as in a relationship with them. “This is obvious stuff if you are connected to your parenting instincts,” Maté says. But as children grow, those instincts become harder to notice, let alone follow.
“This is what I wish I’d understood as a parent; consciously understood,” Maté, 75, says. “Take a 10-year-old child. How many years have you got left with them? When they are still under your roof, under your direction? Well, what is your goal for those years?” Looking back on his life “from above”, he says, he can see that his own goal “was to be a successful and busy and high-accomplishing physician. And that’s how I lived my life.”
To any parent wishing to hold on to a child or win back a “lost” one, he advises: “Evaluate how the architecture of your life supports that intention.”
I assume he means work fewer hours; but since the book is all about honing instincts, he will say only, “You need to make a decision as to how much of that working life is essential and how much is discretionary.” Even slivers of time help: a parent who comes home late can pop into a child’s room for a quick catch-up if they are awake.
It helps to clear time at weekends to spend with your child. Above all, create an atmosphere at home that is inviting. If older children respond coolly to this assault on their affections, “Stay patient,” Maté says. “You don’t take the rejections personally. You hang in there. You are wooing the child back into the relationship.”
A lot of my own relationship seems to be spent running up and down stairs to check that the computer has been shut down, I say. “Take the focus off the technicalities of how to control the kids and their media. Get back to work on the relationship,” Maté answers. Still, within the context of even the best-intentioned relationship, it’s hard to know how far to retain control without seeming too controlling.
“You wouldn’t give a two-year-old whisky!” Maté shoots back. “Is that a question of control? Or is that saving a child from something unhealthy?” His sonorous voice quickens. “When you say control, it’s leadership. Once it becomes control, you have already lost the battle.” A strong relationship provides caregivers with the authority to limit unhealthy attachments. “Tell them, ‘You can do this, but only for half an hour a day.’”
That’s what I do, I say, but 30 minutes screen time still morphs into 40. This doesn’t trouble Maté, however, who thinks overshooting by only 10 minutes is “great… It’s a question of degree and having some latitude.”
The idea that failing in a small way might count as success comes as a huge relief. I can’t help wondering how many things, even as basic as warmth and a little latitude, parents should know, but have learned – or been taught – to ignore. Maybe, as Maté says, we can all be “brought back to instinct”.
How to reattach
‘Collect’ your children: Spend time with them when they wake up, when they come in from school, at family meals, when they go to bed. It’s the intention and awareness that makes a difference. Even two minutes can provide “a dose of fulfilling connection”.
Parents set the rules: “You’ll know when some negotiation is advisable and when it isn’t.”
Check your attitude: Instead of shouting or texting when it’s dinner time, walk up stairs and speak to them. If that requires more energy than you have, Maté insists this is not an energy issue, but “an attitude issue”.
Don’t try to control. Try to lead: If you find yourself always getting into a standoff with your child, “you’d better not force the issue, because you are just going to create conflict”. Don’t try to control, Maté says. Work on rebuilding the relationship.
Hold off giving your child a mobile phone for as long as possible: Maté is reluctant to be prescriptive as far as technology is concerned
• Hold On To Your Kids is published by Ebury Press. To order a copy for £8.79 (RRP £9.99), go to guardianbookshop.co.uk or call 0330 333 6846.
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