Childhood Development & Parenting
The essential condition for healthy development is the child’s relationship with nurturing adults. Hold On to Your Kids, co-authored with the eminent developmental psychologist Dr. Gordon Neufeld, provides insight into the environmental factors necessary for healthy child development, how these conditions are increasingly under threat in today’s society, and how parents and teachers can maintain their leading position in face of the multiple challenges posed by modern culture.
Articles & Interviews
- Interview: Connecting with your Kids is key During the Pandemic. (Global News, December 2020)
- Trauma As Disconnection From The Self (ACES to Assets, July 2019)
- Childhood trauma ‘can lead to mental and physical illness’ (STV News, June 2019)
- Interview: Scots psyche leads to parents passing trauma on to children (The Scotsman, June 2019)
- If You Focus on Control, You Have Lost the battle’: How to Win Back Your Kids (The Guardian, March 2019)
- How Does Childhood Stress Manifest in Adulthood? (goop, March 2019)
- Parents Must Reclaim the Central Role if Growing Crisis Among Children Is to End, Suggests New Book (Irish Examiner, December 2018)
- How Our Childhood Shapes Every Aspect of Our Health with Dr. Gabor Maté (Dr. Chatterjee, November 2018)
- Through the Rearview: Adult Parent-Child Conflict (October 2018)
- HELLO AGAIN with Gabor & Daniel Maté Podcast Preview 2 (SoundCloud, September 2018)
- HELLO AGAIN with Gabor & Daniel Maté Podcast Preview 1 (SoundCloud, August 2018)
- Tots to Teen: Childhood Anxiety (CTV News Winnipeg, March 2018)
- Gabor Maté & son Daniel giveworkshop on relationships between parents, adult children (CBC News, May 2016)
- Addiction is a Response to Childhood Suffering: In Depth with Gabor Maté (The Fix January 2016)
- Explaining Daddy’s Addiction (Washington Post, October 2014)
- Conrad Black’s acquisitions compensate for lack of love (Ottawa Citizen, February 2008)
- If you’re stressed so is your kid (Times-Union, Albany, September 2011)
- “You’re Not the Boss of Me!” (Great Schools)
- A Scream for Unconditional Love (Future Primitive, January 2014)
Audio & Video
Audio
A wide-ranging interview with Jamie Kilstein and Allison Kilkenny; Citizen Radio (Breakthru Radio Network, U.S.A.):
- The Myth of Normal: Podcast with Guy Lawrence (September, 2020)
- Authority vs Power: Exclusive Preview with Daniel and Gabor Maté (August, 2018)
- Part One (2/20/10) – “the War on Drugs” and politics; drugs of abuse as painkillers; society, disconnection, and addiction; harm reduction and the Supervised Injection Site; stress and disease; environmental roots of ADD and other childhood issues.
- Part Two (2/24/10) – America’s overmedication; sympathy for Rush Limbaugh; Stephen Harper’s dead eyes; healthy anger and immunity; advice for addicts; what attracted Dr. Maté to addiction work?
Video
- The Revolution of Responsibility with Dr. Gabor Maté (Voiceclub, August 2018)
- Gabor and Daniel on the Parenting-Child Relationship (Hollyhock)
- Hello Again: A Fresh Start for Parents and Their Adult Children (Hollyhock, May 2016)
- The Biology of Loss and How to Heal From it (Healing our Children 2016 World Summit, March 2016)
- On Attachments and Conscious Parenting (Pathways to Family Wellness)
- Attachment = Wholeness and Health or Disease, Addiction, ADD and Violence (Michael Mendizza)
A series of videos by KidCare Canada:
- Introduction: Perspectives of a Renowned Physician and Author
- Love is not enough: Early Childcare and Emotional Development
- Fathers and Postpartum Dynamics
- Resilience
- Touch and Connection
- The Roots of Addiction
- No Two Children Have the Same Parents
- Postpartum Depression is Multigenerational
- Supporting Parents with Postpartum Depressions
Books
Hold On To Your Kids: Why Parents Need to Matter More Than Peers, examines parenting from the perspective of attachment theory to illuminate the crucial role parents must play in the upbringing of their children. This book was co-authored by Dr. Gordon Neufeld, a developmental and clinical psychologist.
FAQ
*For further support on this topic, please visit the website of Gordon Neufeld, which has plenty more excellent information about attachment-focused parenting, his area of expertise.
Q. Are you and your co-author Gordon Neufeld saying that kids shouldn’t have friends their own age?
A. Of course not. Peer relationships are part of natural human socialization. What’s developmentally unnatural, we claim, is that peer relationships have become the primary relationships in childrens’ lives – the relationships they care most about, have the highest emotional stake in, and the primary guiding light for their behaviours, culture, norms, and so on. This only seems “normal” to us in our society because we’ve lost touch with how nature meant things to be, which is for kids’ primary, orienting relationships to be with adults. Within the context of stable, secure attachments with responsible adult caregivers, peer socialization can happen in a safe and natural way.
Q. Haven’t so-called “peer problems” like bullying been around since the dawn of time?
A. Yes, they have. As long as humans have existed, we’ve been exploiting each other’s vulnerabilities to gain dominance. And certainly, children have not been exempt from that tendency. What’s different now is that the preponderance seems to have increased significantly – everywhere you turn, in virtually every school system, it’s now considered an epidemic on the rise. It’s possible that we’ve become more sensitized to it, but that can’t on its own account for the dramatic rise in indicence of late.
What’s also different is that kids used to look upon bullies as outsiders and misfits, whereas nowadays bullying behaviour is often a sign of social power and status. You find entire groups of “popular” kids picking on the unpopular ones – the “strong” many persecuting the weak “few” – and this is considered normal. Technology and social media, which are very much geared and marketed toward strengthening the peer culture, give kids an additional power to do each other significant emotional harm. We’ve never seen such levels of childhood and teen violence and suicide as we do in today’s Western society, particularly in North America.
All of this results, we argue, from the peer culture taking precedence over safe, orienting attachments with adults. And all of the anti-bullying “education” programs in the world won’t make a difference unless this fundamental, and disastrous, phenomenon is faced and dealt with.