Dr. Neufeld’s Hold On to Your Kids

Hold On to Your Kids: Why Parents Need to Matter More Than Peers

This book by Dr. Gordon Neufeld, with writing help from Dr. Gabor Maté, is about the pivotal importance of children’s relationships to those responsible for them and the devastating impact in today’s society of competing attachments with peers. However it is much more than a book on peer orientation: it is about parenting with relationship in mind. This book restores parents to their natural intuition, confronting such relationship-devastating devices as time-outs and using what children care about against them.

Offering effective strategies for preserving and restoring the child-to-parent relationship, this book provides refreshing natural alternatives to today’s contrived methods of behaviour control. The content is relevant to parents of children of any age, from infants right through to adult children. Readers have commonly commented on how much hardship and confusion they could have avoided had this material been available to them right from the beginning.

When the original edition was released in 2004, it was just before the emergence of Facebook and other social media. In retrospect, the book amply foreshadowed, but could not fully have pictured, the impact of the digital revolution that followed. The book was re-released in 2013 with additional chapters on raising children in a digital world.

This bestselling book is now available in thirty-one translations including French, Spanish, Italian, German, Russian, Hungarian, Dutch, Portuguese (both Portugal and Brazil versions), Hebrew, Swedish, Norwegian, Japanese, Korean, Polish, Chinese, and Ukrainian, to name some. More translations are being published on a regular basis. See below for a full list of available translations, with links to publishers.

Study Guide

Created in October 2021, the Hold On To Your Kids Study Guide includes chapter-by-chapter discussion questions as well as an abundant collection of additional resources.

Hold On to Your Kids is the rare book that has become more, rather than less, relevant as the years have passed. Dr. Neufeld’s highly readable exploration of the phenomenon of peer orientation–what it is, how it impedes healthy development and what we can do to reverse its adverse effects–has transformed the lives of many families with its vital message. 

Visit our Study Guides page to request a FREE copy.

Excerpt

To download Chapter One of the second edition (the Canadian paperback and American publications), click here. We hope it will give you enough of the feel and content of the book that you will be able to judge whether it is worth your time and energy to read. Of course, we hope that this excerpt will whet your appetite for more. The full edition should be at a bookstore near you.

Reviews & Testimonials

…meticulous exploration of the problem… numerous solutions for reestablishing a caring adult hierarchy. Beautifully written, this terrific, poignant book is already a bestseller in Canada.

Publishers Weekly (starred review)

…visionary book that goes beyond the usual explanations to illuminate a crisis of unrecognized proportions.

Peter A. Levine Ph.D., International teacher and author of the best selling books: Waking the Tiger, Healing Trauma and It Won’t Hurt Forever, Guiding Your Child through Trauma

The thoughts and perspectives presented by the authors are informative — even inspirational — for those who choose to dedicate their lives and energy to students.

Bulletin of the National Association of Secondary School Principals

With original insights on parent-child attachments and how parents can restore them, this is a book for revitalizing families and rekindling the song in their children’s hearts.

Raffi, children’s troubadour, founder of Child Honoring Society Institute

His approach has the power to change, if not save, the lives of our children.

National Post

Rare and refreshing. . . . Here you will find family stories, an accessible description of brain development and sound information. You will also find hope.

The Globe and Mail

The authors present doable strategies to help parents help their kids. If their advice is taken to heart, there’s hope there will be more warmth and security all round.

The Georgia Straight

Your book has transformed my life and my parenting. The most incredible thing is that once I started following your suggestions, my daughter’s behaviour changed almost immediately. I am so convinced of the soundness and naturalness of your ideas that I have sent information about the book to all of my friends and family members – not just parents, but also teachers and people who have children in their lives generally.

A wonderful book and a powerful wakeup call to parents.

The Mall

This book represents a great step forward in grasping the sorrow and suffering that our kids are experiencing. Gordon Neufeld locates this suffering in the child’s loss of attachment to parents and increasing preoccupation with peers. Neufeld’s mind is powerful, capable of understanding the disastrous direction in which our culture is going. This is a brilliant book on the level of Paul Goodman’s Growing Up Absurd. Give a copy of this book to every parent you know.

Robert Bly, poet and author of The Sibling Society and Iron John

I thoroughly enjoyed your book on holding onto your kids. I have never read a more informative book on parenting ever. As a child who did not connect with my parents I was passing this legacy onto my children with little success of reaching my six year old daughter. She was well on her way to the eyeball rolling attitude you describe in your book. Lately I have implemented some of your techniques and have met with great results. I feel your book is ahead of its time and have recommended it for Dr. Laura’s “reading corner” online. I really hope you’ll write more books and enlighten parents in the future. Thank you!!!

I am weeping with relief, feeling truly understood for the first time in 60 years. I feel like I think Helen Keller may have felt when she suddenly had language to articulate her inner life. I can feel a lifetime logjam of anger and frustration loosening and letting go. Thank you.

As important as are Dr. Neufeld’s insights into how peers can replace parents, even more valuable is the comprehensive framework for understanding psychological/emotional development that he outlines. These insights alone were more than worth the price of the book and truly answer why parents matter. This book is more comprehensive and more in-depth than any other I’ve ever read.

As a counselor, parenting coach and mother of four, I was reading it from both a professional and personal perspective and found it hit home in many areas. It’s one of the best books on parenthood that I have read in a long time.

Your work has been of enormous benefit to all of us who have children or who work with kids in schools, etc. The biggest change may be in having HOPE that eroded relationships can be rebuilt, or that tentative relationships with our kids can be strengthened in enduring ways.

Table of Contents

This is the outline for the third edition of the book (released in 2013). It is the same as the second edition except for the addition of Part Six on raising children in the digital age.

Preface
Acknowledgments

PART ONE

The Phenomenon of Peer Orientation
1 — Why Parents Matter More Than Ever
2 — Skewed Attachments, Subverted Instincts
3 — Why We’ve Come Undone

PART TWO

Sabotaged: How Peer Orientation Undermines Parenting
4 — The Power to Parent Is Slipping Away
5 — From Help Turned to Hinderance: When Attachment Works Against Us
6 — Counterwill: Why Children Become Disobedient
7 — The Flatlining of Culture

PART THREE

Stuck in Immaturity: How Peer Orientation Stunts Heathy Development
8 — The Dangerous Flight from Feeling
9 — Stuck in Immaturity
10 — A Legacy of Aggression
11 — The Making of Bullies and Victims
12 — A Sexual Turn
13 — Unteachable Students

PART FOUR

How to Hold On to Our Kids (or How to Reclaim Them)
14 — Collecting Our Children
15 — Preserve the Ties That Empower
16 — Discipline That Does Not Divide

PART FIVE

Preventing Peer Orientation
17 — Don’t Court the Competition
18 — Re-create the Attachment Village

PART SIX

A Postscript for the Digital Age
19 — The Digital Revolution Bent Out of Shape
20 — A Matter of Timing

Glossary
Endnotes
Index

English Editions

Translations