Well for some reason our culture has shifted from being driven by adult interaction and relationships to being driven by peer interactions and relationships. Children have simply become more likely to accept their social cues from the other children in their lives. This “peer oriented” lifestyle has in fact become so commonplace, it has many parents believing it is a natural step in a child’s overall growth and in turn they are encouraging their children to spend more time with their peers. This will naturally lead to them withdrawing from all adult influence. While it’s a good idea to help your child develop strong socialization skills with peers, you absolutely do not want to create an environment where they have an inability to also develop and maintain healthy bonds with the adults in their lives, specifically their parents. The hope is that if a child maintains their adult bonds they will be less likely to reject parental/adult influence, possibly even utilizing those authority figures on a more frequent basis.
When there is an absence of a more adult oriented world for a child, they will seek a way to fill that absence and their peers would naturally seem to be the most logical fit. There is extreme amounts of evidence demonstrating that spending time with our children creates an attachment which will serve as a strong base for them to confidently explore their world. Children do not ever stop seeking out this attachment and will find it where readily available. One of the primary issues is that a child’s peers simply do not have the skills to nurture this attachment as it will require some of their thinking patterns towards relationships, interactions, and other social cues to become skewed or completely changed.
As long as our children are our dependents, we need to allow them to do exactly that...Depend upon us! It is a fact that whoever has the greatest bond with a child will have the greatest influence over them. There is no reason a child cannot have a strong bond with a parent and a peer at the same time, however a peer will not be able to give a child is stability, attention, advice, food, shelter, protection, and an unpolluted world of knowledge and experience.
All too often we adults like to place lack of relationships under the umbrella excuse of “bad parenting skills”. Again, not true. Parents generally come with good instincts about being a parent, but they do all too often lose is their ability to enforce the power and authority they have as the parent. Keeping in mind the term "power" is not meant in the sense of force, manipulation, or fear which is usually what happens when we no longer feel in control. For when those feelings develop, all too often parents resort to threats, violence, or some other type of useless, unnecessary, and unproductive way of controlling the situation. The type of "power" this article is referring to is the power to create and maintain a relationship with their own child.
Dependency is a natural need of a child. Plan and simple, the person on which they feel most dependent will be the one who holds the most ability to help the child become a productive, responsive, responsible, highly functioning adult. Children may know what they want, but they don’t always know what they need. It is our job as the adults and the parents to put what we know to use and do our jobs. We need to create those bonds, form those relationships, and guide our children into what we know they can be.
For more information about this please read Gabor Matte’s book, “Hold On To Your Kids: Why Parents Matter”.
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