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One of the most surprising claims that Dr. Gabor Maté makes in “Hold on to your Kids”, the book he co-wrote with Dr. Gordon Neufeld, is that youth culture didn’t exist until after the Second World War.
Maté, who visits Dublin later this month, says young people had their own interests – and while he agrees that there were aspects of culture that young people focussed in on, and cultural activities almost exclusively for the young – such as dating and courting – he claims there was not an antagonistic culture of youth rebelling against the older generation.. That’s a development of the postmodern age and it’s this cultural rebellion that has led to severe alienation between the generations; and to the crisis of today’s youth.
Humans are social creatures and are born with an instinct to attach. Humans aren’t unique in this. A duckling will immediately seek out its mother and if she is not around will attach to any living creature. Attachment is innate. “Most simply stated it is a force of attraction puling two bodies towards each other,” Maté explains. “In the human domain, attachment is the pursuit and preservation of proximity, emotionally, and psychologically.”
“A family cannot be a family without it,” he says.
Attachment doesn’t exist on its own. It flourishes in relationship to a symbiotic phenomenon; orientation. If attachment is therelationship that encourages imitation and nurturing, orientation is the direction of the leading part of that relationship.
A sailor guided by a compass is orientated towards a magnetic pole. But; if there were two magnetic poles that sailor would not be able to navigate successfully. He would be disorientated. A child who is orientated by peer attachments or, who is not primarily orientated by parental attachment becomes disorientated. When there are multiple attachments; for instance if a child has both peer, and parental attachment; there must be a dominant attachment. Children who are orientated primarily by their parental attachment can have peer attachments also, but these will not be in conflict with that parental attachment. Parents must be more important than peers.
This was a central thesis of Maté and Neufeld’s book. When attachment happens organically, as was typical in traditional societies, you are not even conscious of their existence. It’s when they are displaced that dysfunction enters family dynamics.
The modern world has brought on challenges that have seen the loss of parental attachment in the past seven decades. Increased mobility has meant that people are less rooted in their societies and that societies change rapidly. This has not just meant people spend more time travelling to work, but also that people more readily move their home to new places, leaving them less connected to extended family. In the urban landscape, people are living in larger population centres, but hardly know any of their neighbours.
People have less time to spend on the relationships within families, especially on the relationships with their children.
Society is more orientated to economy than humanity. We see this in the case of parents being encouraged – and in many cases, driven – by economic necessity to leave their children to others to mind. While this does achieve economies of scale (with some crèches having up to six children per adult) it can leave the children starved of the company of adult s to whom they are most attached at a crucial stage of development. In many cases, these children – starved of the nurturing attention of an adult – form attachment to the only person(s) physically available; other children. The obvious problem with this is that children don’t have the wisdom or the love and patience to nurture their peers and guide them. The attachment instinct means that children are meant to revolve around their parents, yet more and more children are revolving around each other.
The displaced attachment to peers – peers that are not invested in nurturing and leading the child for the child’s own benefit- that can start at the tender age before a child can even crawl, can lead a child to experience constant anxiety. It is a fear of rejection, because the attachment is conditional on fitting in. There is a strong argument to be made that the rise in anxiety, mental illness, suicide and depression amongst the young over the past several decades is rooted in the disorientation that comes from peer attachment and the fear of rejection by their peers.
ttachment is both simple and complex. It comes from a need to be loved. At the most basic level we attach through the “senses”. The child craves proximity and touch and this is the basis of the bond of attachment between child and parents. As the child gets familiar with their parents they start to imitate and attach through “sameness”. There are four more ways of attachment which integrate the bond deeper. Maté lists these as “belonging and loyalty,” “significance,” “feeling” as in feelings of affection and love etc, and “being known.”
If you look closely you can see that some of these are deeper recapitulations of other forms of attachment. For instance, “being known” is a psychological state of familiarity. That familiarity and comfort the child first gets through the senses – by seeing and touching and hearing their parent – they now feel on a psychological level.
But the “new normal” doesn’t allow for children to spend time with their parents and so in the past few generations children have displaced their attachment from their parents to their peers. Maté argues that the “new normal” is anything but normal.
Anyone who has read through the messages in teenager’s messenger groups, such as snapchat, can testify that they are typically complete gibberish. The teenagers seem to think these are supremely significant forums but a typical conversation might look like this:
“Hey
“Hey
“What’s up
“Nuttin. sup
“Jus chillin
“story?
“sup”
And on, and on..
What’s apparent is that there is nothing significant being discussed here, and it could have the child deeply engrossed for hours. This is the result of peer orientation, where the children are afraid of being judged and ostracised by their peer group.
Many parents wildly overestimate the importance of peer group acceptance to children. It seems like a big mistake. According to Maté inflating the importance of child peer attachment only creates conflicting attachments with conflicting messages.
Children who develop peer-attachment only develop the more basic forms of attachment. They imitate but don’t belong. They want significance but don’t feel known. They seem to assert their own independence, but their will is actually subverted by their peers.
Maté says: “The culture generated by peer orientation contains no wisdom, does not protect its members from themselves, creates only fleeting fads, and worships idols hollow of value or meaning. It symbolizes only the undeveloped ego of callow youth anddestroys child-parent attachments.”
Phew!
It’s an eloquent mouthful. And it also makes sense on an intuitive level.
In Hold on to your Kids, Maté and Neufeld make some extraordinary claims. It’s not all ‘Gentle Parenting’, mind you. You won’t find such statements as “the child is never wrong,” but you do get an utter rejection of brutality. There is a strange-seeming claim that the child cannot come into full maturation without being fully oriented towards the parent. One way of interpreting this is that the child has to be subverted to the parents will before they can develop their own will and autonomy.
This seeming paradox can only be properly understood as functional within a loving relationship, where the parent uses the Christian definition of love –“to will the good of the other” as Bishop Robert Barron defines it.
Maté gives examples of where cruelty and dysfunction dominate because the generational hierarchy was never properly established. Instances of astonishing bullying where Maté blames the lack of an attachment hierarchy with adults in charge. Hesays an instinct to dominate arises when there is a loss of appropriate attachment and youngsters are reduced to impulse and instinct. This is dominating without caring.
Maté is a deep thinker and he comes at these issues from a very different perspective than most of the readers of this site probably would; this reader included. Recent publications, such as Bad Therapy by Abigail Shrier, have questioned the validity of the psycho-therapeutic approach to all society’s ills. Shrier’s critique – well researched just like Maté’s – resonates with my impulses, but although Maté’s analysis has a touchy-feely sense to it, it makes a lot of sense. We are social creatures, and what I sense from Maté and Neufeld’s book is an understanding that we are spiritual creatures and we need spiritual nurture..
That might sound “Spooky Woo Woo” to the libertarian grounded in science and markets types. So be it! What Maté calls attachment I might call a spiritual connection between souls, and I don’t think he would disagree with that definition. What wassurprising to this reader was how much I found myself agreeing with his diagnosis.
What’s undeniable is that there is a lot of dysfunction in our society and that children are feeling it. The metrics over the past decades show that there is a rising crisis in the young and many of the proposed solutions we have, seem to be making it worse. We ignore this stuff at our, and more importantly, at our children’s peril.
Dr. Gabor Maté is a trauma expert. He will be visiting Dublin on Thursday, June 20 where he will be taking part in “Exploring the Myth of Normal in a Toxic Culture” in the RDS Jacqueline Kyne | Wellness Event Planning | Dublin, Ireland
Lorcán Mac Mathúna
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