Katharine on Hold On to Your Kids

I see Katharine's been writing about Gordon Neufeld's Hold On to Your Kids, a subject I've been planning to get back to:

• How do people hold on to their kids: the Tiger Mother and the immigrant parent
• Problems with child-centered "sociability," II: digesting those excerpts
• What kinds of peer groups and parenting styles are most problematic for "peer orientation"?

Speaking as an n of 1, I can attest that raising a child in an adult-oriented house produces a terrific kid. C. is 18 now, and he's exactly the person we hoped he'd be (knock on wood). We hear the same from his teachers. Last week Ed was in a meeting with one of C's first-semester professors, and when she realized C. was Ed's son, she said C. was "very important to the course."

The reason C. could be "important" to a freshman seminar, I assume, is that he is naturally attuned to adults. Now that I've read Neufeld, I realize C. has essentially none of that .... I don't know what to call it.

That 'clubby,' secret-identity feeling you get from many adolescents----?

C. feels at home with adults. Put it that way.

The parent/teacher connection struck me so forcefully when I read Neufeld side-by-side with Steinberg (Beyond the Classroom). Kids raised in permissive homes, Steinberg shows, are peer-oriented; kids raised in authoritative homes are oriented toward adults: parents and teachers.

Steinberg's research shows that adult-orientation is highly productive in terms of school and entry-level jobs. By the time kids are 18, the difference between peer-orientation and adult-orientation is significant..

For the record, I don't really know how we raised an adult-oriented teen in a peer-oriented culture. Until 2 months ago I'd never heard of Neufeld, and when my kids were little I shared with everyone else the same unexamined set of beliefs about the importance of peer socialization -- maybe especially so given the fact that out typical child, C., had two autistic brothers.

I can't say that I worried about socialization (I didn't), but I did fret about it from time to time....I wondered whether C. was too shy, and when he was little I was constantly shlepping him to play dates hither and yon. But as he grew older I didn't bother with the play dates. C. always had a solid group of friends who were and are good kids; in fact, he still has today almost every friend he made when he was as young as age 4. He has another set of friends from his Jesuit high school and a new group now at NYU. The fact that C. had friends seemed good enough to me, so I spent my time worrying about math.

As to why he was an adult-oriented child, I'm guessing the reasons include:

• Authoritative parenting - both Ed and I had authoritative parents ourselves; permissive parenting is pretty foreign to our experience. While Neufeld doesn't talk about authoritative parenting (at least not in the first third of his book) I suspect authoritative parenting per se probably produces adult-orientation.
•  2 siblings with autism - from early days, I knew C. would one day be responsible for his siblings, and that fact has always been front and center. My goal has been to socialize C. to understand and welcome this fact -- not to protect him from knowledge of his fate, as other parents of disabled kids sometimes seem to do. As a direct result, C. is great working with disabled kids. I don't (necessarily) see him going into special education, but he would be terrific as a SPED teacher or therapist. 
• Strength in numbers - because of the 2 boys with autism, we have always had a crazy number of adults in the house. As I write now, there are 3 adults in the house and just one child, Andrew. I remember years ago, reading Jean Kerr I think it was, on the subject of having twins. As I recall, she said that when it's 2 parents and 1 kid, you're in charge. When suddenly it's 2 parents and 3 kids (the Kerrs had a singleton and then twins same way Ed and I did), suddenly you're outnumbered and everything changes. In our house, the grown-ups have had parity with the kids.

on the other hand

follow on to Why you don't want your child to be popular

Last October, the National Bureau of Economic Research distributed a study showing a compelling correlation between high-school popularity—measured by how many “friendship nominations” each kid received from their peers—and future earnings in boys. Thirty-five years later, the authors estimated, boys who ranked in the 80th percentile of popularity earned, on average, 10 percent more than those in the 20th. There are obvious chicken-and-egg questions in all studies like this; maybe these kids were already destined for dominance, which is why they were popular. But Gabriella Conti, an economist and first author of the paper, notes that she and her colleagues took into consideration the personality traits of their subjects, measuring their levels of openness, agreeableness, extroversion, and so forth. “And adolescent popularity is predictive beyond them,” she says, “which tells me this is about more than just personality. It’s about interpersonal relations. High school is when you learn how to master social relationships—and to understand how, basically, to ‘play the game.’ ” Or don’t.

So...you want your child to be well-liked but not popular?

Is that it?

Maybe so. Another study found that 10th grade girls who self-identified as brainy fared well compared to "princesses":

At 24, the princesses had lower self-esteem than the brainy girls, which certainly wasn’t true when they were 16.

Why You Never Truly Leave High School
By Jennifer Senior Published Jan 20, 2013 | New York Magazine

why you don't want your child to be popular

More from Why You Truly Never Leave High School:

In 2007, for instance, Steinberg and two colleagues surveyed hundreds of adolescents in two midwestern communities, asking them to decide which category they most identified with: Jocks, Populars, Brains, Normals, Druggie/Toughs, Outcasts, or None. They also asked a subsample of those kids to make the same assessment of their peers. Then they compared results.

Some were predictable. The kids who were identified as Druggies, Normals, or Jocks, for example, tended to see themselves in the same way. What was surprising was the self-assessment of the kids others thought were popular. Just 27 percent in one study and 37 in a similar, second study in the same paper saw themselves as campus celebrities. Yes, a few declared themselves Jocks, perhaps just as prestigious. But more were inclined to view themselves either as normal or none of the above.

Faris’s research on aggression in high-school students may help account for this gap between reputation and self-­perception. One of his findings is obvious: The more concerned kids are with popularity, the more aggressive they are. But another finding isn’t: Kids become more vulnerable to aggression as their popularity increases, unless they’re at the very top of the status heap. “It’s social combat,” he explains. “Think about it: There’s not much instrumental value to gossiping about a wallflower. There’s value to gossiping about your rivals.” The higher kids climb, in other words, the more precariously balanced they feel, unless they’re standing on the square head of the totem pole. It therefore stands to reason that many popular kids don’t see themselves as popular, or at least feel less powerful than they loom. Their perch is too fragile.

"sadistically unhealthy places to send adolescents"

Two people have told me about this article now: Why You Never Truly Leave High School

I love this line:

“Ironically, one of the reasons many of us have chosen to educate our own is precisely this very issue of socialization! Children spending time with individuals of all ages more closely resembles real life than does a same-age school setting.”

More:

Casey and two of her colleagues, Francis Lee and Siobhan Pattwell, were part of a team that co-published a startling paper last year showing that adolescents—both mice and humans—were far less capable of dialing back their fear response than children or adults.

[snip]

...if humans really do feel things most intensely during adolescence, and if, at this same developmental moment, they also happen to be working out an identity for the first time—“sometimes morbidly, often curiously, preoccupied with what they appear to be in the eyes of others as compared with what they feel they are,” as the psychoanalyst Erik Erikson wrote—then it seems safe to say this: Most American high schools are almost sadistically unhealthy places to send adolescents.

Until the Great Depression, the majority of American adolescents didn’t even graduate from high school. Once kids hit their teen years, they did a variety of things: farmed, helped run the home, earned a regular wage. Before the banning of child labor, they worked in factories and textile mills and mines. All were different roads to adulthood; many were undesirable, if not outright Dickensian. But these disparate paths did arguably have one virtue in common: They placed adolescent children alongside adults. They were not sequestered as they matured. Now teens live in a biosphere of their own. In their recent book Escaping the Endless Adolescence, psychologists Joseph and Claudia Worrell Allen note that teenagers today spend just 16 hours per week interacting with adults and 60 with their cohort. One century ago, it was almost exactly the reverse.

Something happens when children spend so much time apart from adult company. They start to generate a culture with independent values and priorities. James Coleman, a renowned mid-century sociologist, was among the first to analyze that culture in his seminal 1961 work, The Adolescent Society, and he wasn’t very impressed. “Our society has within its midst a set of small teen-age societies,” he wrote, “which focus teen-age interests and attitudes on things far removed from adult responsibilities.” Yes, his words were prudish, but many parents have had some version of these misgivings ever since, especially those who’ve consciously opted not to send their kids into the Roman amphi­theater. (From the website of the National Home Education Network: “Ironically, one of the reasons many of us have chosen to educate our own is precisely this very issue of socialization! Children spending time with individuals of all ages more closely resembles real life than does a same-age school setting.”)

In fact, one of the reasons that high schools may produce such peculiar value systems is precisely because the people there have little in common, except their ages. “These are people in a large box without any clear, predetermined way of sorting out status,” says Robert Faris, a sociologist at UC Davis who’s spent a lot of time studying high-school aggression. “There’s no natural connection between them.” Such a situation, in his view, is likely to reward aggression.

By Jennifer Senior
Published Jan 20, 2013
New York Magazine

news to me

from Education Week:

We hear it all the time. "Students should take ownership of their school."

7 Ways to Increase Student Ownership
By Jennifer Barnett
January 8, 2013

That reminds me.

Back when C. was in middle school, all the students were required to pick up trash strewn around outside by one small group of students. The assistant principal told parents the reason for the policy was that when some students are required to pick up other students' trash, they "take ownership of the school."

When I shared the rationale with C, he said, "But if it's our school, then it's our trash, too, and we don't have to pick it up if we don't want to."

In the edu-world words never mean what you think they mean.

I believe it was Glen who pointed that out.

Cells and bells, the video

I've just watched the "open spaces" video a couple of times. I don't see a single adult in any of the images. No classrooms, either. Just "think tanks" and "breakout rooms" and "wide hallways" and the like.

From the video:

LIBRARIES evolve into vibrant extensions of classroom space.
THINK-TANKS or breakout rooms support individual or group work space.
OPEN COMMON AREAS allow students to meet and gather informally.

And this:

When it comes to building proposals, as opposed to curriculum and teaching methods, citizens actually have a vote.

Mine is No.

Cells and bells

That's a new one on me.

Cells and bells.

Meaning: old-timey school buildings with old-timey teacher-dominated classrooms (sage on the stage) and old-timey bells:

A building alone does not create a school culture. But research shows that school buildings can affect students' morale and academic performance. Now, school officials are moving away from the "cells and bells" design marked by long, locker-lined hallways of windowless classrooms, and toward more open, flexible buildings aimed at creating a sense of community and collaboration.

Such new designs tie together a shift to a more technology-driven, collaborative, student-centered approach to education with an effort to improve students' safety, engagement, and community.

[snip]

Increasingly, the spaces themselves are designed to foster student connection. Traditional cafeterias in some schools have been replaced with more café-like areas where students might work and eat at the same time. Windows are opened to improve daytime lighting and indoor-air quality. Hallways are broadened and lockers removed to reduce clutter and chaos.

Many newer buildings also are "more learning-focused, less teacher-focused," says Craig Mason, an architect with the DLR Group, based in Overland Park, Kan. Some school buildings include breakout spaces for students to meet in small groups, or have windows specifically so a group can work outside while still being supervised.

Schools' Design Can Play Role in Safety, Student Engagement
By Jaclyn Zubrzycki
Published in Print: January 10, 2013, as Building Toward a Positive Climate

I'm asking myself: what would Gordon say?

School buildings are being intentionally designed to foster peer orientation? To minimize teacher influence?

OK, fine. One more reason to vote down bond propositions.

Meanwhile, how come the ed establishment has a lock on slogans that rhyme?

• guide on the side
• sage on the stage
• chalk and talk
• drill and kill
• cells and bells

I need a rhyme.

Laura Z on parents as guides on the side

re: Gordon Neufeld's Hold Onto Your Kids, Laura in AZ said...

This is a wonderful book! One of the best I've ever read, period!

Oh, yes, when you don't go with the flow with your child. I too tried with my daughter - from Pre-school through 4th grade. Not knowing she had Asperger's - though she is very high functioning. The schools tried to make her social, tried to make my "square-peg" fit into the "round-hole" of the whole social set-up. When it didn't work, it was my fault. (This was before her diagnosis).

Then when we started homeschooling, everything became so much easier for my daughter, because she had so much less stress! But the accusations came that I was sheltering her (Er... yeah, that's kinda my job), she wasn't getting "socialized" (We were keeping it at healthier levels and not overwhelming her), etc.

It all came down to the arguments given in the book - modern society really believes that especially as children get older they should raise themselves and each other. Parents are only to be "friends" or perhaps "Guides on the Side." We have lost our place of authority. How many parents even ask little 2 or 3 year-olds what they want to wear? Or what they want to eat?

parent-oriented colleges

C. tells me that at his friend's Jesuit college, the R.A. had the students all make Christmas cards for their parents.

That would NEVER happen at NYU.

NYU students don't have parents.

At least, that's the vibe you get attending 'Parents' Day, which didn't feel like a Parents Day at all. When the various speakers referred to our children, they used the term "your student."

"Your student" is the same formulation administrators here in my peer-oriented school district always used, even for kids as young as 10.

"Please share with your student."

"Please discuss with your student." (My personal favorite: the letter home asking us to discuss bomb threats with our student.)

I don't have a student, bub! (Well, actually I do.)

I have a child.

C. told me the Christmas card story and said, "I wish I'd gone to a Catholic college."

I wish he had, too.

update from the Comments:

I teach at a Catholic college, and my husband used to teach at one of the elite Jesuit colleges. Trust me, they aren't worth drooling over. The elite Jesuit college was pretty much like small elite liberal arts colleges of all stripes, except the student body was 95% Irish. My large Catholic university has all the woes of large private universities everywhere, and the Catholicism mainly shows up in the form of trying to force professors to tack service learning into every course. Your kid is better off at NYU.

C.'s friend is attending a Jesuit college, come to think of it. Not sure whether it's an elite Jesuit college. C. will know.

only children and peer orientation

re: Hold On to Your Kids: Why Parents Need to Matter More than Peers by Gordon Neufeld and Gabor Maté

C (freshman in college & home for Christmas) has been very interested in the Neufeld discussions Ed and I have been having.

The other night we were trying to figure out whether Neufeld would consider C's friends to be adult-oriented. We all thought he would. C is an adult-oriented teen and all of his friends are adult-oriented teens. One of C's friends is very adult-oriented, as a matter of fact, to the point that he specifically wants to chat with Ed and me when he and C. get together.

So then we were trying to figure out why some kids are adult-oriented when so many aren't. It's certainly not as if any of us set out to raise adult-oriented kids on purpose, or even knew there was an 'adult-oriented' option on the menu.

C. thought about it for a while, and then said that "only children" are more peer-oriented than children with brothers and sisters.

That was a shock. In my day, "only children" were presumed to be adult-oriented. Obviously we didn't have the term "adult-oriented," but we had the concept, at least where "only children" were concerned. Pace Neufeld, nobody thought the adult-orientation of "only children" was a good thing...

Assuming C. is right (I have no way of knowing), it strikes me that the explanation may be the changed culture children and teens (and adults) live in. Neufeld argues, and I agree, that our culture fosters peer orientation.

Although the cultural changes Neufeld describes were already happening when I was young, it's probably easier, today, for an 'only child' to become peer-oriented than it was when I was growing up. Parents don't have the same gravitational pull they used to, and even an 'only child' can escape their obit.

Children who have siblings are subject to the same peer pressures, but peer pressure does not eliminate sibling rivalry. Any child who has a brother or a sister must compete with that sibling for the parent's love, and the competition for the parent's love makes the parent more important.

Are siblings a protective factor in a peer-oriented youth culture?

I think it's possible.

Neufeld on shyness in adult-oriented kids

Shyness is not the problem we think it is

We usually think of shyness as a negative quality, something we would want children to overcome. Yet developmentally, even this apparent handicap has a useful function. Shyness is an attachment force, designed to shut the child down socially, discouraging any interaction with those outside her nexus of safe connections.

The shy child is timid around people she is not attached to. It is only to be expected that adult-oriented children are often socially naive and awkward around their peers, at least in the earlier grades. Peer-oriented kids, by contrast, appear to be socially successfu. This is their forte. They should know what is cool and what is not, what to wear and how to talk--they are applying most of their intelligence to reading from one another the cues on how to be and how to act.

Much of the sociability of peer-oriented children is the result of a loss of shyness. When peers replace adults, shyness is reversed. The child becomes shy with adults but gregarious in the company of peers. We see the child around her peers coming out of her shell, finding her tongue, presenting herself more confidently. The change in personality is impressive, and we are apt to give credit to the peer interaction. Surely, we tell ourselves, such a highly desirable outcome could not emanate from something problematic! Yet true social integration and real social ability--caring about others and considering the feelings of people they do not know--will not, in the long term, be the attributes fo the peer-oriented child.

Adult-oriented children are much slower to lose their shyness around their peers. What should eventually temper this shyness is not peer orientation but the psychological maturity that engenders a strong sense of self and the capacity for mixed feelings. The best way to deal with shyness is to promote warm relationships with the adults who care for and teach the child. With attachment in mind, it's not shyness we ought to be so concerned about but the lack of shyness of many of today's children.
Hold On to Your Kids: Why Parents Need to Matter More than Peers by Gordon Neufeld and Gabor Maté

This is the exact opposite of everything I've ever been told by anyone on the subject of children and parenting. Pretty much.

Shyness is a good thing?

Premature lack of shyness is a bad thing?

As I think about it, I realize that when I was a child people did have a category for premature loss of shyness, mainly relating to girls who were "sexually precocious."

Today, I'm pretty sure that a fair number of parents in my neck of the woods actively promote what my parents would have considered precocious sexuality.

That reminds me.

Back in Los Angeles one of the neighbors -- dear people, but also the subject of intermittent social opprobrium from the other moms on the block -- treated their 7-year old daughter (who had had a brief career as a beauty pageant contestant when she was two) and her friends to a birthday party .... where?

Was it Planet Hollywood?

Something like that. An adult venue. They rented the place out and threw a big bash for twenty 7-year old girls.

My neighbor further down the street thought the whole thing was crazy.

"What are they going to do when she turns 8?" she said. "Fly them to Vegas?"

I loved that street.

how were teenagers were invented?

the answer: technology!

"Hold On to Your Kids" and "authoritative parenting"

re: Hold On to Your Kids: Why Parents Need to Matter More than Peers by Gordon Neufeld and Gabor Maté

I'm only a few pages into Hold On to Your Kids but already I feel my entire parental life rushing before my eyes: from Neufeld's perspective, everything looks different.

Ed and I are "authoritative parents," so much so that we ended up pulling C. out of public school and sending him to an "authoritative" high school (a Jesuit school).

"Authoritative parenting" is warm/strict (in Doug Lemov's terms). Actually, it's warm/strict combined with 'autonomy,' which means autonomy of thought, not behavior. Teenagers being raised by authoritative parents are free to think whatever they please without incurring the wrath of their parents. But the rules stand.

With authoritative parenting, warmth is as important as strictness; without the warmth you have authoritarian parenting, which does not work. But the name American psychologists have given to effective parenting is authoritative parenting, and I have always thought about "authoritative parenting" in terms of parental authority first and foremast. I took the warmth for granted.

Reading Neufeld, I think that's wrong.

I think the essence of authoritative parenting is that the parent-child attachment remains quite strong even through the teen years and even in the midst of a "youth culture."

A few minutes ago, I pulled out my copy of Steinberg's Beyond the Classroom and tracked down this passage, which I remembered from the book. Although it made a big impression on me when I first read it years ago, today I discover that it's almost a throwaway:

Adolescents from permissive homes are in some ways a mirror image of those from authoritarian homes. On measures of misbehavior and lack of compliance with adult authority, permissively raised adolescents often appear to be in some trouble. Their drug and alcohol use is higher than other adolescents, their school performance is lower, and their orientation toward school is weaker. All of this suggest some reluctance, or perhaps difficulty in buying into the values and norms of adults (most of whom would counsel staying out of trouble and doing well in school). At the same time, though, the adolescents from permissive homes report a level of self-assurance, confidence, and social poise comparable to that seen in the teenagers from authoritative households. Especially attuned to their peers, adolescents from permissive homes are both more capable in social situations with their age mates and more susceptible to their friends' influence. All in all, it appears as if parental permissiveness leads teenagers to be relatively more oriented toward their peers, and less oriented toward their parents and other adults, such as teachers.

The differences we observed among adolescents from authoritative, authoritarian, and permissive homes point once again to the power of authoritative parenting---this time, during adolescence--as an approach to child-rearing that protects adolescents from getting into trouble while at the same time promoting their maturity and successful school performance.

This may be the only passage in the book that addresses the subject of peer versus adult orientation. The rest of the book takes it as a given that all teens are effectively 'raised' by other teens (although that is not the way Steinberg puts it): that this is a natural state of affairs.

But it's not. A separate "youth culture" or "generation gap" is a relatively new phenomenon. The word "teenager" didn't even exist until after World War II.

"Hold On to Your Kids"

For a number of years, now, I've been thinking that schools per se are a bad idea. Not education, schools.

The way I put it to myself had to do with "age segregation." Every time I thought of middle school or high school, I would think: all those 14-year olds together in one place---eeek!

The age segregation of the middle school struck me as particularly unnatural. K-8 schools seemed a more constructive social grouping, and in fact there is evidence that K-8 schools are more constructive academically, although I'm not going to take the time to look it up just now. (Middle school posts here.)

In any event, age segregation bad is as far as I ever took this line of thought -- until this week, when I ordered Hold On to Your Kids: Why Parents Need to Matter More than Peers by Gordon Neufeld and Gabor Maté. Debbie S was raving about it, so I got it.

Neufeld's book is a revelation.

Neufeld puts into words the inchoate thoughts and intuitions I've had re: kids, schools, and parental authority (helicopter parent posts here).

Hold On to Your Kids argues that teens are being raised by teens -- and that our culture sees this historically unprecedented situation as normal and correct.

The chief and most damaging of the competing attachments that undermine parenting authority and parental love is the increasing bonding of our children with their peers. It is the thesis of this book that the disorder affecting the generations of young children and adolescents now heading toward adulthood is rooted in the lost orientation of children toward the nurturing adults in their lives....For the first time in history young people are turning for instruction, modeling, and guidance not to mothers, fathers, teachers, and other responsible adults but to people whom nature never intended to place in a parenting role--their own peers. They are not manageable, teachable, or maturing because they no longer take their cues from adults. Instead, children are being brought up by immature persons who cannot possibly guide them to maturity. They are being brought up by each other.

I imagine Neufeld and Maté are going to say that a school, depending upon its culture, can act to increase -- or to decrease -- "peer orientation," but we'll see.

That is certainly what I've observed.

More later.