Your Child Needs This More Than Friends

As children grow, their world enlarges and making friends becomes one of their most important missions. Friendships are good for a child’s self-esteem. A child with friends will definitely feel better about himself than one with no friends at all. It is normal for young children to have friends but there is something children need more than friends.

There is something children need more than friends – those are not my words but that of Gabor Mate and Gordon Neufeld, authors of the book Hold on to your Kids. 

In their book, the authors make the case that “friendship is based on a solid foundation of mutual respect and individuality,” and “friendship is not possible until a certain level of maturity is reached.” That means before they become mature, children are not remotely capable of having true friendships. And until they are capable of true friendship, they really do not need friends. What they need during their formative childhood years, even through the adolescence phase, is to form strong attachments with their parents and those who share responsibility to care for them. 

Children today are spending more time with their peers than they are with their parents. And this begins from an early age, from when they are in childcare to preschool and all the way to higher education, creating an attachment void between them and their parents. The attachment void typically occurs more with fathers than with mothers as fathers tend to spend more time at work. This means that fathers might have to work harder at establishing an attachment with their children.

When children are not well attached to their parents, they become more peer oriented, looking forward to being with their friends more than to being with their parents. Without a strong attachment between the parent and the child, the authority to parent gets eroded, making parenting much harder, even impossible. 

The secret of parenting is not in what a parent does but rather who the parent is to a child. When a child seeks contact and closeness with us, we become empowered as a nurturer, a comforter, a guide, a model, a teacher, or a coach. For a child well attached to us, we are her home base from which to venture into the world, her retreat to fall back to, her fountainhead of inspiration. All the parenting skills in the world cannot compensate for a lack of attachment relationship.  

By Parcsen Loke, Family Life Coach, Centre for Fathering