Hold On to Your Kids: Why Parents Need to Matter More Than Peers by Gordon Neufeld & Gabor Md Mate

Author:Gordon Neufeld & Gabor Md Mate [Neufeld, Gordon]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2008-11-18T23:00:00+00:00

In both of these cases we see that bullying among animals followed the destruction of the natural generational hierarchy. Among human children as well, the bullying phenomenon is a direct product of the subversion of the natural hierarchy, following on the loss of adult relationships. In Lord of the Flies the children are left to their own devices in the wake of a plane crash that none of their caregiving adults survive. In the killing of Reena Virk in Victoria, both the victim and her attackers were young people from troubled family backgrounds who were intensely peer-oriented, having lost emotional attachments with adults. Even the Victorian-era bully Flashman was the product of a system that took very young boys out of their homes and placed them in institutions where peer values dominated their social life and relationships. Bullying has always been an endemic feature of British boys’ schools.

The underlying problem is not the behavior itself but the loss of the natural attachment hierarchy with adults in charge. When youngsters can no longer look to parents to orient by, they are reduced to instinct and impulse. As I'll discuss, an instinct to dominate arises when there is a loss of appropriate attachments. Unfortunately, the dynamics of bullying behavior, so deeply rooted in instinct and emotion, are often overlooked. Only what's immediately visible to us, the bullying behavior and its deplorable impact on the victims, draw everyone's concern.

What's especially grabbing our attention is the epidemic of bullying in our schools. The traditional North American stereotype of the bully as a social misfit, socially disadvantaged, preying on the weak and the vulnerable but ostracized by the mainstream no longer holds. In our children's world, bullies are not outcasts. They often enjoy a large supporting cast, at least in school. A study published in 2000 by the American Psychological Association found that “many highly aggressive and anti-social boys in elementary school are rewarded with popularity.” The main author of this research was Philip Rodkin, a professor at Duke University in North Carolina. “When we think of aggressive kids, we tend to think of kids who are losers, stigmatized and out of control,” Dr. Rodkin said. “But about one third of these aggressive kids are ringleaders of groups in the classroom. These kids can have a lot of influence on their peers and on the classroom as a whole, even if they're a minority, because of their high status.”5

It is popular but misguided to believe that bullying originates in a moral failure or stems from abuse in the home or a lack of discipline or from exposure to violence in the entertainment media. Some aspects of bullying may arise from such sources, but bullying itself, I am convinced, is fundamentally an outcome of a failure of attachment. In each of the earlier examples, the children and animals had been orphaned, physically or emotionally and psychologically. To study the effect of peer-rearing, the monkeys had been separated from their parents; the elephants’ parents had been killed in a cull.

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