Relisten: Hold On To Your Kids - Dr. Gabor Maté

0:00Hi, I'm Hunter Clark Fields, and welcome to this special re-listen episode of the Mindful Mama podcast. Today, we revisit a profound conversation with Dr. Gabor Mate on the topic of hold on to your kids. Whether you're a new listener or revisiting this episode, Dr. Mate's wisdom offers valuable perspectives on nurturing our children's emotional well-being.

0:23Welcome to the Mindful Mama podcast. Here, it's about becoming a less irritable, more joyful parent. At Mindful Mama, we know that you cannot give what you do not have, and when you have calm and peace within, then you can give it to your children. I'm your host, Hunter Clark-Fields. I help smart, thoughtful parents stay calm so they can have strong, connected relationships with their children. I've been practicing mindfulness for over 25 years. I'm the creator of the Mindful Parenting course and teacher training, and I'm the author of the international bestseller, Raising Good Humans, Raising Good Humans Every Day, and the Raising Good Humans It's a guided journal.

1:03Let's dive into this enlightening discussion with Dr. Gabor Mate.

1:13If you're a nurse or future nurse, you know how challenging and rewarding this career can be. Hi there. I'm Nurse Mo, creator of the Straight A Nursing Podcast. I'd love for you to join me every Thursday as I teach nursing concepts and share tips to help you succeed in school and at the bedside. Each episode breaks down often complex information so it's easy to understand, so you can feel more confident whether you're taking an exam or taking care of patients. So subscribe to the Straighten Nursing Podcast, and I'll see you on Thursday. so dr gabor mate thank you so much for coming on the mindful parenting podcast i'm so glad you're here nice to be with you again yeah yeah i'm good good to talk to you again um and we're here to talk a little this time a little bit uh about your book that you wrote with gordon neufeld phd uh hold on to your kids and uh there's as i was like kind of looking into the you know of as I was reading the book and looking into this, it sounds like there was an article in The Guardian talking about how when your son was eight, you went to talk to Gordon Neufeld, you went to see him because he was this renowned developmental psychologist.

2:34And he said to you that your son doesn't have a problem, you do, that instead of having a troubled kid on your hand, you had to address your own behavior. I imagine that was kind of surprising to hear that news back then. It was surprising, but it was also empowering because our belief was, by the way, that was 40 years ago now. And that kid who was eight then is 48 now. Wow. He helped me write my most recent book. And then with a normal, and him and I are working on a new book together called Hello Again, A Fresh Start for Parents. and adult children. Oh, I love that. And I love the myth of normal.

3:17The shout out for that book as well. It's been 40 years since we met Gordon. And, you know, in this society, when kids, you know, exhibit troubling behaviors or disobedience or issues, we think there's something wrong with the kid. And our first go-to is let's fix the kid. And that's the attitude with which my wife and I consulted Gordon. But he said to us, no, he says the problem is not with him. His behavior and the troubling dynamics that he exhibits are a function of your relationship with him. And if you go to work on that relationship, his behavior will change. The behaviors of the child are a symptom of something awry in their relationship with their parents, which, of course, can be both disturbing for parents but also very empowering.

4:13Because it's a whole lot easier to work on yourself and to change their relationship than to try and fix the kid, which, by the way, doesn't work. And so in our society, we tend to either explain kids' issues by pathologizing them, giving them all these diagnoses, often medicating them, or we think it's a behavior that we try and fix in the child by either punishment or reward. And what we're missing is that the child's behaviors and ways of being are a function and a product of our relationship with them. And that's the main point of this book is that let's look at the relationship rather than trying to pathologize the child.

5:02You said that by the time you wrote Hold On to Your Kids, you made every mistake in the book. And I'm wondering, what are some of these mistakes that you made with your son that you were describing in that statement? Yeah, well, the biggest one, it's a very natural one, is my assumption that if I loved the kids, that'd be enough. but the love that the parent feels for the child although it's essential is not enough that love has to get through to the child it has to be received by the child and how that love is received depends very much on our relationship what i didn't know about the importance of building part-saving and holding sacred that relationship with our children.

5:53So let's not assume that loving them is enough. It's necessary, but it's not enough. That love is to be delivered and received by the child. And for the child's heart to remain open to receiving it depends very much on their safety, security, and trust in their relationship, which in our society, for many reasons, is undermined. So that's the first one. the second one which we don't talk about so much in Old Auntie Kids I talk about in my other books is that our own emotional states very much affect the child so that in order to take care of the child I take care of myself and how I live my life and what my relationship is with my spouse what the atmosphere is in the home what's the emotional resonance in the home not the child, because the kids are wired into our emotional states.

6:48So taking care of our own emotional states is absolutely essential. The third one, and this is one of the main themes of this book, Hold On To Your Kids, the subtitle being Why Parents Need To Matter More Than Peers, is that in our society there's been a hidden dynamic that basically robs parents of their capacity to deliver that love to their children, because their children are too early in age on acculturated to look to each other for modeling and for connection. And that's an unnatural product of something that's quite an aberration in human evolution and history, which is that most of the time, most of our kids are away from the parents.

7:40and we assume that they're still our kids but they're not because in the sense of being attached to children especially young children they attach to who they're with and when they spend most of their time from an earlier john in the company of their peers gradually that attachment relationship that's meant to be primarily with the adults and the parents is transferred to the peer group and peer group then becomes dominant in children's thinking, how to be, how to walk, how to talk, what shoes to wear, what values to uphold, what values to reject. And so that basically there's this competition with the adult values and adult intentions so that almost for the first time in history, children are getting most of their influences from immature peers.

8:31and immature peers cannot guide one another to maturity by definition. This is an aberration in human history and human existence. And essentially what it means is we lose the power to parent because the power to parent doesn't come contrary to what some people think because we're bigger and smarter and stronger. It comes from kids wanting to belong to us. It comes from people, kids wanting to attach to us, to connect with us. And that's what gives us the natural authority so we don't have to become authoritarians. When we lose our natural authority, we try to become authoritarian and force our authority, the hierarchy, by force, which pushes kids further away from us.

9:16So those are all the mistakes that we made. That must have been an incredibly frustrating time. There's a lot, obviously, to talk about here. you're you know if I love my kid that will be enough the idea that we miss that our own emotional state matters enormously that the peer orientation and then and then that that attachment piece there's there's so much there I mean what did at that time just to kind of bring it back to kind of you personally and your wife what where did you start what did you what did you do with that information? Where did you start with it? Well, I wish I could say that overnight, magically, we turned things around.

9:59Wouldn't that be nice?

10:03But we still had our own issues to work out. But I can tell you that this book was published originally almost 30 years ago now. No, sorry, 20 years ago now. And what we've been told internationally, it's been published in over 30 languages, and what we've been told internationally is that in a lot of families reading the book immediately made a huge difference. And the difference it made for us as well is that we started looking at what in the home life brings the child closer to us and what drives him further away. And not to see his behaviors as something that now we have to react to and control, but instead to create conditions where you want to connect with us, want to belong to us, so that it will naturally heed our guidance.

11:03And we did that imperfectly, but to the extent that we did, it really made a difference.

11:13Stay tuned for more Mindful Mama podcasts right after this break. Grownups, if there's a child in your life who is interested in, curious about, or fascinated by people and places from history, then my podcast, The Past and the Curious, might just be a hit in your home. From the invention of microscopes, to world-traveling dogs, to fashions of the 1890s, gold rush ghost towns, and audiences going wild for walking competitions, we've got a little bit of it all. hosted by children's author and museum educator mick sullivan that's me the show is fun funny engaging honest and beloved by kids and parents alike find the past and the curious at all the usual podcast places yeah it can be feel counterintuitive i imagine when everything's feeling haywiring your kids feeling really oppositional and things like that to want to bring them closer, right?

12:14Sometimes I imagine like we can feel defensive or we can feel like we want to shut it down or we want to control it, but then to try to like almost, you know, I think of it as like dating, just as partners need date nights and things like that. Like we need date nights with our kids, right? We're wanting to bring them closer. We're wanting to bring them into closer relationship. But I imagine in those times when everything's chaotic and oppositional, that's when it can be really, really hard to make those overtures. Well, it is for two reasons. One is that we get hurt and we get reactive. So we get tense and the sudden degree of aggression and frustration in us.

12:59Number one, number two, then the culture and the parenting experts tell us to use their relationship against the child. And so rather than warming up their relationship, we're told to use timeouts and distancing and punishment and control, which further drives the child away from us. Now, if we realize that the child's behaviors, you know, you use this word acting out. a lot. Let me just try this. When I say acting out, what does that usually evoke for people? What do we mean when we say acting out? I think for a lot of people, I would imagine it's like talking back. That's a big thing that I hear is talking back, yelling, throwing things, breaking things.

13:56Yeah. Rudeness, aggression, opposition. That's not what acting out means. It's a good English language phrase. We act things out when we don't have the words to say it in language. So in a game of charades where you're not allowed to speak, what do you have to do? You have to act it out. Or if you land in a country where nobody spoke your language and you had to portray hunger, you'd have to act it out. When kids are acting out, that's exactly what they're doing. They're portraying through behaviors, emotional needs and dynamics that don't have the language to express. They don't know that, but that's what they're doing.

14:37Our job is to understand the acting out. Now, you mentioned oppositionality. So these days, it's quite fashionable to diagnose kids with a condition that doesn't exist. It's called oppositional defiant disorder. And when I say it doesn't exist, I don't mean that it doesn't describe something. It describes something, but it's not a disorder in the child. It's very quickly. Can you oppose somebody if you're not in a relationship with them? No, I guess not. Well, how would you? I guess, yeah. If you're not sure what I'm talking about. I'm thinking like I can oppose some people who have no idea who I exist.

15:19You're in some relationship with them. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You know, there could be a politician far away, but they're in relationship with you. They have authority over you, you know? So, and if people don't know what I'm talking about, my invitation is, at this point, is to lock yourself in a room, make sure you're alone, and oppose somebody. And if you manage to do it, put it on YouTube, because we all want to see how you do it. So, oppositionality, by definition, opposition, by definition, implies a relationship. Yeah. So instead of diagnosing the child, why don't we look at the relationship?

15:55For example, in an adult relationship, never mind the child-adult relationship, in an adult relationship, if I'm opposing what my partner wants me to do, you couldn't make sense of that unless you first learned what my partner wanted me to do. In other words, it's a relationship. then the opposition only might make sense or might not but it certainly happens in relationship now what happens with these kids who are labeled oppositional is first of all a certain degree of resistance to parental authority is natural in a child in fact it's even healthy um in fact it happens at age one and a half one what do kids start saying at one and a half oh yeah definitely No.

16:41What's the word? No. Well, why does nature do that? Because nature is smart. And nature says, this child has to develop into their own person. And in order to develop into their own individuality, they need to somehow counter the will of the parent to a certain degree so that they can, before they can figure out what they want, they have to figure out, they have to say no to what they don't want. And that's a natural process. Now, Gordon calls that counter will, countering the will of the other. It's perfectly natural, as long as you understand that it's natural. But what happens if a kid starts saying no, and we see it as a bad thing, and we start pushing back on it?

17:24Now, in nature, to every force, there's an equal and opposite counter force. So when we push on these kids too hard, they push back even harder. Now, what mitigates the oppositionality is their relationship. you know like when you first fall in love with somebody and they say i'd like to have a cup of coffee you'll say okay don't worry i'll fly to new york and i'll bring the best cappuccino world just wait right here i'll be back in five hours i mean you know you'll do anything you know five years later in your relationship and they will say i want a cup of coffee they You get it yourself, you know, so that when we're in that powerful relational role, we want to please and cooperate.

18:13So what mitigates the oppositionality is relationship. So these kids that are labeled oppositional, they have two things going on. They've lost their primary relationship with the adults, so it doesn't seem natural to them for adults to tell them what to do, number one. And number two, they've been pushed on too much, so they're pushing back even harder. So rather than diagnosing them, let's look at the relationship and warm up that relationship with them. Believe me, the opposition will melt beautifully. And I've seen that over and over and over again. And this is, by the way, two nudges with kids, but even with adults, but especially with kids.

18:52So where are we? And we talk about, so yeah, I mean, what you're describing, right, is that attachment relationship, and we want to have that close connection for our kids to listen to us, to not be oppositional, to have that close, you know, that we want them to care about us and care about them. It's that whole cycle so that we can then get along in the world and get everyone's needs met. But, you know, I think that maybe what you're describing, like, is sometimes, like, we get so, you know, right at the beginning, you said I made the mistake that, like, if I love the kid, that will be enough.

19:29And sometimes I think we, like you described, we love our kids, but we're not necessarily showing it or expressing it or we're not doing those actions or creating those connections maybe as explicitly as we would if we were like, I don't know, dating somebody in those first blooms of love, right? Like we're maybe critical of a lot of things or we're maybe holding boundaries are a lot of things. The way I think of it, the easiest way for me to think of it is like we're taking a lot of deposits out of that relationship bank account without, or taking a lot out without putting those deposits in, right?

20:10Like we're pulling out where we haven't kind of put in the deposits in our relationship bank account. So is that what's going on a lot of times? Like what we're not? Yeah, but we need to frame this not as a default or a mission of individual parents, but as a real cultural issue. Oh, thank you. Because how we evolve as creatures, as mammals, as hominids and as hominins, human-like creatures, and as human beings for millions and hundreds of thousands of years, is that kids were around their parents the whole day. Or even aunties and uncles and all kinds of people that care and love about them. Not just the parents, but the whole community.

20:57That's great. So we attach to who we're around. And the more immature we are, the more we attach to who is around. So children naturally attach to parents and other adults. So that parental authority, the hierarchy, and parenting is a hierarchy. Parenting is not a democracy. A kid doesn't get to vote on whether or not she runs across the street with heavy traffic. Yeah, well, it wouldn't be safe to have it be a democracy. A two-year-old doesn't get to vote on having five cookies before dinner. No, no. And a two-year-old doesn't get to vote on whether or not they can crawl out into the winter snow with no clothes on.

21:40You know, it's a hierarchy. But it's a natural hierarchy that's facilitated by the attachment relationship. Now, in a society where kids spend so much of their time away from their parents, this hierarchy is flattened. and kids now connect to other kids and they start resisting adult authority. And the more we lose our natural authority, the more authoritarian we become. We've talked about this before, which just evokes more opposition. So the dynamic by which we've lost the reality that kids are no longer around the adults that nurture them most of the day, that's not the fault of individual parents.

22:24It's actually something that this society has not only created, but exacerbates every day. And there's more and more breakdown of community, more and more loneliness, less and less connection in extended families, more and more trauma that's not resolved from one generation to the next. And so all this conspires to drive kids away from us quite against our will or intention. so nobody should feel blamed here but we need to understand that we've lost the plot and we need to get it back yeah you in this book you talk about peer orientation and you mentioned that earlier and you know as I mentioned earlier most of us, most parents expect that peers are going to become more important than parents especially when kids become adolescents it's like widely considered normal and healthy but you and dr neufeld pushed back against that idea talk to me about the problems that come with peer orientation sure so what is definitely true that one of nature's agenda for all beings particularly all human beings is that we become our own individual selves.

23:40And for that, there needs to be a gradual individuation and growth of independence from the adults. But that doesn't have to happen in opposition to the adults. And what we call healthy teenage rebellion is neither genuine rebellion, nor is it healthy. Because genuine rebellion, like when the Americans rebelled against the British, what did they want? They wanted independence. They wanted freedom. When kids rebel against parents, it's not that they want freedom to be themselves. What they're looking for is more melding and conforming with the peer group. There's nothing healthy about them. Now, there always used to be this process of individuation, becoming our own selves, and we have to be because our parents are going to die.

24:34And so at some point we have to be able to manage ourselves independently and make our own lives. Can't depend on our parents all our lives. So that drive for independence is healthy. However, in traditional societies, that used to be guided by adults. There used to be ceremonies and rituals for kids to grow up and to individuate and become their own selves. In indigenous cultures, there was all these initiation rituals. guided not by peers, but by elders and adults. A lot of people will be familiar with the Jewish bar mitzvah ceremony. Well, the bar mitzvah ceremony or the bat mitzvah ceremony for girls is meant to be a statement that now I'm an adult ready to join the adult community, but it's done under the guidance of adult.

25:23So what we call teenage rebellion in our society is not genuine independence, but it's conformity with the peer group. That's not genuine independence. and it's not healthy. And it's done completely in opposition to the parents. I mean, it's so interesting. I can completely see this in my own family. When I was young, I completely rebelled against my parents, did a lot of conforming with some bad actions of kids in my high school, did lots of initiation through drugs and alcohol, which wasn't very healthy. And there was a lot of opposition. And then with my own kids, my kids are 17 and 14 now, and they are becoming their own people.

26:08And we are still connected. And we are still close. And they're having, you know, I don't know, we don't have any kind of initiation. One became an Eagle Scout. So maybe she had that sort of ceremony, right, to become an Eagle Scout. But that's interesting. But that's under the guidance of adults. Yeah, exactly. Like, I'm seeing that. It's fascinating. But what I'm seeing, I guess, that I'm excited about is that when I went through that experience with my own family and my own father just being like, oh, I had to believe when my kids were young that it was possible for them to grow up and not hate me when they were teenagers and not go through this thing that everyone says is normal, that they're going to hate you, that they're going to rebel, and that's normal, and you just have to expect that.

26:56and I had to believe that wasn't true and I love that you're saying that it's not true. Yeah, well, you know, we want to support our kids in independence but we don't have to worry about it in order to push them for it because independence is a natural agenda of human development. If you provide the right conditions for it, it's going to happen. So as Gordon says, and Gordon is the main author of this book, and he says, to promote independence, invite dependence. it's so counterintuitive to most people right like we don't maybe we don't want that peer dependence we don't want peers replacing parents but but for that's um that feels very counterintuitive but please go on well here's the thing at a certain point the child will start saying i'll do this myself you know they're trying to choose that try that you're tying their shoelaces when they're three years old.

27:52I'll do it myself. Why? That's nature's agenda, to have mastery. The kid will do that anyway. I don't have to push them for it. So if the child feels secure, the more secure they feel, the more independent they can be. So kids, when you do these experiments on attachment relationships, those kids who are secure with their parents, they'll play independently very beautifully. And when necessary, they'll come back to the parent for reassurance for a moment, then off they go and play independently again. It's the case who are insecure who can't play independently or who play independently, but they don't go back to the parent for reassurance.

28:32So by meeting the child dependency needs, not by making them over-dependent, but simply meeting their dependent's needs, you're naturally promoting independence. That's going to develop. And there's a kind of natural hierarchy in child development, as Gordon points out. It's like a pyramid, and I'm making a pyramid shape with my hands as I'm talking. The basis of it is the attachment relationship, a secure attachment relationship, where the child is accepted, loved, not judged, celebrated, welcomed for exactly who they are. That's the basis of everything. And that's the first tier of the pyramid.

29:16That's the basis. The second tier is individuation, where the child begins to become an independent person on their own, and that happens in stages throughout childhood and adolescence. So that one-and-a-half-year-old to start saying no, that's the first step in that individuation process. Again, you didn't have to teach the kid to say no. They start saying it automatically. It's the natural independent. So the second tier is individuation. Only when they're well-individuated can they socialize, and that's the third tier is socialization. If you don't have a clear sense of yourself, and if you don't feel secure, then when you socialize, what will you be doing?