Hold Onto Your Kids

It's been 40 years since we met Gordon and in this society when kids 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. So 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 because 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. You 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, the biggest one, it's a very natural one, is my assumption that if I love 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 the relationship. What I didn't know about the importance of building, part-safing, and holding sacred that relationship with our children. So let's not assume that loving them is enough. It's necessary, but it's not enough. That love has 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 Hold On To Your Kids, I talk about in my other books, is that our own emotional state is very much like the child. So that in order to take care of the child, I've got to 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. So taking care of our own emotional states is absolutely essential.