Byzantine Catholic Family Matters

Parenting and Culture Through the Lens of Attachment I

An Introduction

Imagine visiting a place where adults and children walk through the narrow streets of the village exchanging greetings with one another. What’s more, social gatherings typically involve two, if not three generations. (Children are welcome!). You would have a hard time buying yourself a newspaper or a pair shoes - or anything - if you tried to go to a store during the three hour midday break when all places of business and all schools are closed to allow adults and children to share their midday meal with their families. Also, in this village you would find that only one activity goes on at any given time. Sunday afternoon, for example, is the time families take strolls in the neighboring countryside.

Is this a nostalgic look to the past? Certainly it is not something we are likely to find in North America. However, this is precisely what Canadian psychologist Gordon Neufeld and his family found on a recent visit to a village in Provence, France. What Dr. Neufeld found in Provence was an example of a culture organized around the essential task of helping children to develop strong, healthy attachment relationships with their parents and other important adults in the community. Such a society is adult-oriented in that values and norms are passed on to children from adults. Dr. Neufeld and physician Gabor Mate discuss the importance of an adult-oriented social structure (as opposed to a peer-oriented social structure) for the healthy development of children in their book Hold Onto Your Kids: Why parents need to matter more than peers (Ballantine Books, 2006).

The authors write that the peer-oriented youth culture has so thoroughly become the norm in most Western, urban (as opposed to rural) areas that it is understood by most as simply the way things are and the way things have always been. Not so, they write, the youth culture has existed for only the past fifty years or so. Current factors seem to enhance the further strengthening of the peer-oriented youth culture into a force that undermines parents and other important adults. Doctors Neufeld and Gabor identify these forces.

One such force is the tendency to put very young children - even infants - into situations where they are spending a lot of time with peers in day care and pre-school settings; settings where it is highly unlikely for a child to form an attachment with an employee of the facility. My wife’s observations of disinterested au pairs and nannies while their charges struggle with peer interactions in the local playground suggest that those who can afford such one to one caregivers for their children are not guaranteeing a better outcome for their children than for those in day care.

Large, depersonalized schools, where teachers are overwhelmed and perhaps not even supported by parents and where other teachers may simply not care, are breeding grounds for strong peer-orientation.

Dysfunctional marriages and divorce can result in attachment problems for the children in these families. These range from being torn between two parents to experiencing a profound loss.

The loss of the influence of the extended family and the mobility of families, and a decrease in the importance of the faith community (if it even has a role in a family’s life) are additional factors that hinder the development of attachment relationships with adults and, hence an adult-oriented culture.

The impact of this recent and pervasive phenomenon in our society on our children’s development will be the subject of the next part in this series.