This is a lovely essay on child-rearing from Dr. Neufeld. I'll be sharing a few excerpts as much of what he discusses is relevant and under-valued.

https://neufeldinstitute.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/12/Neufeld_Brussels_address.pdf

On saying 'no': "As futility registers emotionally, the energy being directed toward changing things or making things work comes to rest...the automatic nervous system shifts from trying to make things work...to letting go...resilience
grows and adaptability increases."

"We have lost the wisdom of tears and with it our capacity to adapt to that which is out of our control. Too many parents are...afraid to say no. They are failing to act as agents of futility or agents of comfort, no longer realizing that children need to have their sadness"

"1) For maturation to result, children need to ATTACH deeply to the adult(s) responsible for the them. The foundational prerequisite has to do with the preeminent need of children - a sense of contact and connection with those responsible for them."

"in extending our [digital] reach, we run the risk of thwarting the solution - a fully developed capacity for relationship. Research is pouring in that not only finds digital intimacy empty of nurturance but also having the effect of preempting/preventing deeper human connection.

As a daycare worker, foster care worker, and nanny, I can tell you this is very true. Childcare should be a shared task, but it must not be a revolving door for paid strangers: "I am convinced that we were never meant to deal with children whose hearts we did not have."

"When the school system was still inside a child’s village of attachment, this pivotal student-teacher relationship was cultivated by the rituals and customs in society...

"Unfortunately during the last couple of generations, our schools have drifted outside of the student’s village of attachment, w/ disastrous consequences ... The primary issue in education has always been the degree to which our teaching results in a child’s learning."

This is absolutely true and comes back to why places can pour money into schools and nothing will come from it. It's not testing. It's not flashy programs. It's creating a sense of belonging and meaningful interaction. The schools are too big and the parents too overworked.

"[Due to attachment failures] too many children today are an enigma to their parents. Unable to read their children, these adults have taken to reading parenting books. Unfortunately, the secrets of parenting are rarely revealed in books."

The next part is explosive. To summarize: pathologizing shyness as "social anxiety disorder" is an attempt to avoid (and wickedly profit from) how failures of attachment in early childhood and rootless, mass-schooling create anxiety.

"When viewed through the lens of attachment, shyness makes perfect sense. Shyness is meant to keep children inside their village of attachment until they are developmental ready to be dealt with outside of their attachments."

I want to stick to sharing this essay but as a quick aside: I was extraordinarily shy for years and in my late teens encouraged to think of it as a biochemical illness and take drugs for it (I adamantly refused).

My shyness was at school and large crowds. I was in daycares early on and passionately hated it; my mom stayed home in later years and I remember how grateful I was to her for not having to go to after-school care. This dread of impersonal spaces is not a pathological illness.

Back to Neufeld: "Shy children were never meant to function outside of their village of attachment. Early research with shyness and intelligence revealed that shy children scored significantly less when tested by adults they were not attached to.

"Once again, the importance of working attachments to the raising of children would revolutionize our educational systems and our day-care system, contributing to the well-being of our children as well as of our society."

Universal daycare is not a solution.

"Our educational system and day-care systems, having drifted outside our childrens’ villages of attachment, are being crippled by the protective attachment instincts of shyness and counterwill.

"In ignorance of these dynamics, today’s parents and teachers as well as policy makers think that the answer to dealing with children lies in training. We couldn’t be more mistaken."

It's almost like bureaucratic solutions ignore the root causes and inevitably worsen the problem

I have been harassed for pointing this out, but as someone who has been on the employed-provider end of care this next part is absolutely true and why care providers must be an organic part of the child's life, not outsourced and able to leave (i.e. abandon):

"Nothing affects children more than facing separation from their attachment figures.... When children are unable to preserve the connection with their attachment figures, stress hormones are released and powerful emotions are evoked in an attempt to fix the separation problem."

YOUR CHILD DOES NOT GET USED TO YOU LEAVING: " If these emotions cannot fix the problem of separation, defenses are evoked in the brain to protect against a separation..too much to bear. The primary defense is a flight from vulnerability, resulting in the loss of tender feelings.

I could write a very long piece about that last tweet from the point of view of someone very, very familiar with childcare. Please meditate on its implications.

"The resulting separation complex underlies most troubling behaviour in children. The problem is that even in our most advanced societies today, children are facing more separation than ever before, leading to an escalation of these common childhood concerns."

"Aggression and suicide among children have been
escalating in the last fifty years. Problems rooted in alarm such as anxiety, agitation and adrenalin-seeking behaviour, are becoming common place among children."

If you want to deal with the mental health crisis you have to be there, you have to replace the digital with the real: "To reverse this trend, we would need to support children’s
attachments to the adults responsible for them."

This does not look like universal daycare.

"This is even true in adolescence. The deeper the attachment, the more room for personhood, individuality and independence. It is only at the superficial levels of attachment that being attached and becoming one’s own person are in conflict."

It is amazing that we have allowed the needs of the institutions to dictate the terms of our society and ignored the ramifications on health, abandoning a child's need for verticality at pressing stages, handing them over to factory middle-schools and rootless colleges.

It doesn't go away and only a very bizarre society could shame teenagers and young adults who feel uncomfortable. But it happens, I see it! "What a strange kid, she didn't live on campus." I see a kid with a close-knit happy family and have you seen what happens on campus?

"Children must have confidence we are the
answer to their attachment needs. In order to find rest, they cannot be working for our love or approval. To find rest, they must not have to measure up to find significance. To keep us close, they must not think that they have to be good

Children need true play and they are not receiving it: "We call many things play that are not play. Playing piano can be play but often is not. Playing sports can also be play, but more often is not. Most video games would not qualify as play."

"Play is becoming an endangered activity in our society. It is being usurped by screens and non-stop stimulation. It is also being eroded by our hurriedness as society for our children to get ahead."

"Preoccupied with performance and outcomes, and ignorant about where they come from, we are putting children into school earlier and earlier to prepare them for what comes ahead."

Half-day kindergarten is nearly dead. Now we want universal daycare. When does it stop?

"We need statesmen and policy makers that understand the importance of true play for our children. Play is not an optional activity; it is an essential requirement for growth and development."

This is going to mean reconsidering the screen in early childhood.

"Only humans are capable of feeling their emotions and this capacity turns out to be an essential prerequisite for becoming fully human and humane...For emotions to be felt, they must be expressed, they must be named, and they must be relatively safe from injury"

"We were told not to be emotional, to reign in our emotions in, to stop being irrational. Emotions were considered childish and even girlish (as if this is a bad thing), a
source of embarrassment for grown-ups. Most of our medications aim at reducing emotion in one way or another

"Ironically, studies of the brain have revealed the central role of emotion in human development, even the growth of the brain itself. The emotional brain is at the heart of well-being."

Medicating a child's emotions can be a failure to ignore urgent needs being expressed.

"What is required for optimal functioning is for the child to actually feel his or her emotions, not just to have them. The intuitive term for this would be a ‘soft heart’...When the
woundedness is too much to bear, it interferes with basic functioning...

"So when I child has to function in a wounding environment, the brain equips the child to do so by numbing out their tender feelings." The paragraphs following about juvenile delinquents and parallel developments among small children are vital reading.

"We know that the most wounding of all experiences is facing separation. We also know that peer interaction is where most wounding occurs for children. Unfortunately, today’s children are subjected to more separation and more peer interaction than ever before."

"The more shielded by a safe attachment to us, the less their brains have to take defensive action. In my clinical experience, even a little bit of shielding can go along way toward restoring feelings once they have been lost."

"Another way of saying this is that the irreducible needs of children are right relationships, soft hearts, psychological rest and true play."

Nearly all popular discussions of schooling and child-rearing fail to consider any of these; indeed, they undermine them.

"If we took our cues from developmental science, it seems to me ... it would be imperative to support families to do what they can do to allow the child’s capacity for relationship to develop fully before requiring the child to be apart from family."

Think tanks don't like that.

"The role of the state should never be to replace the family in the lives of children as attachments are family business and growth can only be home grown."

This principal of subsidiarity has been lost and the mental health crisis will worsen until we address it rather than GDP.

The whole thing is very good, I encourage people to read it. Nearly every day we encounter people who begin their discussions of children and schooling as if it is common sense to disregard attachment, play, and vertical family ties. They are abominably wrong.

It may take a village to raise a child, but it makes all the difference in the world if we are equating a village with a place of poorly paid, revolving strangers or a home where the child is bonded to the people around them by ties of meaning that support them.