Dr. Gordon Neufeld is a world renowned developmental psychologist, international speaker and bestselling author of the book Hold Onto Your Kids: Why Parents Need to Matter More than Peers with Gabor Maté which has been translated into 35 languages. This pivotal book tackles one of the most disturbing trends of our time: children today increasingly look to their peers for direction—their values, identity, and codes of behavior. This “peer orientation” undermines family cohesion, interferes with healthy development, and fosters a hostile and sexualized youth culture. Children end up becoming overly conformist, desensitized, and alienated; being “cool” matters more to them than anything else.

Hold Onto Your Kids explains the causes of this crucial breakdown of parental influence—and demonstrates ways to “reattach” to sons and daughters, establish the proper hierarchy in the home, make kids feel safe and understood, and earn back your children’s loyalty and love.  By helping to reawaken parenting instincts innate to us all, this book will empower parents to be for their children what nature intended: a true source of contact, security, and warmth.

Before he retired, Dr. Gordon Neufeld had accumulated more than 40 years of experience as a clinical psychologist with children and youth and those responsible for them. Dr. Neufeld is widely considered to be a leading interpreter and communicator of the developmental approach. He provides a comprehensive model that has evolved from years of synthesis and distillation. The result is an integrated developmental approach rooted in depth psychology, grounded in the developmental paradigm, saturated in attachment theory, congruent with current neurological research, and honed by over 40 years of professional practice, parenting and personal reflection His model has clear and profound implications for parents, teachers, youth workers and social workers. In the words of one fellow psychologist, “the uniqueness of Gordon is that in a day of focusing on the superficial and specializing in the specifics, he goes for depth and the big picture. He leads us to a way of thinking and seeing that penetrates to the very essence of things and then opens doors for change.”

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