Quotes from Gordon Neufeld

I started my career in parent education with the idea that we needed to let our kids go. I believed that parents were suffocating for their children. There was no room for individuality and personhood.

Parents are the designated caregivers and are best suited for being able to raise children.

It is a parent's responsibility to preserve the connection with their children, to preserve the relationship, so that the children can let go and become their own selves.

Children learn best when they like their teacher and they think their teacher likes them.

Children do not experience our intentions, no matter how heartfelt. They experience what we manifest in tone and behavior.

Absolutely missing in peer relationships are unconditional love and acceptance, the desire to nurture, the ability to extend oneself for the sake of the other, the willingness to sacrifice for the growth and development of the other.

Carl Jung explained that we tend to attack in others what we are most uncomfortable with in ourselves. When vulnerability is the enemy, it is attacked wherever it is perceived, even in a best friend.

We used to think that schools built brains. Now we know that it is play that builds the brains that school can then use.

Soliciting good intentions in older children involves sharing with them your own values or finding within them the seeds of your values.

What to us looks like independence is really just dependence transferred. We are in such a hurry for our children to be able to do things themselves that we do not see just how dependent they really are. Like power, dependence has become a dirty word. We want our children to be self-directing, self-motivated, self-controlled, self-orienting, self-reliant, and self-assured. We have put such a premium on independence that we lose sight of what childhood is about. Parents

Increasingly, children's behavioral problems are ascribed to various medical syndromes such as oppositional defiant disorder or attention deficit disorder. These diagnoses at least have the benefit of absolving the child and of removing the onus of blame from the parents, but they camouflage the reversible dynamics that cause children to misbehave in the first place.

As children grow, they have an increasing need to orient: to have a sense of who they are, of what is real, why things happen, what is good, what things mean. To fail to orient is to suffer disorientation, to be lost psychologically—a state our brains are programmed to do almost anything to avoid. Children are utterly incapable of orienting by themselves. They need help. Attachment provides that help. The first business

Peer relationships are safest when they are the natural offspring of attachments with the parents.

Our society is so topsy-turvy that we may actually come to value the child's willingness to separate more than her instincts for closeness. Unfortunately, we cannot have it both ways. Parents whose young children are not properly attached face a nightmare scenario just keeping the child in sight. We should be thankful for the assistance attachment provides

The time we as parents and educators spend trying to teach our children social tolerance, acceptance, and etiquette would be much better invested in cultivating a connection with them. Children nurtured in traditional hierarchies of attachment are not nearly as susceptible to the spontaneous forces of tribalization. The social values we wish to inculcate can be transmitted only across existing lines of attachment.

Adults who ground their parenting in a solid relationship with the child parent intuitively. They do not have to resort to techniques or manuals but act from understanding and empathy. If we know how to be with our children and who to be for them, we need much less advice on what to do. Practical approaches emerge spontaneously from our own experience once the relationship has been restored.

Attachment is both a shield and a sword.

those who can't. Attachment and vulnerability—these two great themes of human existence—go hand in hand.

We only feel like being good for those to whom we are attached to. We weren't meant to raise and teach children whose hearts we did not have. We have resorted to all kinds of tricks with our children because we don't have enough natural attachment power to do our job. When we use these tricks, we insult the relationship.

Mes labiau r?pinam?s pamaitinti savo vaikus ir nekreipiame d?mesio ? pat? valgymo ritual?, kurio paskirtis - palaikyti šeimos nari? tarpusavio ryš?.

Children parented in such a manner never come up against the necessary frustration that accompanies facing the impossible. They are deprived of the experience of transforming frustration into feelings of futility, of letting go and adapting.

Peer attachments are not the problem themselves. It's when they compete with adult attachments that the problems emerge. It's just like when siblings get attached to each other. If they start revolving around each other, then the parents can't do anything with them because it's a competing attachment.

Many people think that discipline is the essence of parenting. But that isn't parenting. Parenting is not telling your child what to do when he or she misbehaves. Parenting is providing the conditions in which a child can realize his or her full human potential.

Children need to trust and depend upon those who are responsible for them.