Gordon Neufeld Quotes

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

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.

We have lost sight of nature's role in the whole process of maturation and growing up. Parents and nature are a team. And nature can't go on without the parental role of being able to foster individuality and viability unless the attachment needs are fully met.

Unconditional parental love is the indespensible nutrient for the child's healthy emotional growth. The first task is to create space in the child's heart for the certainty that she is precisely the person the parents want and love. She does not have to do anything or be any different to earn that love - in fact, she cannot do anything, since that love cannot be won or lost ... The child can be ornery, unpleasant, whiny, uncooperative, and plain rude, and the parent still lets her feel loved. Ways have to be found to convey the unacceptability of certain behaviors without making the child herself feel unaccepted. She has to be able to bring her unrest, her least likable characteristics to the parent and still receive the parent's absolutely satisfying, security-inducing unconditional love.

Digital intimacy ruins the appetite for the real thing. So, when kids are gaming or even when spouses are gaming, they lose their appetite for genuine intimacy. Kids lose their appetite for getting their intimacy needs, their hunger for significance and attachment, with the family, and it erodes the relationship between them and their parents.

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.

In thousands of little ways, we pull and push our children to grow up, hurrying them along instead of inviting them to rest. We could never court each other as adults by resisting dependance...Perhaps we feel free to invite the dependance of adults becuase we are not responsible for their growth and maturity. We don't bear the burden of getting them to be independant. Here is the core of the problem: we are assuming too much responsiblity for the maturation of our children. We have forgotten that we are not alone - we have nature as our ally. Independance is the fruit of maturation; our job in raising children is to look after their dependance needs. When we do our job of meeting genuine dependance needs, nature is free to do its job of promoting maturity. In the same way, we don't have to make our children grow taller; we just need to give them food. By forgetting that growth, development and maturation are natural processes, we lose perspective. We become afraid our children will get stuck and never grow up. Perhaps we think that if we don't push a little, they will never leave the nest. Human beings are not like birds in this respect. The more children are pushed, the tighter they cling - or, failing that, they nest with someone else.

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

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

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