This book by Dr. Gordon Neufeld, with writing help from Dr. Gabor Maté, is about the pivotal importance of children’s relationships to those responsible for them and the devastating impact in today’s society of competing attachments with peers. However, it is much more than a book on peer orientation: it is about parenting with relationship in mind. This book restores parents to their natural intuition, confronting such relationship-devastating devices as time-outs and using what children care about against them.

Offering effective strategies for preserving and restoring the child-to-parent relationship, this book provides refreshing natural alternatives to today’s contrived methods of behaviour control. The content is relevant to parents of children of any age, from infants right through to adult children. Readers have commonly commented on how much hardship and confusion they could have avoided had this material been available to them right from the beginning.

Hold On to Your Kids is the rare book that has become more, rather than less, relevant as the years have passed. Dr. Neufeld’s highly readable exploration of the phenomenon of peer orientation–what it is, how it impedes healthy development and what we can do to reverse its adverse effects–has transformed the lives of many families with its vital message. 

The original edition was released in 2004, just before the emergence of Facebook and other social media. In retrospect, the book amply foreshadowed, but could not fully have pictured, the impact of the digital revolution that followed. The book was re-released in 2013 with additional chapters on raising children in a digital world.

The book was re-released once again in 2024 with an additional chapter on the roots of the current crisis of mental health in our children. This chapter was necessitated by the shocking revelation coming out of the pandemic that an alarming number of children are suffering from mental health issues. Without the insights provided by this book, experts were wrongly assuming that the problem was isolation from their peers, the opposite of what was the case. This chapter explores the roots of emotional well-being and confirms the paramount importance of the healthy child-adult relationships.