Until about fifty years ago, culture was handed down vertically from generation to generation. Adults served as natural mentors for the young, passing down their traditions and cultural values. Not much changed from generation to generation with regard to cultural identity, codes of behavior, and values.
Nowadays, children create their own culture, their own styles of dress, their own music, their own codes of behavior. This youth culture bears little resemblance to the culture of their parents. It remains separate and distinct from that of the generation before. Culture is now created and passed horizontally among peers.
Gordon Neufeld, P.h.D., clinical psychologist and co-author of Hold on to Your Kids, calls this shift peer orientation and he marks it as a modern phenomenon that arose in the Western world during the post-WWII era. Only since that time has peer orientation become the norm in industrialized nations.
According to an international study headed by British child psychologist Sir Michael Rutter and criminologist David Smith, and including leading scholars from sixteen countries [Michael Rutter and David J. Smith, eds., Psychosocial Disorders in Young People: Time Trends and Their Causes (New York: John Wiley and Sons, Inc., 1995)], the decrease in the vertical transmission of mainstream culture and the rise in the horizontal transmission of youth culture corresponds with the rise of antisocial behavior, youth crime, violence, bullying, and delinquency.
What Caused the Shift from Parents to Peers?
During the past fifty years, society has changed in such a way that parents and other caring adults have become less and less available to children. Most families require two incomes, two parents working outside the home. Children are placed in day-care at an early age, sometimes shortly after birth. Thereafter, they enter schools where they will spend the majority of their time among their peers.
According to Gordon Neufeld, children need to orient to someone. They need someone who is available to whom they can look to for guidance. In the midst of high child to adult ratios in day-care centers and schools, children are left with little choice but to orient to their peers. Even children who had a strong parental attachment in their early years may feel the need to re-orient as they feel increasingly alienated from that parental relationship.
What's Wrong With Youth Culture?
Youth culture is not a step toward independence. It is a transfer from one dependent relationship to another. Children look to their immature peers for guidance. However, peer relationships, unlike attached parent-child relationships, significantly lack the desire to nurture, to provide unconditional love and acceptance, and the willingness to sacrifice for the growth of the other. Peer orientation does not foster healthy development or lead to true independence.
In a healthy attached parent-child relationship, the child wants to look to the adult. The child feels safe, secure, loved and accepted within the relationship, and thus the child feels receptive to guidance from the adult. This relationship would occur and remain naturally if parents and children were not separated before the child was ready to move toward independence. Peer relationships are not secure, but for lack of an available secure relationship, children stick with their friends and turn away from their parents.
What Can Parents Do to Get Their Kids Back?
When parents cannot provide as their child's primary orientation, they can ensure that a trusted adult is available and willing to develop a suitable attached relationship with the child. Communities may need to work together to make this possible for all the children. Steps in this direction include more manageable ratios of children to adults in day-care and school settings and training for these adults in the attachment and orienting needs of children.
Children need someone to orient to, to turn to for guidance with regard to their sense of identity, codes of behavior, and cultural values. In the absence of an available parent or other caring adult, children have little choice but to orient to their peers. Modern social, cultural, and economic forces currently promote peer orientation, but what has been done can be undone with a society-wide shift in priorities toward meeting our children's attachment and orientation needs.
For an in-depth resource on peer orientation and what to do about it, see Hold on to Your Kids, by Gordon Neufeld, P.h.D., and Gabor Maté, M.D.
