NATIONAL BESTSELLER • This parenting classic—as relevant today as it was when it was first published—shines a light on one of the most misunderstood trends of our time: peers, social media, and on-screen culture replacing parents in the lives of children, and what parents can do about it.

With a new chapter addressing mental health in school-aged kids since the pandemic.

Children take their lead from their friends: being ‘cool’ matters more than anything else. Shaping values, identity, and codes of behaviour, peer groups are often far more influential than parents.
But this situation is far from natural, and it can be dangerous—it undermines family cohesion, interferes with healthy development, and fosters a hostile and sexualized youth culture. Children end up becoming conformist, anxious, and alienated.

In Hold On to Your Kids, acclaimed physician and bestselling author Gabor Maté joins forces with psychologist Gordon Neufeld to pinpoint the causes of this breakdown and offer practical advice on how to ‘reattach’ to your children, make children feel safe and understood, and earn back your children's loyalty and love. This updated edition also addresses the unprecedented parenting challenges posed by the rise of digital devices and social media.

By helping to reawaken our instincts, Maté and Neufeld empower parents to be what nature intended: a true source of enrichment, security, and warmth for their children.

This parenting classic on one of the most disturbing and misunderstood trends of our time--peers replacing parents in the lives of children--is now more relevant than ever. The latest edition includes new material on how social media and video game culture are affecting our children, and what parents can do. In Hold On to Your Kids, Dr. Neufeld and Dr. Maté explore the phenomenon of peer orientation: the troubling tendency of children and youth to look to their peers for direction--for a sense of right and wrong, for values, identity and codes of behaviour. But peer orientation undermines family cohesion, poisons the school atmosphere, and fosters an aggressively hostile and sexualized youth culture. It provides a powerful explanation for schoolyard bullying and youth violence; it is an escalating trend that has never been adequately described or contested until Hold On to Your Kids. Once understood, it becomes self-evident--as do the solutions.

"With simple ideas and steps, this book is directed not only to parents, but to all those--educators, social workers, counsellors--whose lives and work bring them into contact with children."
—Quill & Quire
 
"May serve as a loud wake-up call for mothers and fathers.... Offers what many of the others do not--that rare commodity known as common sense."
—Winnipeg Free Press
 
"Beautifully written...terrific, poignant."
—Publishers Weekly (starred review)