Kids in the House 2: Peer Orientation

0:02 This is a very common problem of kids not listening to their parents when their friends are around, their peers are around. And it's an early indication, actually, that a child is beginning to replace parents with peers. This is what I call peer orientation. And it's a growing and escalating phenomena in our world today. It's so common, in fact, that we don't realize its insidiousness, that it is actually what was never intended. Nature never intended it. When a child.

0:28 When peers matter more than parents, when a child takes his cues from his peers for how to act, for how to be, for how to think, for what's important, and when a child starts orbiting around his peers, that's the problem. The symptom is they won't listen to us. But we only attend to the person that we're attached to and only when those attachment instincts are engaged. So this suggests not a behavioral problem, but a relationship problem.

0:58 And so the wise parent will say, oh, my goodness, I'm losing my child when they're with his peers. I need to do something about this to slow down the interaction, which we all need to do to slow down the interaction, not to court the competition, not to encourage it, and to strengthen the relationship. And there's also another thing that's very important with attention, is even if your child has a good relationship with you, you've got to be able to collect the eyes.

1:27 You've got to be able to collect the attention before you have to engage them, before you interact. It's very simple. It's the ess of the greeting ritual. You get their eyes, you get a smile, you get a nod, and you make sure you get all those things. And so you work for this. And then when you have it, you ask them to put away their clothes, you start interacting with them in ways to influence them and so on.

1:50 Many parents simply operate out of their role, and they think, well, I can tell the child what to do simply because I'm dad or stepdad or mom or whatever it is, or teacher. That's not true. You have to actually collect before you direct. That little mantra can absolutely transform a whole.