STUCK IN IMMATURITY
I’M TOTALLY FED up,” Sarah’s mother said, upset about her daughter’s inconsistency and unpredictability. “She doesn’t follow through with anything, no matter how hard we try to make things work for her.” One repeated situation particularly disturbed Sarah’s parents. They would extend themselves to make possible some fervently expressed desire of hers, only to find that she bolted at the first moment of frustration or failure. She quit her figure skating class at the end of her second lesson after they had carefully saved the money for the fees and arranged their schedules to accommodate her timetable. Sarah was also very impulsive, impatient, and would lose her temper easily. She kept on promising to be good but often failed to follow through.
Peter’s mother and father were also concerned. Their son was chronically impatient and irritable, at times getting quite nasty with his sister as well as his parents. “He doesn’t even seem to be aware,” Peter’s father told me, “that what he says or does has any impact on the rest of the family.” Peter was also argumentative and oppositional. He lacked any long-term aspirations. He had no passion for anything except Nintendo and computer games. The concept of work seemed to mean nothing to him, whether it was schoolwork, home study, or chores around the house. “What worries me most,” said the father, “is that Peter doesn’t seem worried at all.” The boy showed no concern about his lack of direction and meaningful goals.
In somewhat different ways, Peter and Sarah exhibited a similar constellation of traits. Both children were impulsive. Both appeared to know how they should conduct themselves, but neither actually behaved in accordance with what they knew. Both were unreflective, failed to think before acting, and were given to swing-of-the-pendulum reactions. Each set of parents wanted to know if they should be concerned. To Sarah’s parents, my answer was probably not. Sarah was only four years old: these traits went with the territory. If everything unfolded as it should, the next few years of development would bring significant differences in Sarah’s attitude and behavior. Peter’s parents did have reason to be uneasy, however. He was fourteen and, in this way at least, his personality had not changed since he was a preschooler.
Both Sarah and Peter manifested what I have come to dub the preschooler syndrome, behaviors appropriate for any preschool child. At this stage of development a number of psychological functions are not yet integrated in the child—a lack of integrative functioning that is a red flag for psychological immaturity. The only ones, of course, who have the developmental “right” to act like preschoolers are preschoolers. In an older child or adult such lack of integration indicates an immaturity that is out of phase with age.
Physical growth and adult physiological functioning are not automatically accompanied by psychological and emotional maturation. Robert Bly, in his book The Sibling Society, exposes immaturity as being endemic in our society. “People don’t bother to grow up, and we are all fish swimming in a tank of half-adults,” he writes.1 In today’s world the preschooler syndrome affects many children well past the preschool years, and may even be seen in teenagers and adults. Many adults have not attained maturity—have not mastered being independent, self-motivated individuals capable of tending their own emotional needs and of respecting the needs of others.
Among the several reasons why maturity is less and less prevalent today, peer orientation is probably the main culprit. Immaturity and peer orientation go hand in hand. The earlier the onset of peer orientation in a child’s life and the more intense the preoccupation with peers, the greater the likelihood of being destined to perpetual childishness.
Peter was highly peer-oriented. It wasn’t clear what came first: Had his immaturity made him so susceptible to becoming peer-oriented or was it his early peer orientation that was the cause of his arrested development? The causality can go in both directions, but once formed, peer orientation locks the problem in. Either way, peer-oriented kids fail to grow up.
WHAT IT MEANS TO BE IMMATURE
As we mature, our brain develops the ability to mix things together, to hold different perceptions, senses, thoughts, feelings, and impulses all at the same time without becoming confused in thinking or paralyzed in action. This is the capacity I called “integrative functioning” when, just above, I mentioned the preschooler syndrome. Reaching this point in development has a tremendous transforming and civilizing effect on personality and behavior. The attributes of childishness, like impulsiveness and ego-centrism, fade away and a much more balanced personality begins to emerge. One cannot teach the brain to do this; the integrative capacity must be developed, grown into. The ancient Romans had a word for this kind of mix: temper. That verb now means “to regulate” or “to moderate,” but originally referred to the mingling of different ingredients to make clay. Both Sarah and Peter were “untempered” in experience and expression. Being untempered—unable to tolerate mixed feelings at the same time—is the hallmark of the immature.
For instance, Sarah was quite affectionate toward her parents, but like most children would get frustrated from time to time. When frustrated, she would be given to tantrums even to the point of saying “I hate you” to her mother. Sarah’s frustrations with her mother, at her developmental level, were never tempered by affection, just as her frustrations at falling on the ice were not tempered by her desire to figure skate. Hence her impulsiveness. Similarly, when Peter erupted, it would be with insults and name-calling. Although predictably and repeatedly he would get into trouble, his apprehension at the negative consequences was eclipsed by whatever intense frustration he was experiencing at that moment. Again, the feelings failed to mix. Both these children lost their tempers in the true meaning of that word and, as a result, their reactions were strident, insolent, and unmitigated.
Along the same lines, Peter could not assimilate the idea of work because the concept requires mixed feelings. Work is often not very attractive, but we generally do it because we can mix our resistance to it in the moment with a commitment or purpose we may have in mind for the long term. Too immature to hold on to a goal beyond immediate satisfaction, Peter worked only when he felt like it and that wasn’t very often. He was conscious of no more than one feeling at a time. In this sense, he was no different from any preschooler. His failure to endure conflicting thoughts, feelings, and purposes in his consciousness was a legacy of his peer orientation.
NATURE’s BLUEPRINT FOR GROWTH
In our customary headlong rush to figure out what to do about this or that problem, we often ignore the first essential step of looking, reflecting, and understanding. We can ill afford to omit that step when it comes to rearing children in today’s chaotic world. We must know how things work so we can understand what can go wrong—that’s a necessity for prevention or, if needed, a remedy. What follows is a thumbnail sketch of maturation, a process every parent and teacher should have a working knowledge of. For many it will simply affirm what they have already grasped intuitively.
How do young human beings mature? One of the most significant breakthroughs of developmental theory came in the 1950s when scientists found that there is a consistent and predictable order to the process of maturation, whenever and wherever it occurs. The first phase involves a kind of splitting, or differentiation, followed by a second phase which brings ever increasing integration of the separated elements. This sequence holds true whether the organism is plant or animal and whether the domain is biological or psychological and whether the entity is a single cell or the complex entity we call the self.
Maturation proceeds first through the process of division, teasing things apart until they are distinct and independent. Only then will development mix these same distinct and separate elements together. It is simple and, at the same time, profound—a process we see even at the most basic level. The embryo first grows by dividing into separate cells, each one with its own nucleus and distinct boundaries. Then, once the individual cells have separated sufficiently so that they are not in danger of fusing, the focus of development becomes the interaction between them. Groups of cells become integrated into functioning organs. In turn, the distinct organs develop separately and then become organized and integrated into body systems—for example, the heart and blood vessels form the cardiovascular system. The same pattern is followed with the two hemispheres of the brain. The developing brain regions at first function quite independently of each other physiologically and electrically, but then become gradually integrated. As they do, the child exhibits new skills and behavior.2 This process continues well into the teenage years and even beyond.
Maturation in the psychological realm involves the differentiation of the elements of consciousness—thoughts, feelings, impulses, values, opinions, preferences, interests, intentions, aspirations. Differentiation needs to happen before these elements of consciousness can be mixed to produce tempered experience and expression. It is the same in the realm of relationships: maturation requires that the child first becomes unique and separate from other individuals. The better differentiated she becomes, the more she is able to mix with others without losing her sense of self.
More fundamentally, a sense of self first needs to separate from inner experience, a capacity entirely absent in the young child. The child has to be able to know that she is not identical with whatever feeling happens to be active in her at any particular moment. She can feel something without her actions being necessarily dominated by that feeling. She can be aware of other, conflicting feelings, or of thoughts, values, commitments that might run counter to the feeling of the moment. She can choose.
Both Peter and Sarah lacked a relationship with themselves because this prerequisite division had not yet occurred. They were not given to reflecting on their inner experience, agreeing or disagreeing with themselves, approving or disapproving of what they saw within. Because their feelings and thoughts were not differentiated enough to withstand mixing, they were capable of only one feeling or impulse at a time. Neither of them was given to statements like “Part of me feels this way and part of me feels that way.” Neither of them had “on the other hand” kind of experiences, nor felt ambivalent about erupting in frustration or about avoiding things. Without the capacity for reflection, they were defined by the inner experience of the moment. They immediately acted out whatever emotions arose in them. They could be their inner experience but they could not see it. This inability made them impulsive, egocentric, reactive, and impatient. Because frustration did not mix with caring, they had no patience. Because anger did not mix with love, they showed no forgiveness. Because frustration did not mix with either fear or affection, they lost their tempers. In short, they lacked maturity.
It would have been unreasonable to expect Sarah to be capable of mixed feelings or for her to be anything other than untempered in her expression. She was too young. It was certainly reasonable to expect self-reflection and the capacity to tolerate mixed impulses and emotions of Peter, but completely unrealistic as well. He was no more mature than Sarah.
I felt confident in reassuring Sarah’s parents that there was plenty of evidence of a very active maturing process going on within her. She exhibited encouraging signs of the differentiation process at work: she was eager to do things by herself and loved to figure things out on her own. She definitely wanted to be her own person and have her own thoughts, ideas, and reasons for doing things. She also had a wonderful venturing-forth kind of energy—a curiosity about things she was not familiar with or attached to, an eagerness to explore the unknown, and a fascination with anything new or novel. Furthermore, she engaged in solitary play that was imaginative, creative, and completely self-satisfying. These telltale signs of the maturing process put to rest any concern about Sarah’s failing to develop. Her personality was maturing and, in its own time, the fruit would come. Patience was what was called for.
I could not find any similar vital signs of emergent life in Peter. There was no creative solitude, no desire to figure things out for himself, no pride in being self-sufficient, no attempt to be his own person. He was preoccupied by boundaries with his parents, but this was not about truly individuating, only about keeping his parents out of his life. His resistance to leaning on his parents was not motivated by a desire to do things himself. He was oppositional and contrary but, as we discussed in Chapter 6, only from the intensity of his peer attachments and not from a genuine drive toward independence.
Maturation is spontaneous but not inevitable. It is like a computer program preinstalled in the hard drive but not necessarily activated. Unless Peter got unstuck, he was well on his way to becoming one of those adults still caught in the preschooler syndrome. But how to get children like Peter unstuck? What activates the process of maturation?
HOW MATURATION CAN BE FOSTERED
Although parents and teachers are forever telling children to “grow up,” maturation cannot be commanded. One cannot teach a child to be an individual or train a child to be his own person. This is the work of maturation and maturation alone. We can nurture the process, provide the right conditions, remove the impediments, but we can no more make a child grow up than we can order the plants in our garden to grow.
Dealing with immature children, we may need to show them how to act, draw the boundaries of what is acceptable, and articulate what our expectations are. Children who do not understand fairness have to be taught to take turns. Children not yet mature enough to appreciate the impact of their actions must be provided with rules and prescriptions for acceptable conduct. But such scripted behavior mustn’t be confused with the real thing. One cannot be any more mature than one truly is, only act that way when appropriately cued. To take turns because it is right to do so is certainly civil, but to take turns out of a genuine sense of fairness can only come from maturity. To say sorry may be appropriate to the situation, but to assume responsibility for one’s actions can come only from the process of individuation. There is no substitute for genuine maturation, no shortcut to getting there. Behavior can be prescribed or imposed, but maturity comes from the heart and mind. The real challenge for parents is to help kids grow up, not simply to look like grown-ups.
If discipline is no cure for immaturity and if scripting is helpful but insufficient, how can we help our children mature? For years, develop-mentalists puzzled over the conditions that activated maturation. The breakthrough came only when researchers discovered the fundamental importance of attachment.
Surprising as it may be to say, the story of maturation is quite straightforward and self-evident. Like so much else in child development, it begins with attachment. As I explained in Chapter 2, attachment is the first priority of living things. It is only when there is some release from this preoccupation that maturation can occur. In plants, the roots must first take hold for growth to commence and bearing fruit to become a possibility. For children, the ultimate agenda of becoming viable as a separate being can take over only when their needs are met for attachment, for nurturing contact, and for being able to depend on the relationship unconditionally. Few parents, and even fewer experts, understand this intuitively. “When I became a parent,” one thoughtful father who did understand said to me, “I saw that the world seemed absolutely convinced that you must form your children—actively form their characters rather than simply create an environment in which they can develop and thrive. Nobody seemed to get that if you give them the loving connection they need, they will flourish.”
The key to activating maturation is to take care of the attachment needs of the child. To foster independence we must first invite dependence; to promote individuation we must provide a sense of belonging and unity; to help the child separate we must assume the responsibility for keeping the child close. We help a child let go by providing more contact and connection than he himself is seeking. When he asks for a hug, we give him a warmer one than he is giving us. We liberate children not by making them work for our love but by letting them rest in it. We help a child face the separation involved in going to sleep or going to school by satisfying his need for closeness. Thus the story of maturation is one of paradox: dependence and attachment foster independence and genuine separation.
Attachment is the womb of maturation. Just as the biological womb gives birth to a separate being in the physical sense, attachment gives birth to a separate being in the psychological sense. Following physical birth, the developmental agenda is to form an emotional attachment womb for the child from which he can be born once again as an autonomous individual, capable of functioning without being dominated by attachment drives. Humans never outgrow their need to connect with others, nor should they, but mature, truly individual people are not controlled by these needs. Becoming such a separate being takes the whole of a childhood, which in our times stretches to at least the end of the teenage years and perhaps beyond.
We need to release a child from preoccupation with attachment so he can pursue the natural agenda of independent maturation. The secret to doing so is to make sure that the child does not need to work to get his needs met for contact and closeness, to find his bearings, to orient. Children need to have their attachment needs satiated; only then can a shift of energy occur toward individuation, the process of becoming a truly individual person. Only then is the child freed to venture forward, to grow emotionally.
Attachment hunger is very much like physical hunger. The need for food never goes away, just as the child’s need for attachment never ends. As parents we free the child from the pursuit of physical nurturance. We assume responsibility for feeding the child as well as providing a sense of security about the provision. No matter how much food a child has at the moment, if there is no sense of confidence in the supply, getting food will continue to be the top priority. A child is not free to proceed with his learning and his life until the food issues are taken care of, and we parents do that as a matter of course. Our duty ought to be equally transparent to us in satisfying the child’s attachment hunger.
In his book On Becoming a Person, the psychotherapist Carl Rogers describes a warm, caring attitude for which he adopted the phrase unconditional positive regard because, he said, “It has no conditions of worth attached to it.” This is a caring, wrote Rogers, “which is not possessive, which demands no personal gratification. It is an atmosphere which simply demonstrates I care; not I care for you if you behave thus and so.”3 Rogers was summing up the qualities of a good therapist in relation to her/his clients. Substitute parent for therapist and child for client, and we have an eloquent description of what is needed in a parent-child relationship. Unconditional parental love is the indispensable 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. It is not conditional. It is just there, regardless of which side the child is acting from—“good” or “bad.” 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.
A child needs to experience enough security, enough unconditional love, for the required shift of energy to occur. It’s as if the brain says, “Thank you very much, that is what we needed, and now we can get on with the real task of development, with becoming a separate being. I don’t have to keep hunting for fuel; my tank has been refilled, so now I can get on the road again.” Nothing could be more important in the developmental scheme of things.
The father of eleven-year-old Evan, a friend of my cowriter, had just completed a weekend seminar on family relationships and was now, on a Monday morning, walking with his son on the way to school. He had been pressuring Evan to continue with his karate class, an activity the boy was resisting. “You know, Evan,” the father said to him, “if you stay in karate I’m going to love you. And you know what else? If you don’t stay in karate I’m going to love you just as much.” The child didn’t say anything for a few minutes. Then, suddenly, he looked up at the overcast sky and smiled at his father. “Isn’t it a beautiful day, Dad?” he said. “Aren’t those beautiful clouds up there?” After a few more moments of silence, he added, “I think I’ll get my black belt.” And he has continued with his martial arts studies.
Even adults can experience the effects of this developmental shifting of gears, given the right conditions. One situation that can produce a surge of emergent energy is the experience of being deeply in love and also feeling very secure in that love. People freshly in love experience a renewal of interests and curiosity, an acute sense of uniqueness and individuality, and an awakening of a spirit of discovery. It doesn’t come from someone pushing us to be mature and independent but from being deeply fulfilled and satiated in our attachment needs.
Impeding the development of so many of our children is their inability to make that shift from seeking satisfaction of their attachment hunger to the emergence of independent, exuberant engagement with their world. There are five reasons, important for parents and educators to understand, for why peer orientation robs children of the capacity to become satiated.
PEER ORIENTATION STUNTS GROWTH IN FIVE SIGNIFICANT WAYS
Parental Nurturance Cannot Get Through
One effect of peer orientation is that the love and nurturance we have for our children cannot get through. This was certainly the case in Peter’s situation and for many of the parents I have conferred with. There was no doubt that Peter’s parents loved him, wanted the best for him, and were willing to sacrifice for him. However, they, like many parents in their situation, found it difficult to maintain love in the absence of any kind of reciprocity from their son, and even more daunting when he actively rejected their overtures, rebuffed their affection, and resented any communication of interest on their part. Peter was simply not allowing his parents’ warmth and caring to sink in.
I see so many situations where a child is in the midst of plenty, a virtual banquet spread out before him, but is suffering from psychological mal-nourishment because of attachment problems. You cannot feed someone who is not sitting at your table. All the love in the world would not be enough to take the child to the turning point—the umbilical cord needs to be hooked up for the nourishment to get through. It is impossible to satiate the attachment needs of a child who is not actively attaching to the person willing and able to provide for those needs. When a child replaces parents with peers as the primary attachment figures, it is to peers she will look for emotional nurturing. Plainly put, it is exceptional for peer attachments to ever satisfy that attachment hunger. The developmental shift of energy never occurs. Because there is no move from attachment to indi-viduation, peer orientation and immaturity go hand and hand.
Peer Attachments, Being Insecure, Cannot Bring a Child to Rest
Peer relationships connect immature beings. As I pointed out in the previous chapter, they are inherently insecure. They cannot allow a child to rest from the relentless foraging for approval, love, and significance. The child is never free from the pursuit of closeness. Instead of rest, peer orientation brings agitation. The more peer-oriented the child, the more pervasive and chronic the underlying restlessness becomes. No matter how much contact and connection exist with peers, proximity can never be taken for granted or held fast. A child feeding off his popularity with others—or suffering the lack of it—is conscious of every nuance, threatened by every unfavorable word, look, gesture. With peers, the turning point is never reached: the pursuit of closeness never shifts into venturing forth as a sepa-rate being. Owing to their highly conditional nature, peer relationships—with few exceptions—cannot promote the growth of the child’s emerging self. One exception would be the friendship of children who are secure in their adult attachments; in such cases the acceptance and companionship of a peer can add to a child’s sense of security. Feeling fundamentally safe in his adult relationships, such a child gets an extra glow from peer friendships—not having to depend on them, he need not feel threatened by their inherent instability.
Peer-Oriented Children Are Unable to Feel Fulfilled
There is yet another reason why peer-oriented kids are insatiable. In order to reach the turning point, a child must not only be fulfilled, but this fulfillment must sink in. It has to register somehow in the child’s brain that the longing for closeness and connectedness is being met. This registration is not cognitive or even conscious, but deeply emotional. It is emotion that moves the child and shifts the energy from one developmental agenda to another, from attachment to individuation. The problem is that, for fulfillment to sink in, the child must be able to feel deeply and vulnerably—an experience most peer-oriented kids will be defended against. For the reasons discussed in the last chapter, peer-oriented children cannot permit themselves to feel their vulnerability.
It may seem strange that feelings of fulfillment would require openness to feelings of vulnerability. There is no hurt or pain in fulfillment—quite the opposite. Yet there is an underlying emotional logic to this phenomenon. For the child to feel full he must first feel empty, to feel helped the child must first feel in need of help, to feel complete he must have felt incomplete. To experience the joy of reunion one must first experience the ache of loss, to be comforted one must first have felt hurt. Satiation may be a very pleasant experience, but the prerequisite is to be able to feel vulnerability. When a child loses the ability to feel her attachment voids, the child also loses the ability to feel nurtured and fulfilled. One of the first things I check for in my assessment of children is the existence of feelings of missing and loss. It is indicative of emotional health for children to be able to sense what is missing and to know what the emptiness is about. As soon as they are able to articulate, they should be able to say things like “I miss daddy,” “It hurt me that grandma didn’t notice me,” “It didn’t seem like you were interested in my story,” “I don’t think so and so likes me.”
Many children today are too defended, too emotionally closed, to experience such vulnerable emotions. Children are affected by what is missing whether they feel it or not, but only when they can feel and know what is missing can they be released from their pursuit of attachment. Parents of such children are not able to take them to the turning point or bring them to a place of rest. If a child becomes defended against vulnerability as a result of peer orientation, he is made insatiable in relation to the parents as well. That is the tragedy of peer orientation—it renders our love and affection so useless and unfulfilling.
For children who are insatiable, nothing is ever enough. No matter what one does, how much one tries to make things work, how much attention and approval is given, the turning point is never reached. For parents this is extremely discouraging and exhausting. Nothing is as satisfying to a parent as the sense of being the source of fulfillment for a child. Millions of parents are cheated of such an experience because their children are either looking elsewhere for nurturance or are too defended against vulnerability to be capable of satiation. Insatiability keeps our children stuck in first gear developmentally, stuck in immaturity, unable to transcend basic instincts. They are thwarted from ever finding rest and remain ever dependent on someone or something outside themselves for satisfaction. Neither the discipline imposed by parents nor the love felt by them can cure this condition. The only hope is to bring children back into the attachment fold where they belong and then soften them up to where our love can actually penetrate and nurture.
What happens when insatiability dominates a person’s emotional functioning? The process of maturation is preempted by an obsession or an addiction, in this case for peer connection. Peer contact whets the appetite without nourishing. It titillates without satisfying. The end result of peer contact is usually an urgent desire for more. The more the child gets, the more he craves. The mother of an eight-year-old girl mused, “I don’t get it—the more time my daughter spends with her friends, the more demanding she becomes to get together with them. How much time does she really need for social interaction, anyway?” Likewise, the parents of a young adolescent complained that “as soon as our son comes home from camp, he gets on the phone right away to call the kids he’s just been with. Yet it’s the family he hasn’t seen for two weeks.” The obsession with peer contact is always worse after exposure to peers, whether it is at school or in playtimes, sleepovers, class retreats, outings, or camps. If peer contact satiated, times of peer interaction would lead automatically to increased self-generated play, creative solitude, or individual reflection.
Many parents confuse this insatiable behavior with a valid need for peer interaction. Over and over I hear some variation of “but my child is absolutely obsessed with getting together with friends. It would be cruel to deprive him.” Actually, it would be more cruel and irresponsible to indulge what so clearly fuels the obsession. The only attachment that children truly need is the kind that nurtures and satisfies them and can bring them to rest. The more demanding the child is, the more he is indicating a runaway obsession. It is not strength that the child manifests but the desperation of a hunger that only increases with more peer contact.
Peer-Oriented Children Cannot Let Go
My focus so far in this chapter has been on the satiation of attachment hunger as the key to releasing a child from preoccupation with attachment. Yet there are people who have matured well without ever having enjoyed, as children, a nurturing attachment with an adult. How can this be? The explanation is that there is a second key to unlocking the maturation process. One could call it “the back door to maturation,” as it is far less obvious and in many ways the opposite of satiation. This emotional turning point comes when, instead of being fulfilled by what works, the child’s brain registers that the attachment hunger is not going to be satisfied in this situation or at this time. The futility that sinks in arises from failed aspirations—not getting daddy’s attention or being special to grandma, a failure to make a friend or to have someone to play with. It may be caused by a child’s inability to escape feeling alone, or to be the biggest and best, matter the most to someone, to find a lost pet, keep mommy home, or to prevent the family from moving. The list of potentially futile desires could extend from the most mundane example of a thwarted drive for closeness with someone to the most profound loss of attachment.
Our emotional circuitry is programmed to release us from the pursuit of contact and closeness not only when attachment hunger is fulfilled but also when we truly get that the desire for its fulfillment is futile. Letting go of a desire we are attached to is most difficult even for adults, whether it be the wish that everyone like us or that a particular person love us, or that we become politically powerful. Not until we accept that what we have been trying to do cannot be done and fully experience the disappointment and sadness that follow can we move on with our lives. As immature creatures of attachment, children naturally experience the urges to hold on, to make contact, to demand attention, to possess the person attached to. A child may even become consumed by this desire to the point that it dominates her functioning. Only when the futility registers deep within the emotional brain will the urgency relax and the clinging end. On the other hand, if the futility fails to sink in, the child will remain gripped by obsessive attachment needs and will persist in pursuing the unattainable.
As with fulfillment, futility must sink in for the shift in energy to occur, the shift that leads to acceptance, from frustration to a sense of peace with how things are. It is not enough to register it intellectually, it must be felt deeply and vulnerably, in the very heart of the limbic system, at the core of the brain’s emotional circuitry. Futility is a vulnerable feeling, bringing us face-to-face with the limits of our control and with what we cannot change. Feelings of futility are some of the first to go when a child becomes defended against vulnerability. As a result, peer-oriented kids are extremely short on such emotions. Despite the fact that their peer relationships are so fraught with frustration and loss, they seldom talk about feelings of disappointment, sadness, and grief. As we will see in a later chapter, the inability to go from frustration to futility, from “mad to sad,” is a major source of aggression and violence.
In children, one of the most obvious signs of futility sinking in is the eyes watering. There is a little organ in the brain that orchestrates this telltale sign. We often learn to hide our tears as adults, but the impulse to cry is hardwired to feelings of futility. Of course, there are other experiences that can move us to tears as well, like something in our eye, onions, physical pain, and frustration. The tears of futility are set off by different neurological circuitry and are psychologically unique. They feel different on our cheeks. They are accompanied by a shift in energy: a healthy sadness, a backing-off from trying to change things. Tears of futility actually bring a release, a sense that something has come to an end. They signal that the brain truly apprehends that something is not working and must be let go of. A toddler who, for example, drops his ice cream cone but is able to find his tears and sadness in the arms of a loving adult will accept his loss, brighten up quickly, and move on to his next adventure in the world.
It is only natural that a child would be moved to tears by the experience of something unsuccessful in her attachments. In this, too, peer-oriented kids are far from natural. They are more likely to be dry-eyed when it comes to futility, and the worse things are in their peer relationships, the more entrenched becomes their unconscious resistance to accepting the futility of things. When we stop crying, it’s as if the brain’s capacity to process emotions—normally quite flexible and responsive—becomes rigid. It loses its plasticity, its ability to develop. Without futility, as without satiation, maturation is impossible.
Peer Orientation Crushes Individuality
Peer orientation threatens maturation in another crucial way: it crushes individuality. Before we explore why, we must briefly point out the important distinction between individuality and individualism. Individuality is the fruit of the process of becoming a psychologically separate being that culminates in the full flowering of one’s uniqueness. Psychologists call this process differentiation or individuation. To be an individual is to have one’s own meanings, one’s own ideas and boundaries. It is to value one’s own preferences, principles, intentions, perspectives, and goals. It is to stand in a place occupied by no other. Individualism is the philosophy that puts the rights and interests of a person ahead of the rights and interests of the community. Individuality, on the other hand, is the foundation of true community because only authentically mature individuals can fully cooperate in a way that respects and celebrates the uniqueness of others. Ironically, peer orientation may fuel individualism even as it undermines true individuality.
Budding individuality and emerging independence require protection, both from the reactions of others and from the power of one’s own drive to attach to others at all costs. There is something very vulnerable about newly emergent psychological growth in all its manifestations: interest, curiosity, uniqueness, creativity, originality, wide-eyed wonder, new ideas, doing it oneself, experimenting, exploring, and so on. Such emergence has a tentative and timid character, like a turtle sticking its head out of a shell. To venture forth in all our naked originality is to be totally exposed to the reactions of others. If the reaction is too critical or negative, this show of emergence quickly dissipates. Only a highly mature person can brave the reactions of those who do not recognize or value independence of thought, being, and action.
Children cannot be expected to welcome signs of maturation in another child. It is not their responsibility and, in any case, they are too driven by attachment to honor individuality. How could they know that developing one’s own intentions is the seed of future values? That dividing the world into “mine” and “not mine” is not antisocial but the necessary beginning of individuation? That wanting to be the author of one’s work and the originator of one’s ideas is the way to becoming one’s own person? Children do not care much about such things in one another. It takes an adult to recognize the seeds of maturity, to make room for individuality, and to value the early signs of independence. It takes an adult to see individuality as a sacred trust and to give it whatever protection it needs.
Still, if the only problem was children’s inability to encourage and celebrate one another’s individuality, peer interaction would not be so hard on emerging personhood. Unfortunately, the problem is much worse than that. Immature people tend to trample on any individuality that dares show itself. In a child’s world it is not immaturity but rather the maturing processes that are suspect and a source of shame. The emergent child—the child who is self-motivated and not driven by needs for peer contact—seems like an anomaly, irregular, a little off the beaten track. The words that peer-oriented kids use for such a child are highly critical, words like weird, stupid, retarded, freak, and geek. Immature children do not understand why these emergent, maturing others are trying so hard to get along, why they seek solitude sometimes instead of company, why they can be curious and interested about things that don’t involve others, why they ask questions in class. There must be something wrong with these kids and for that they deserve to be shamed. The stronger a child’s peer orientation, the more intensely she will resent and assault another kid’s individuality.
Just as individuation is threatened from the outside by the reactions of peers, it’s also undermined by the internal dynamics of the peer-oriented child. Individuality is hard on peer attachments. Few peer-oriented relationships can bear the weight of the child becoming his own person, having his own preferences, speaking his own mind, expressing his own judgments, making his own decisions. When attachment to peers is the primary concern, individuality must be sacrificed. To the immature child this sacrifice seems only right. Editing her personality, diminishing her true self-expression, and suppressing any conflicting opinions or values seem like the natural course of action. She must not allow her individuality to come between herself and her peers. To immature beings, friendship—by which they mean peer attachment—must always come before the self. Creatures of attachment would willingly sell their birthright of individuality for some token acceptance from peers, without any idea of the developmental sacrilege they had just committed. Not until there is viability as a separate being does a self-preserving instinct even form.
Kate is the mother of seven-year-old Claire, whom she home-schools. “Quite a neat and unique little person at seven,” says Kate of her daughter, “with independence of spirit. Yet after more than a few hours with her peers, she comes back not exactly herself. Her language is not her own and she takes on the mannerisms of her friends. Then it takes a couple of hours for her Claire-self to reemerge. But as she gets older, the more and more she is able to maintain herself.”
During my daughter Tamara’s peer-oriented years she could not express her opinions or even entertain thoughts that would lead to conflict with her friends. I could almost see her shrink to fit within the parameters of whatever relationship she was preserving. When I encouraged her to be herself with Shannon—the girl who had become her primary orientation—she had great difficulty even comprehending what I meant. Although Tamara excelled academically, she was embarrassed by her accomplishments and took great pains to hide her marks from her peers. Any peer-oriented child knows the deal: don’t say or do anything that could reflect badly on others and risk pushing them away. She knew intuitively that these relationships could not take her weight, yet instead of allowing development to take its course, she attempted to make herself small enough to fit.
The world our children live in is becoming increasingly unfriendly to the natural processes of maturing. In the peer-oriented universe, maturation and individuation are seen as the enemies of attachment. Uniqueness and individuality become impediments to success in the peer culture.
It is our job, as parents, to cultivate attachments with our children that make room for individuation. A child’s individuality should never be the price exacted for warmth and closeness. We have to give our children what they cannot give to one another: the freedom to be themselves in the context of loving acceptance—an acceptance that immature peers are unable to offer but one that we adults can and must provide.