Forcing the Brain in the Wrong Direction

Chapter 13 of The Myth of Normal by Dr Gabor Mate

I love going through this book, and sharing what I’m learning from it, but it’s taking more time than I anticipated to write. . . mostly because I can’t seem to tone down the verbiage. I’m going to try to share only a couple gems from each chapter—as distilled as possible so I can spend time on a couple of longer articles I’m working on.

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This chapter focuses on putting parenting into the wider context of society. Parents are often trying their best, but when two incomes are needed, and our “nuclear families” have so little support from an extended family and community is almost non-existent, it is difficult to make the time and space for that all-important connection with our children.

I highly recommend reading Dr Gordon Neufeld’s and Dr Gabor Mate’s book Hold On to Your Kids if you still have children at home. The research done into the importance of the parent-child relationship is extensive and very conclusive. It was one of the (very few) parenting books that I held onto and followed throughout my children’s lives — I still find it very important in their teen years. It really helps me to refocus sometimes on what is important and needed for my children. (spoiler alert: not stuff and phones).

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From The Myth of Normal:

“An automatic consequence of the weakening of communal and family ties is that our kids must seek their attachment needs elsewhere. Children, like the young of many species, must attach to someone in their lives: their neurophysiology demands it. Absent a reliable attachment figure, they experience fear and disorientation. Their brain wiring will go, well, haywire. In effect, essential brain circuits having to do with capacities such as learning, healthy social interaction, or emotional regulation will not develop appropriately.

Nothing in a child’s brain tells her to whom she should attach. Nature’s assumption, if we can put it that way, is that the parents will be consistently present. . .

“For our young today, “whoever is around” from an early age onward is most often the peer group. Unmoored by the decline of multigenerational adult-led community, children and adolescents have to seek acceptance from one another. This is, developmentally speaking, a fool’s errand”

Losing your developmental way by orienting to peers instead of adults sets a child up for exploitation by media and marketing, and it also forces a child to become “invulnerable”. Children lose their vulnerability at an incredibly young age when they do not have a safe space with supportive adults, to really be themselves. Why would we want children to be vulnerable? According to the research “If there is no emotional vulnerability, there is no developmental growth, and children are stuck, unable to fully mature.”

This used to only be the case for occasional sad situations; children who tragically had terrible situations at home, and therefore had no safe attachments to parents where they could be vulnerable and develop properly. Now, according to researchers, it is becoming increasingly the norm. This isn’t due to a growing number of families where parental abuse is the norm, but rather due to increasing separation between children and their parents, as parents need to work more, children are under more pressure to succeed academically, and our leisure time is so often spent in our own separate spaces with our own separate devices.

This type of detachment is happening at younger and younger ages, as parents become more dependent on devices: Tired and stressed breastfeeding mothers, scrolling through Tiktok instead of having that face-to-face time with the newborn. Hurried, rushed parents giving a toddler a phone or tablet so they’ll be still during a diaper change or a car ride or a restaurant meal.

The lack of cultural parent supports in North America, the degradation of the extended family, and the rise in the cost of living all contribute to the way things are, and we’ve normalized it—normalized a way of being that’s detrimental to our physical and mental health, and even the basic development of our children.

The biggest takeaway from this chapter is how incredibly important a safe and supportive relationship between parent and child (or teen) is. Without it the child cannot fully develop, and also becomes prey to the exploitive marketing techniques of many corporations, and the addictiveness of the quick hits of dopamine that social media and other behaviors and substances can give.

There is a lot more research and discussion in this chapter around supports that parents need, the exploitation of children’s vulnerabilities and developing minds for profit, and Dr Mate touches briefly on dopamine, addiction, and screens. This will be explored more thoroughly in the next section.

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This brief commentary and the included quotes are only a sample of Dr Mate’s work. I include what stands out the most to me, but there is a lot more. If you’re interested in exploring trauma and emotional healing further, I encourage you to visit Dr Gabor Mate’s website, check out his youtube channel, or read more of his books.