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I've just put the finishing touches on my keynote for our upcoming conference on April 20th and am very much looking forward to sharing it with you. What's happening to our kids is alarming and should concern us all. In terms of their mental health, all indications are that it is steadily declining. A deeper dive into this arena reveals that our care is not getting through, they are losing their feelings, they are losing their empathy, and they are losing their playfulness. In putting the puzzle pieces together, there is absolutely no question whatsoever that something is awry in the underlying attachment dynamics. Without a deeper understanding of the problem however, we continue to engage in a futile battle against symptoms, unwittingly exacerbating the underlying roots of their troubles.
In my keynote, I will be talking about two camouflaged conditions and three still unrecognized disorders of attachment that are plaguing today's children, despite our current focus on their well-being and our well-meaning efforts to support it. One of these attachment disorders continues to be peer orientation, even more prevalent and hidden today than when I first introduced this attachment problem in my book twenty years ago. Current indications suggest that close to 70% of our school-aged children are now affected.
Unless we get to the underlying roots of our children's troubles, the decline in their well-being will not be reversed. The current approaches of diagnosing disorders, teaching empathy, promoting self-care, and fostering mental health literacy, are destined to fail, as they not only neglect to address the roots but, in giving the illusion of doing something about the problems, distract from what truly needs to be done. That is why we need to make sense of what is happening to our kids.
- Gordon Neufeld
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