Brian Rose had a young son when he sat down with Dr Gabor Maté in late 2018, and this clip is him asking, as a father, the question many parents quietly worry about: how do I not screw this up? Maté’s answers are gentle, direct, and at times a challenge to mainstream parenting advice.
It’s a ten-minute clip, and one of the most-watched parenting conversations on the channel.
▶ Watch the full episode: Gabor Maté – Childhood Trauma Creates Addiction
The first three years
Maté says the first seven years of a child’s life are crucial, and the first three are the core of it. His advice to parents is memorable: “you get the first three years right, you can relax.” Get them wrong, he says, and you may spend decades on remedial parenting.
Presence, not words
What does getting it wrong look like? Maté uses himself as the example. As a young father, he says, he couldn’t simply be with his children. He was waiting for them to grow old enough to talk and engage intellectually, and by then he had missed the window.
The real relationship, he explains, doesn’t depend on words. It depends on the capacity to be with a child, and to communicate, through body language and energy, that you welcome them and are glad they exist. Babies can’t name it, he says, but they feel it, and it starts shaping their personality.
Mothers, fathers and presence
Brian asks whether mothers simply bond differently. Maté says it isn’t really a gender issue but a relational one. Mothers have traditionally been present, while fathers often “visit” their children around work. Fathers who stay home learn to nurture too, he says, which is why paternity leave matters. Even when a child is playing alone, the parent’s presence is what makes it feel safe enough to play.
Why kids drift to their peers
Maté then describes the argument of his book Hold On to Your Kids, written with psychologist Gordon Neufeld. Children are driven to attach to someone. In the hunter-gatherer groups humans evolved in, those attachments were to a circle of nurturing adults. In modern culture, he says, children often lack that adult presence, and fill the gap with their peer group, which then becomes their model for how to walk, talk and behave.
The result, he argues, is that parents lose their natural authority, which comes not from being bigger or wiser but from the child’s desire to belong to them.
Discipline means disciples
When parents lose that authority, Maté says, they often become authoritarian, and the harder they push, the more the child resists. His alternative is in the word itself: to discipline children, “we actually have to make them our disciples,” and a disciple is someone who loves and follows you, not someone who is afraid of you.
That’s why he challenges time-outs. Withdrawing the relationship to make a child comply, he says, teaches them that love is conditional and that their parent is least available exactly when they are most upset. He is equally critical of leaving babies to cry.
What to take from it
You don’t have to agree with every point to take something useful away. Maté’s central message is simple: the relationship is the foundation of a child’s development, so protect it, and be present, even when there is nothing to say.
Who is Dr Gabor Maté?
Gabor Maté is a Hungarian-born Canadian physician and author, born in Budapest in 1944. He spent years working with people with addiction in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside, and is known for his work on childhood trauma, stress and addiction. His books include In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts, When the Body Says No and The Myth of Normal.
In the full episode, he talks with Brian Rose about how childhood trauma shapes addiction, and what healing looks like. You can also watch his first London Real interview: Gabor Maté – Why You Are Addicted.
See everything Gabor Maté has done with London Real on his guest page: Dr Gabor Maté on London Real.
More on London Real
Transcript
Transcript: Dr Gabor Maté – How Not To Screw Up Your Kids: Presence, The First Three Years And Discipline
0:00 Brian Rose: I know you have a whole book on this, and I’m ordering it on Audible tonight. But things to think about in my relationship with my children: the first lesson is that happiness is the greatest gift I can give them. And the first seven years are very important.
0:14 Gabor Maté: The first seven years are crucial. I’d say the first three years are the nub of it. I also say to people: you get the first three years right, you can relax. If you don’t get the first three years right, you’ll be practising remedial parenting for decades.
0:34 Brian Rose: So I’ve got six months left with my first son. Game on.
0:41 Gabor Maté: I’m sure you didn’t screw it all up.
0:45 Brian Rose: What does screwing it up look like? How would you know?
0:51 Gabor Maté: Well, first of all, you’d know because there I am with my son and I’m not finding rest in it. I don’t know how to be there with him, how to be there for him. And I was like that. I was always waiting for my kids to grow older, so I could intellectually engage them and we’d have something in common. But the sheer state of being with them, I could never achieve. And it’s interesting: I look at my brothers, and they’re so wonderful with little kids. They’re so spontaneously there for them. I never knew how to do that.
1:33 Gabor Maté: So while you’re busy waiting for them to get old enough to talk and engage, you’ve already missed the window. Because the real relationship doesn’t depend on words. It depends on the capacity to be with. “I’m just here with you, here and now, and I welcome your presence. I welcome you to exist in my presence, and I’m overjoyed to have you.” That’s what the child needs from the parent, and it’s communicated with body language and energy. They can feel it. They can’t name it, but they can feel it. And that already starts shaping their personality.
2:23 Brian Rose: So that’s in the first few years, and you were waiting to intellectually engage, which makes sense. They always say mothers form a different bond. Is that just an anachronism?
2:35 Gabor Maté: Mothers form a different bond, but only because mothers are present with their kids, whereas fathers tend to visit their kids. The father typically goes to work, visits at home for a couple of hours, and takes off again the next morning. Those fathers who stay home with their kids learn how to nurture their kids. So it’s not a gender issue, it’s a relational issue. And mothers allow themselves to be trained by the kids, whereas fathers tend to impose their own expectations on the kid. This is not universal; I’m talking by and large.
3:10 Gabor Maté: So those fathers who have the good fortune, in the civilised countries where parents are given paternity leave, learn to relate to their kids in a different way from the average father somewhere else. We can be trained, but we have to be present for the training.
3:26 Brian Rose: I do think about this. Sometimes I was in situations where he’s one or two years old and I’m thinking, I don’t know what to do here. And I was like: just breathe and just be here for him. Even if he’s playing.
3:46 Gabor Maté: Even if he’s playing. It’s your presence that gives him the security to play on his own. The anxious child cannot play on his own, or plays on his own as a way of protecting himself. When you look at animals, the young cubs play all the time, and play is the preparation for life. But it happens in the protective presence of the parents.
4:21 Brian Rose: So the basic lessons: give the gift of happiness, be present, even if you can’t verbally communicate. That’s not even the most important part. Just be there.
4:38 Gabor Maté: Because the two-month-old, the three-month-old, the six-month-old doesn’t understand words anyway. The communication happens on a much deeper level.
4:46 Brian Rose: And the name of the book, if people want to get it?
4:50 Gabor Maté: The parenting book that I co-wrote is called Hold On to Your Kids: Why Parents Need to Matter More Than Peers. It’s been published in over 20 languages. What it’s about is that children need to attach. They need to connect with somebody, because without that connection they don’t survive. In the hunter-gatherer bands where human beings evolved, those attachments were with adults, and not just one or two adults but a whole set of nurturing adults.
5:26 Gabor Maté: In our culture we’ve deprived kids of parental presence for the most part, and the child’s brain can’t handle an attachment void, where there’s no attachment figure. In the absence of the parent or nurturing adult, the child will fill that void with the peer group. Now kids become far more peer-attached than is healthy for them. Peers become their models and their mentors, the templates for how to be, how to walk and how to talk. And as that happens, the kids push away from the parents, because they’re more minded to belong to the peer group, which has different values. The child’s brain can’t handle that competition, so it will actually choose the peer group over the parent.
6:12 Gabor Maté: Where that goes, you can see on Facebook, you can see it in teenage gangs, and you can see it in the increasing frustration of parents who’ve lost their power to parent. Parents think their power to parent comes from the fact that they have the responsibility and the strength and the wisdom. It doesn’t. The power to parent comes from the desire of the child to belong to you. When the child is driven to belong to the peer group, because we’ve taken him out of his natural context, we lose the power to parent.
6:42 Gabor Maté: What do we do then? We ratchet up the pressure. We lose the authority, so we become authoritarian. And the more authoritarian we become, the more pressure we put on, the more they resist. And now we label them with oppositional defiant disorder, and we call them obstreperous and bad and naughty, when all they’re doing is acting out their attachment dynamics. So if you want to discipline kids, we actually have to make them our disciples. A disciple is not somebody who’s afraid of you. A disciple is somebody who loves you and wants to belong to you and follow you. So discipline is the very opposite of punishment.
7:24 Brian Rose: How do you do that with your kids?
7:28 Gabor Maté: You realise that the essential template for the emotional development of the child, as well as for the brain’s healthy physiological development, is a nurturing relationship with mutually responsive adults. That means anything you do that undermines the relationship with the child undermines the child’s development, because it makes the child insecure. And kids in a state of insecurity are in defensive fight-or-flight mode, in which they don’t learn anything. They just start defending.
8:12 Gabor Maté: So every time I use the relationship against the child… I have a two-year-old who’s angry, and most psychologists and parenting experts will tell you: time-out. In other words, withdraw the relationship from the child as a way of threatening the child, and that threat will make the child comply. Well, the child may temporarily comply. But what have you taught them? That the relationship is conditional, that they’re only acceptable to you if they please you. Furthermore, you’ve taught them that relationships are unstable and unreliable, and that you’re not available for them when they’re most upset.
9:00 Gabor Maté: Why is he acting out? Why the tantrum? Because he’s frustrated about something, angry about something, unhappy. And you say to him: when you’re most unhappy, that’s when I’m least available to you. This is how parents are taught to parent. Furthermore, parents are taught not to pick up the kids when they’re crying, to let them sleep it out. Utterly noxious. What lesson do they get? Their emotions don’t matter. Just the opposite of what any loving parent wants to teach. So the parenting psychology in this culture has become anti-child.
