The Myth of Normal 149

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. Children are born with this expectation coded into their bodies and nervous systems. The immature brain cannot abide what Gordon Neufeld calls an “attachment void”—a situation in which no attachment figure is there to connect with. Inevitably, just as a newborn duckling, in the absence of its mother, will trustingly follow the first creature it sees—the nearest goose, squirrel, park ranger, or even a robotic toy car—the vacuum must and will be filled by whoever is around. For our young today, “whoever is around” from an early age onward is most often the peer group. Unmoored by the decline of the multigenerational adult-led community, children and adolescents have to seek acceptance from one another. This is, developmentally speaking, a fool’s errand. To be clear, the desire, even the need, to form close connections with one’s own age group is natural and healthy. Such friendships can be among the richest bonds forged in a lifetime. But from the perspective of emotional development, peer orientation—the displacement of adults as the primary source and locus of attachment for the child, in favor of her own age cohort— is disastrous.[] The proverbial blind can do a better job of leading the blind than immature creatures can successfully guide one another to psychological maturity. Aaron, the younger of my two sons, now forty-three, sees in hindsight how this dynamic has limited him. “As a teenager I was consumed by what my friends thought of me, how much they liked me, what it took to fit in with their expectations,” he recalled recently. “That kept me immature into my adulthood.” Of course, his peer orientation was not about his peers per se: it was a natural outcome of his parents’ lack of availability as emotionally attuned adults in his early years. As we’ve discussed, emotional safety, formed in secure connections with a baseline of unconditional worth, is a prerequisite condition for maturation. Generally, once kids are absorbed into the peer world, they lose the safety of the primary connection with adults.[]