Your Child Is Attaching to Someone (And It Might NOT be You) #84

Why kids stop listening to parents (and how to rebuild connection without power struggles or punishment).

If your child suddenly seems more influenced by friends, more sensitive to what others think, or harder to reach at home, you’re not imagining it. This video breaks down what’s actually happening beneath the surface when kids become more peer-focused, why it can lead to emotional instability, defiance, or withdrawal, and how to gently re-anchor your relationship without forcing control. If you're dealing with backtalk, disconnection, big emotions, or a child who just won’t listen anymore, this will help you understand the “why” behind it—and what actually works.

What You’ll Learn:

•  Why kids become more attached to peers than parents (and when it becomes a problem) 
•  The early signs your child is “pulling away” (before it gets worse) 
•  3 simple ways to rebuild connection without nagging, yelling, or control 
•  How to become the safe place your child actually turns to (even during meltdowns) 
•  What attachment really means—and how it shapes behavior, listening, and emotional regulation 

This approach is grounded in developmental psychology and neuroscience, but translated into real, usable parenting tools. No scripts, no quick fixes—just a clear way to understand your child’s behavior and respond in a way that strengthens your relationship instead of straining it.

If parenting has been feeling harder lately, more pushback, more second-guessing, more distance, this is exactly the kind of shift that makes things feel easier again. Subscribe if you want practical, research-backed guidance that helps you stay calm, feel more confident, and actually enjoy your child again (even in the messy moments).

Transcript

Who Your Child Is Wired To Follow

Jon @WholeParent 0:00

Your child's brain is wired to follow whoever they feel most attached to. The problem is, for a lot of kids today, that's no longer their parents. Welcome back to the Whole Parent Podcast. My name is John. I'm an author, parenting researcher, I'm getting my PhD, I have a background in counseling, and I'm also a dad of four, which means that I get to see what actually works in real life day to day, and not just what sounds good in a child development textbook. And I found that there is a massive gap today in parenting advice. On one side, you have all of that research, right? The brain development, the stuff you learn in school, behavioral sciences, attachment, and it's all really, really valuable, but it often feels really abstract and hard to apply and disconnected from what's going on going on in normal people's lives with their kids when they're melting down. And then on the other side, you have everyday parenting advice, stuff that you might read in a parenting book or see on YouTube or Instagram, quick fixes. And some of that works for a little while, but then it falls apart when things get too intense, or it doesn't hold up because your kid doesn't fit the type of kid that it's designed for. This podcast is designed to fill in that gap. We're taking the science and we're translating it into something that you can actually use in the real world. There's something happening in childhood right now that most people can feel, but they don't quite have the words for. Kids today are not necessarily more connected to one another. In fact, in many ways, they're less, right? They don't run around outside until it gets dark or go knock on your friend's door so that you can play a pickup game of baseball down the street. If anything, it's just like a different level of exposure to one another. Exposed to comparison, exposed to social feedback, their vulnerabilities put on display, constant, immediate, and in this like unfiltered way. And a lot of that exposure isn't actually happening in real life. It's happening through the devices that have come to rule our lives. And I think we can see the effects of that exposure in really small everyday moments. Like there's kids who used to move through the world freely, right? Up until at least age 14 or 15, who now hesitate. You might have a child who used to play with abandoned without thinking about it. And now they watch and make sure that others are playing first. A child who used to come home and decompress, and now they stay mentally walled in, whatever sort of social dynamic that they were in for the whole day. And again, it's really easy to write this off, right? Like kids have always cared what other kids think, friends have always mattered. Growing up has always involved some level of like social awareness. It's healthy, in fact. But something about this often feels different. And I think that is because it is different. What's changing is not just how kids interact with their peers anymore, it's about how peers are deeply shaping each other. Because for most of human history, a child's world had edges, right? There were clear boundaries between different environments. Like you had home, which felt different than outside home, backstage versus front stage. Family felt different than peers. And there were these like natural breaks when a child could go home and reset and re-anchor and then come back to themselves. And those edges have disappeared in the world of social media and technology. And so now peer dynamics don't stay like in peer spaces, right? They follow your kids home in their pockets. And they show up at the dinner table and they show up before bed or maybe after bed. They show up first thing in the morning when your kid wakes up and reaches for that device, and there's no true off switch. And when you remove those boundaries, something begins to happen. Peers stop being a part of a child's world and they start becoming the center of it. Because a child's brain is always organizing itself around one core question: who do I belong to? What is my tribe? And that question is not optional. It gets answered in one way or another, and the answer really determines everything downstream, right? In an environment where peer input is constant and immediate and always emotionally charged, their brain starts to say, okay, this is where I'm gonna get my cues for like what to do and how to be. And so instead of a kid primarily being oriented around people who unconditionally love them, a safe home base where parents are, you know, securely attached to them, with a strong foundation that they can kind of launch off into the world and kind of make sense of everything, and then they always have that safe home base to come back to. This is what my friend Eli Harwood talks about. She's gonna be on the podcast soon. You start to see the shift toward like everything being oriented around peers, toward group dynamics, towards social positioning being the main point of life. And all of it's very external. And there's this there's just like a difference between a child who enjoys their friends and a child who's entire mindset and identity is organized around friends. One is healthy, really healthy, one is really, really unstable. And when kids start organizing around peers, you s begin to see these patterns emerge where kids become more sensitive to how they're perceived, more aware of like their status and their inclusion and fitting in and wearing the right thing or saying the right thing or liking the right thing, like more likely to adjust themselves to match the dynamics of the group, more affected, like on a deep level affected by the things that are happening in their social circles that are they're just not ready to handle yet. And when this peer orientation, as it's called, increases, the parental orientation often decreases because it doesn't, it's no longer like the primary reference point. And I want to point out that this is a weird episode for me. Not only am I talking in general about older kids than I often talk about, I am also usually the first one to say, let your kids spread their ring wings, and it's good for them to separate from you, and it's good for them to form their own identity, and this should be done with peers in you know, non-interventionalist ways. Like we should be letting our kids spend more time running around the neighborhood. I mean, like literally, my kids, the what the scenario that I described at the beginning of like, oh, kids don't do this anymore. Uh, I say that because that is the norm, but we are not the norm. Like, my kids actually do get to still have that sort of come on when the come home when the lights come on, childhood between us and our neighbors' houses. But there's something, there's this part about growing up, right? There's this difference between what I'm talking about and what what all of these studies show us with healthy independence and outsourcing yourself, like outsourcing your sense of self. Because a kid can still like deeply love you and need you and come to you for like certain things, but when it comes to who they really are intrinsically, like how they act, what their values are, uh, how they decide what matters, if they're primarily looking towards other kids who also have underdeveloped brains as their sense of identity, kids who are not securely attached to them, that's when we get into a completely different territory because peers just simply cannot do the job of parents. I often hear people say things like, oh, you're their parent, you don't have to be their friend, just be their parent, or um, you're not supposed to be their friend, you're supposed to be their parent. And why while I hate that, because I think we can also, we can, we can behave like excellent friends to our kids in many ways. We can be friendly with our kids, we don't have to be mean for no reason, we can be friends and parents. Friends cannot be parents, and I think that's the the kernel of truth that's underneath all of that, right? Friends can include, but they also can exclude, they can influence, and they can be that mirror that we often are, but we they cannot anchor. And when kids place this level of emotional weight into a peer relationship, you don't, you're not gonna end with independence or interdependence, which is ultimately the goal here. What you wind up with is like deep instability and insecurity. You get like a kid whose confidence rises and falls based on external inputs, like how others are responding to them. A kid who becomes so anxious about these small social shifts, a kid who starts performing every single second of every single day instead of expressing who they really are. And a kid who becomes actually less open at home, not because they don't need connection, actually, they need more connection, but because their orientation has gone elsewhere. They're no longer connecting with us because they have outsourced that influence. And again, this is not me like talking about blame here, right? This is, I don't blame parents for this. Like, we are all in the first, you know, 50 years, uh first 20 years of social media. Like, humans were not built for the world that we have right now. Like, I am not blaming anyone. I am not blaming parents or Gen X parents or boomer parents or millennial parents. I this is about awareness. Because I don't think that this is random. I think that this is a very specific combination of factors, right? High peer exposure, constant digital access, and really reduced boundaries between environments. And all of this is happening at the same time that we have less consistent anchoring and adult connection throughout the day. And so when we combine these factors, they sort of create this amalgamation of a conditions like perfectly tailored to form peer attachments, but not parent attachments. Which is why I think so many parents feel of teens feel like there's something off. And I think the crazy, the reason why I'm talking about this on this podcast is because what used to be a phenomenon, I think many parents felt like oh, the peer orientation thing happening at 15, 16, in some ways that's actually not as unhealthy as you might think. The problem is, the reason I'm talking about this now is because peer orientation is starting at nine. It's starting at 10. And so many parents feel that, but they can't quite name it. Like they just know my kid used to feel like easier to reach. So that's what we're talking about for the rest of today. It's not just peer influence, it's peer orientation. Why it's happening, what it looks like, what it does to our kids over time, and most importantly, I think how we can start restoring the kind of connection that allows you to be social without building their identity, like allows you to be social with your kid and allows them to be social with their peers without sort of building their identity on what other people think, especially what other kids, what their peers think. Because like we're never gonna pull our kids away from the world, right? The world is going to start shaping who they become, but we don't want to lose them in that process. So let's break it down. Because if we're actually going to like attempt to change any of this, I think we need to first understand what's happening, not just with the behaviors, but like with literally with the neuroscience here and with the culture here, right? This is the combination of like sociocultural development and like behavioral neuroscience and a lot of things. Like there's there's just a lot. So at the core is this idea goes back literally like over a hundred years to the the early, earliest vestiges of what would become attachment theory. But it is attachment and not like often when we say attachment, we're we're just speaking in kind of like vague generalities. Um, but specific biological attachment is your child's brain constantly asking itself, like, who, like, who is my safe base? Like, who can I trust? And who is going to be the one who's constantly there, who is like showing up more often than not for me. And the answer to that question really in large ways determines who they are going to listen to and also who they imitate and who they prioritize and who they most fear losing and who they organize their priority, like like themselves, their identity around. And from a brain perspective, attachment often we assume that it's just emotional, but it's actually like think of attachment more like physically orienting your kid in their like mental environment. I know that that probably sounds weird, but it it literally like attachment is the system that tells a brain where to look about cues for like where to look for cues about how they're supposed to behave and what what their values are supposed to be and how to interpret the world and where to run when they're unsafe. And this is the key, right? The brain is always going to orient around the strongest secure attachment available. Not necessarily the smartest, not always the intended, but the strongest one. So if peer orientation, like our peer relationships, are driving our kid, peer orientation is driving our kid to start feeling emotionally like their friends or their classmates are more consistent, more identity-shaping than their parents, like then the brain is going to adapt and it's going to say, okay, this is now where we're going to get all of our cues. And again, there's a certain degree of health in this when it occurs later. Again, 16, 17, 18. Uh, there's actually a lot of research pointing to this being a healthy thing, like and it points in this direction. But we know that it should not be going on when our kids are as young as like early or like before even middle school, certainly middle school, right? So, what we know from attachment theory is that, like, I mean, this is this is a very interesting study. Children are wired to seek specifically proximity, not physical, uh, not only physical proximity, I should say, but emotional proximity to their primary attachment figures. Okay. So, like, literally how we test this, uh, who is a child most securely attached to is that we put some adults from their life, maybe a grand grandparent or both parents, caregiver, a nanny, whatever, into a room with a kid, and then we like turn off the lights, or we bring in a stranger who like looks threatening, or we bring in a brig animal, big animal, like a big dog, and we see who the child runs to, like literally who they like gravitate, proximity to, like who they who they run to. And what's really interesting is that kids have an attachment hierarchy in their mind, and they will instantly run to the person who they're who is their primary attachment figure. And so a lot of parents come to me and they say, Oh, how do I know if I'm the primary attachment? You don't actually have to be the primary attachment in their life if your partner is their primary attachment. Like if you're the the non-preferred parent, that's not like some stain on your resume as a parent. Uh obviously, I watch my kids. Right now I'm watching my kids more than 50% of the time, and I am still not the primary attachment. So that isn't normal, right? Uh for one parent to be and the other parent to not be. But here's the interesting thing. You pull the primary out of the room and you run the same experiment back, or maybe a little bit different, the kid will then instantly run to the next person on the primary attachment hierarchy. But literally, how they test this is proximity. They how who do you run towards when you feel afraid? And what we know from social neuroscience is that belonging is like processed in the same regions of the brain as physical pain, okay? Specifically rejection, right? Is it literally hurts? I've made videos about this, short-form videos about how we put people in fMRI scanners and then we have them do silly tasks where they get excluded by like if they have like three participants, or like two of the participants exclude the third one, and we see what happens. And their brain lights up like they're being physically hurt. So from so that's what we know from like social neuroscience, right? Now we take developmental psychology, look all the way back to Ericsson and Freud, and then John Bowlby, like like all of these uh psychoanalytic, like great minds of the 20th century. And what we see is that a lot of the identity formation that's happening in middle childhood and late and even early adolescence, but then in late adolescence becomes highly sensitive to social feedback. So what you when you combine these things, what you get is that the brain is highly motivated to stay aligned with whoever it feels most attached to. And so if that is their peers, then they become the peers become the primary reference point. And this is where like culture, the culture beast comes in because right now what's happening in our world is that kids spend massive portions of their day separated from their adults, and they're surrounded by the exact same age peers. Okay. Like let me let me clarify it's okay if your kid is surrounded by peers all day, but we have a lot of data to show it's not great if kids are surrounded by people who are like exactly the same age. They should be kind of looking to kids who are a little bit older for guidance and then looking for to kids who are a little bit younger as like, and then they care for those, right? So, like if you have like a wide-ange range that are all smashed together, it's actually okay because the younger kids can look up to the older kids and the older kids can take care of the younger kids. But when you have kids that are all within 12 calendar months of each other, and that's who they're spending the overwhelming majority of their time with, like, this is where we're starting to create the environment for the problems. So again, unstructured mixed-age community like has largely disappeared. And then on top of this, screens amplify the comparison and the visibility and the social feedback loops that like kids are experiencing, all while parents are spending less and less time with their kids and are stretched thinner and thinner emotionally, financially, uh, mentally. Like it's just it's it's rough. Many of the same factors are plaguing the parents. And so that unintentionally weakens the connection. The parent is like not as emotionally available, the parent is more stressed out at work or whatever. And so, like all of these pieces like unintentionally weakens that emotional connection with the parent. And so we've created without ever really meaning to, and this is like really kind of even like you could almost take the screens out of this, and it would still be a problem, is a system where peers are not only the most available and the most consistent and the emotionally, most emotionally charged relationships in a child's daily life, it's not only are the peers, it's like peers of of a exact same age. And at a younger age, the brain does what the brain always does, right? Because if a kid is experiencing like like the brain is more plastic at this time. And so it's gonna adapt, like it's going to change. And so it doesn't always show up in like the most obvious ways. Sometimes it looks like your child becoming socially successful, but underneath you see these patterns where you're like, oh my gosh, my kid cares way more about what their friends think than what I think. And again, some of that's okay, but when it's like really over the top, like now we got to take a pause. You're right. Their mood is super dependent about what happens in peer interactions. Like they have they have no emotional stability to be able to just kind of weather the storms of the other prepubescent, like not emotionally thoughtful people in their life. And they become more resistant and dismissive to their parents, like specifically, they hide parts of themselves, or they become more performative, or they become highly sensitive to exclusions. Or embarrassment or status changes. And one of the biggest ones, right? And this is the one that is mirrored by that early research where or the early childhood research where they're showing the attachment figures. The child we know who the child is attached to but by who they run to when they're in danger. When your kid stops turning to you when things go wrong, that's when you know that you have a real problem. And a lot of the time parents interpret these different ways that kids push back or or or push away as disrespect or defiance or or healthy independence, right? Like, or they'll say things like this, it's just a face, right? What's actually happening though here is attachment displacement. And I'm not trying to like make a boogeyman here, but if this is happening consistently and over a long period of time, like your child is not choosing to ignore you. They are choosing, uh their brain, rather, is choosing to prioritize the relationships that it perceives as the most valuable for its attachment survival needs. Like, and this should mean that you need to stop fixing this by just trying to get back control, because control doesn't restore attachment. In fact, control often weakens attachment. And this is why, like, the parent who's like, my kid never tells me anything, so I'm gonna take the door off their room so that they can't hide anything for me. Yeah. Probably the worst possible thing you could do in that scenario. Like, you actually don't, you can't reach for control, you have to reach for connection. And that's what we're gonna talk about right after a break. So, how do you regain influence if it's not through authority, right? Uh it's through attachment. Surprise. Um, but I want to make it really practical. So, what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna give you three really simple tools, and hopefully by the end, you can pick apart, take at least one of these tools and implement it if you feel your kid pulling away, or even if you don't, because you're just worried or you're you're trying to be proactive about making sure that you stay connected. Uh, number one, I want to increase invitations, not instructions, right? One of the fastest ways that you can rebuild attachment is not is to change how you initiate your interactions. So instead of saying, like, oh, go clean up your room or go put on your shoes or um go do this right now. You forgot to do that. Invite them to do it with you. So, like, hey, uh come with me while I go do this thing, or hey, let's go upstairs together. I I gotta clean my room, you can clean your room. And it seems small, but invitations pull your kids into like connection instead of pushing them away and kind of making uh tasks of what to do. Attachment grows in proximity. So, like, if there is a because so okay, let me put it this way invitations cannot just be beyond that, like they can be anything, and that's we're gonna get into in the next one, in the in my next step. But but really remember this. This is this is the key point in this. If you take nothing away from the whole episode, attachment grows in proximity. If you don't spend enough time with your kids, and this is going the only way you can spend more time with them is by inviting them in. If you don't spend enough time with your kids, like they are going to naturally attach to the people who they spend the most time with. And again, I tried to point this out earlier, but culture is is driving, like it is almost impossible to spend as much time with your kids as their friends because of the way that culture has set this up. And I don't think it's healthy, to be completely frank. I I don't think it's healthy, but it is the world that we have. So increase the proximity. But you can't have that proximity be constantly negative. So you also have to, and this is my tip number two I want you to prioritize those like delight moments, if we can call them that, or like joy moments. Your child needs to feel from you, I enjoy you. They have to look at you and say, I this person enjoys my company. They they they like me. Like they are not just managing me, they are not just responsible for me, they are not just like um instructing me to do what I'm supposed to do because they don't want me to disrespect them in some way. Like, they actually enjoy me. Not they love me, they actually like me. And this can be literally 30 seconds, but I want you to do it at least once a day. Eye contact, smile, some sort of inside joke, any shared interest. If the only time that you engage with your kid is to fix behavior or to argue about their grades or to direct them to clean up their room or do this or this or that, you are going to lose influence. You have to increase the experience of your enjoyment in their presence. Like just have fun together. And it does not have to be big things. Okay, like this does not have to be go on vacation. In fact, that's the opposite, not the opposite, but that is the wrong message to take away. This is my small things every day. Connection first. Every day, connection first. And then, number three, and this is really important, you have to be the safe place where they can fall apart when they're having a big problem. If your child feels like they have to perform even for you, they will lean their attachment towards someone who feels like they don't have to perform for them. So when your child is messy and rude and dysregulated and emotional, this is not the moment to tighten up your control. It is actually the moment to increase your safety because attachment deepens actually in those moments. Like when your child is fully seen and not rejected when they are at their worst, that is that is when the attachment is at its best. And so these are not just tactics, okay? Like these are these three things that you can do, like these are about how you see yourself as a parent. These are mindset shifts. Most of us were raised to think my job is to get my kid to behave, or like my job is to make sure that they get good grades or they get into good college or whatever. But if attachment is, secure attachment is the foundation for emotional health, which I think increasingly the research has pointed to, then your real job has to be the person that your child orients to. Like everyone else and everything else will stem from that relationship. Right? So behavior and listening and respect and influence, like all of those are byproducts of a relationship that is built first on trust and connection. And this is why some parents can say very little and their kid will still listen, because their words carry weight from attachment, not like because they're tough or they're authoritarians, but because they're attached. And so if you're thinking this and thinking, like, well, I yeah, I think I've lost that, you're not alone. It but it's not permanent. Attachment is not a one-time thing. It's something that not only is being built all the time, it can be rebuilt and strengthened, repaired even. But it does require intention because, again, the culture that your kid is growing up into is constantly pulling them sideways. And your role is not to fight with that force, it's to deepen your relationship with your child, to be on their team, to be interested in the things that they care about, and to be a safe place when they fall apart, not just the director of their behavior. Because when attachment actually is like the core, it's when it's when it's the strong pillar, when it's the anchor, you actually don't have to compete with your kids' friends for their attention. You will have your kids' attention. And that is like maybe one of the most powerful pieces in all of this. If you liked this, this is a lot of what I talk about in my book, Punishment Free Parenting: the brain-based way to raise kids without raising your voice. A big reason why I advocate for no punishment is to continue to be the safe attachment figure. Also keep an eye out for an upcoming episode with Eli Harwood, who is an expert in attachment. It's gonna be a great one. Until now, listen to the outro, do all the things. Love you guys. See you in the next one. Thank you for your time listening to the whole parent podcast today. I hope you got something out of it. I have a couple quick favors to ask of you as we end the episode. The first one is to jump over on whatever podcast platform that you are listening to right now and rate this show five stars. You'll notice there are a lot of five-star ratings on this show, whether that's on Spotify or Apple Music or Apple Podcasts. We have a ton of five-star ratings and it helps our podcast get out to more people than almost any other parenting podcast out there. And so it's a really quick thing that you can do if you have 15 or 20 seconds. And if you have an additional 30 seconds, I'd love to read a review from you. I read all the reviews that come through. If some if you particularly like one part of the podcast or you like when I talk about something or whatever, imagine that you're writing that review directly to me. The second thing that you can do is go and send this episode to somebody in your life who you think could use it. Think about all the parents in your life. Think about your friends, your family members who could use a little bit of help parenting. It's vulnerable to share an episode of a parenting podcast with them. I get it. But imagine how much better your life is as a result of listening to this podcast, of following me on social media, of getting the emails that I send out. You can share that with someone else too. And so I encourage you, just go over, shoot them a quick text, share this episode with them, or share another episode that you feel like is particularly relevant to them. The last thing you can do is go down to the link show notes at the bottom. 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