““The chief and most damaging of the competing attachments that undermine parenting authority and parental love is the increasing bonding of our children with their peers. The disorder affecting the generations of young children and adolescents now heading toward adulthood is rooted in the lost orientation of children toward the nurturing adults in their lives. Far from seeking to establish yet one more medicalpsychological disorder here — the last thing today's bewildered parents need — we are using the word disorder in its most basic sense: a disruption of the natural order of things. For the first time in history young people are turning for instruction, modeling, and guidance not to mothers, fathers, teachers, and other responsible adults but to people whom nature never intended to place in a parenting role — their own peers. They are not manageable, teachable, or maturing because they no longer take their cues from adults. Instead, children are being brought up by immature persons who cannot possibly guide them to maturity. They are being brought up by each other. The term that seems to fit more than any other for this phenomenon is peer orientation. It is peer orientation that has muted our parenting instincts, eroded our natural authority, and caused us to parent not from the heart but from the head — from manuals, the advice of “experts,” and the confused expectations of society.””
