Page 18 - How Children Learn to Hate Their Parents

Contributing Factor Four: Quality of Life
Often when parents separate, kids experience two homes with vastly different qulities of life. One home might be the familiar setting of everything they have ever known. One setting might be new, stripped down to barely anything, not as exciting, not as many games, not as good food, not as comfortable a place to sleep, not in the same neighborhood as friends.
When this happens, the person living in temporary or limited quarters, actually convinces themselves that they should not need to entertain their child and that the mere presence of them as a parent, anywhere, should be enough to keep a child happy. It does not often happen that way.
Children are opportunistic. They are designed that way to help them survive. A parent can be rejected by a child for not being able to match the lifestyle they have at the other parent's home, even if they have love and attention in both homes.
It's insulting and it's not fair, especially if you have fought an expensive custody battle, are saddled with providing child support and necessities and you have no quality of life--and your kids do not appreciate it and make it seem as though they are doing you a favor just by saying hello. However, it is reality. And children will reject a parent if for no ther reason than it might be "inconvenient" to visit. This is not alienation even though you might find many reasons to say it is.
The remedy for much of this is at the disposal of the preferred parent isn't it? The preferred parent should be able to influence the child to go to a place that is less appealing simply because it is the place where the other most important person to them is. However sometimes it takes great effort to do that even when the cause of the rejection is not their malcious intent.
So when you send each other fifteen nasty emails or text messages a day, proliferate your conflict, fight over little and big expenses, and continue your relationship to pursue revenge for past injustices, why would a rejected parent expect any effort from the preferred parent and give up the joy of watching the rejected parent get what's coming to them. That's not alienation, it's karma any preferred parent will tell you.
Not being the cause of the problem does not mean that the preferred parent has an obligation to fix it. Or does it? We will examine this further in other blocks.
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