Page 2 - How Children Learn to Hate Their Parents

Introduction:
With alarming regularity, judges, legal advocates for children and parents, and mental health professionals who work in and around the divorce and family court systems, are encountering children who want to terminate contact between themselves and a parent. Parents are shocked by rejection from children who just months before were happy, affectionate and who sought their time and attention. Now, out of nowhere they express hatred for their caregivers.
I said "hatred" not dislike or disapproval -- HATRED. Questions arise from the perspective of the rejected parent: How and why did this happen?
Is there any way to fix it?
Is my ex's hatred of me so intense that it's causing this?
Did I do something that caused this?
In this three part program I am going to teach that the rejection of a parent during or after a divorce can have quite a few causes, some of which can result in a permanent rejection of the parent. Hopefully, the information here can help mitigate that outcome by providing some understanding of how and why parental rejection happens.
However, in order to understand how children learn to hate their parents it is important to discard the notion that one thing caused it. It is also important to understand that there is nothing that we know of with certainty that can fix it. This phenomenon of children rejecting their parents after a divorce is ultimately much more complex than people who haven't seen it thousands of times realize.
Unfortunately, I have seen it thousands of times and I have given the best advice on how to address this problem that I can, sometimes successfully and sometimes unsuccessfully. The reason why I am sometimes unsuccessful is I don't know everything about this phenomenon yet, even after thirty six years of studying it and trying to learn. I have no good substantial body of research to guide me, and no treatment approach with any known efficacy to implement as a way of fixing it.
I do know that in the majority of instances where I am unsuccessful, it is because rejection, especially from one's own child hurts and this kind of pain seeks someone to blame; and the concept of "alienation" was constructed in at least some part to give comfort to those
who need someone to blame -- but blaming is an incomplete and often unsatisfying remedy.
For attorneys and advocates who are trying to protect their clients from having the most special and loving relationship in their lives destroyed, I want this information can help guide you through a system that is often powerless to effectuate change. But if we are ever going to create a mechanism for change I believe we must all try to understand the question of how children learn to hate their parents with a better answer than the one word we often over use --
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