Page 31 - How Children Learn to Hate Their Parents

Out of The Trenches: What is the Study of Parental Rejection the Study of?
If you, like me, are pestered with the "why" of everything, understanding is often sought by trying to determine how parental rejection and visitation refusal is like other phenomena we know something about. To me, parental rejection is an "attitude." The study of attitudes and beliefs and how they operate on behavior is within the scope of social psychology and social psychology is steeped in research. Contradictory research, but attempts to look at the behavior of people in groups using the scientific method nonetheless. The way I look at it, if you can change a child's attitude, the negative view of a rejected parent, you might be able to repair the relationship.
Q: Does Attitude Predict Behavior?
A: Sometimes.
Early social psychologists proposed that one way to predict how people behave would be to know their attitudes about the situation they were in. It seemed reasonable, for instance, if a person’s attitude about a certain race of people were known, it would predict how a person would respond to a person of that race. As it turns out such common sense hypothesizing was very inaccurate. Research carried out in the 1960’s by Leon Festinger (1964) and Allan Wicker (1969) shocked the social psychology community with its apparent topsy-turvy validation of the notion that the way a person behaves predicts their attitudes, not vice versa. These scientists were quick to point out that attitudes about cheating on tests did not accurately predict whether people cheated or didn’t cheat. Also, people’s attitudes about religion did not predict church attendance. Attitudes about the Asian race during times of crisis between Asians and Americans did not accurately predict how Asians were treated in one-to-one situations such as being patrons in a restaurant, where the owner of the restaurant has previously expressed negative views about Asians.
Study after study showed that people’s behavior is often not consistent with their attitudes. This might help to explain why children will so frequently violate their own convictions and visit with a parent who they have said they never want to see again.
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