Page 37 - How Children Learn to Hate Their Parents

Small Decisions Lead to Bigger More Far-Reaching Decisions:
There is a phenomenon in social psychology known as “the foot in the door technique,” which helps explain how compliance with a small demand leads to greater commitments to larger demands later on. This was shown and discussed by Freedman and Fraser (1966), Orenstein (1991) and others (Pliner, 1974; Greenwald, 1987; and Lipsitz, 1989) in a variety of experiments.
The typical experiment of this type consists of researchers asking research subjects to comply with an unreasonable demand. One such type of demand was to see if people would volunteer to place a large, ugly sign on their front door that read, “Drive Carefully.” Only 17% of research subjects agreed to the request on its face. Another group was asked to place a small three-inch sign with a similar slogan. Nearly all agreed. After this they were asked if they would display the large ugly sign, and a remarkable 76% agreed to the request.
This experiment and many others like it suggest that if people make “small decisions,” the likelihood of them making large-scale decisions of the same type later on increases.
As applied to visitation refusal, children make the “small decision,” to avoid visitation once, often for benign reasons, perhaps because they have something better to do. Parents allow a child to make a “small decision” to avoid seeing the visiting parent because at that moment the child feels uncomfortable or “bored” or “annoyed” or any of the other excuses children use to avoid visitation. It would seem that these “small decisions” become the basis for later larger decisions, like the decision not to visit at all, especially if this is not the only influence present on the child.
There is even more research to suggest that there is a spiraling of action and attitude that follows a process of step-by-step commitment to an activity (Meyers, 1996). Consider a classic research experiment (Freedman, 1965) where children were shown a robot toy and told that when an experimenter left the room and told not to play with the toy. Freedman used a severe threat to half the children and a mild form of dissuasion with the other half. Several weeks later another researcher left the room but made no threat or statement before doing so. Of 18 children who had been severely threatened, 14 played with the robot. Of the children who had been mildly dissuaded, two thirds of them resisted playing with the robot.
This research suggests that mild forms of dissuasion that is subsequently internalized is more effective than threatening as a form of dissuasion. When children feel as though they are making the choice not to do something, they are more likely to continue resisting doing it. Often we hear that children are given the choice to exercise visitation. Parents say, “I’m not going to force her to go see her father. If she wants to that’s fine, but I’m not going to make her do anything she doesn’t want to do.” At the same time these parents give subtle messages about the “goodness” or “badness” of the other parent to help assist the supposed “choice.”
The experiments by Freedman show that moral choices are very powerful and have long- lasting effects on the behavior of children. Children who refuse to visit a parent because they have made a moral judgment (“my parent is bad,” “my parent has sinned,” “my parent is
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