Page 39 - How Children Learn to Hate Their Parents

Issues of Direct vs. Indirect Programming:
The most common complaint made by alienated parents is that their children have been “programmed” or “brainwashed” to hate them. While it is plausible that a child can be induced to hate a parent through bribery and overt encouragement, it is far “easier” to create a negative mindset about visitation through subtle and indirect methods. One of the most relevant social psychological principles that would explain how these subtle campaigns work is the principle of cognitive dissonance (Festinger, 1957). The theory behind cognitive dissonance is very straightforward: People are motivated to maintain consistency in how they think about things. This theory proffers that people become psychologically uncomfortable when a discordant element enters their mindset. Take the perception: Mom is a bad person. Having to visit with mom is dissonant (inconsistent) with the belief that she is a bad person. Therefore every thought and attitude about mom will be readjusted to find the “bad” in it in an effort to maintain consistency with the belief that “mom is bad.”
Children will often report incident after incident of “bad parent tales,” coupled with long lists of reasons to avoid visitation. It is these behaviors that are evidence of the children attempting to reduce the possibility of allowing a positive attribution sneak into the negative mindset. Often, in cases of alienation it is shocking to see how uniformly negative children are with respect to their thoughts and feelings about a parent. They claim the alienated parent is a bad parent, was never a good parent, is always bad, never good, and cannot recall a single pleasant memory associated with a parent.
Festinger contends that dissonance creates unpleasant feelings. When individuals are in a state of dissonance they will re-adjust their thinking so that the dissonance is reduced. That may very well be why children insist that the alienated parent is all bad, and is very unwilling to consider even the slightest good in the parent.
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