Page 48 - How Children Learn to Hate Their Parents

message (“Your father or mother is bad,”) may become even more persuasive.
At the beginning of this section there was a distinction made between central routes of persuasion versus peripheral routes of persuasion. Intelligent, analytical audiences may be more influenced by well thought out strategies directed toward their logical thought processes (Ciaccopo, 1983). Less sophisticated audiences (like children) respond on the basis of how much they like the communicator (Chaiken, 1980).
Related to this is the effect of good feelings on persuasiveness. Persuasion is more effective when good moods and feeling states are paired with messages (Petty, 1993). Consider the parent who engages the child an exciting game or activity right before visitation. The child, absorbed in a game or craft activity and having a good time also listens to the parent say, “Gee, I’m going to miss you when you go to Mommy’s.” The implied message is “don’t leave.” The message is paired with an enjoyable activity. It would not be surprising to see a child’s level of protest increase when the parent comes for the pick-up.
It also operates in the reverse, in the case of children who don’t want to leave the visiting parent and return to the custodial parent. Parents who see their children on weekends often use the fact that their children don’t “want to go back” to the custodial parent at the end of a weekend visit to support the contention that the custodial parent should not have custody.
Weekend parents (mothers or fathers) who treat their children to an endless array of fun times and freedom from responsibility provide the child with a favorable but distorted view of life in that household. When a child has chores, homework and other responsibilities in the custodial household, it is natural for the child to wish and express that they would be happier in the less structured, more “fun” environment. Weekend parents want to make the most of the time they spend with their children, and that is fine. However, weekend parents are still parents, and must contribute to teaching their children how to become productive and responsible.
Weekend parents who believe the goal of seeing the child is to remind him or her of how great life is with them and how horrible is it with the custodial parent, will find it quite easy to create discomfort in the child at the end of a weekend visit.
Fear producing messages can also assist in the rejection process either by eliciting fear directly or by implying it in more subtle ways. In general, research indicates that fear arousing messages do not always produce potent reactions. If the fearful message is overwhelming the listening might ignore it (Rogers & Mewborn, 1976). Fear inducing strategies that add to it a protective strategy may inhibit certain behavior, however. Consider the parent who sends the child to visit the co-parent’s house with a cell phone and the admonition: “If anything happens, call 911 or call me.” In this instance the parent instills a greater fear, and then provides a direct way to act on the fear. In doing so the fear may become more real and the emotions connected to that fear more negative.
Two-sided appeals are arguments which include the point of view of the opposition. Persuasive talks which acknowledge the opposing points of view are often more effective than one-sided arguments (Jones & Brehm, 1970; Lumsdain & Janis, 1953). Again, double- messages which acknowledge the other parent’s position (i.e., “Daddy hasn’t seen you in a while and it is really not fair to stay here and not see him”), while inducing guilt (i.e., “You
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