Page 50 - How Children Learn to Hate Their Parents

So What Have We Learned?
There seem to be many paths that can lead to lapsed contact between a parent and child. While obvious alienating strategies may include bullying, bribing or simply preventing visitation by avoiding pick-ups, social psychology research shows that people’s attitudes can be manipulated and influenced in many subtle ways.
Social psychologists look at the connection between attitude and behavior. Fifty years of experimental research shows that not only do attitudes influence behavior, the relationship works in the opposite direction as well. This means that parents who model and encourage negative attitudes about the co-parent help create a greater probability that a child will refuse visitation. But far worse, it also means that children who avoid visitation are more likely to develop hateful attitudes about the estranged parent. Group influence, elements of persuasive speaking, obedience to authority and factors which influence compliance also play roles in how people’s attitudes ultimately produce predictable patterns of behavior.
However, for all of the theorizing and proselytizing I might engage in, to convince you that alienation might be the least of what happens when children reject their parents, it is certain that the kind of rejection that worsens, lasts and often become permanent happens because parents surround their children with conflict.
If you think that children deserve love and attention from both of their parents, cure the rejection by preventing it in the first instance.
In parts two and three of this series we will see why "treatments" for parental rejection fail, and how attorneys can prep for dealing with "alienation experts."
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