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Contributing Factor Four: Quality of Life
Often when parents separate, kids experience two homes with vastly different qualities of life. One home might be the familiar setting of everything they have ever known. One setting might be new, stripped down to barely anything, not as exciting, not as many games, not as good food, not as comfortable a place to sleep, not in the same neighborhood as friends.
When this happens, the person living in temporary or limited quarters often convinces themselves that they should not need to entertain their child and that the mere presence of them as a parent, anywhere, should be enough to keep a child happy. It does not often work that way and if a child is spoiled or entitled it will be worse.
Children are opportunistic. They are designed that way to help them survive. A parent can be rejected by a child for not being able to match the lifestyle they have at the other parent's home, even if they have love and attention in both homes.
If you are the rejected parent, it is insulting and it is not fair, especially if you have fought an expensive custody battle, are saddled with providing child support and necessities, and you have no quality of life--and your kids do not appreciate it and make it seem as though they are doing you a favor just by saying hello. However, it is reality. And children will reject a parent if for no other reason than it might be "inconvenient" to visit. This is not alienation even though you might find many reasons to say it is. And this is the very reason why I began by saying that parental rejection happens in part because of “characteristics of the child."
The remedy for much of this is at the disposal of the preferred parent isn't it? The preferred parent should be able to influence the
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