Page 4 - How_Children_Learn_To_Hate_Their_Parents

Introduction:
With alarming regularity, judges, legal advocates for children and parents, and mental health professionals who work in and around the divorce and family court systems, are encountering children who want to terminate contact between themselves and a parent. Parents are shocked by rejection from children who just months before were happy, affectionate and who sought their time and attention. Now, out of nowhere they express hatred for their caregivers.
I said "hatred" not dislike or disapproval -- HATRED. Questions arise from the perspective of the rejected parent: How and why did this happen?
Is there any way to fix it?
Is my ex's hatred of me so intense that it's causing this?
Did I do something that caused this?
In this three part program I am going to teach that the rejection of a parent during or after a divorce can have quite a few causes, some of which can result in a permanent rejection of the parent. Hopefully, the information here can help mitigate that outcome by providing some understanding of how and why parental rejection happens.
However, in order to understand how children learn to hate their parents it is important to discard the notion that one thing caused it. It is also important to understand that there is nothing that we know of with certainty that can fix it. This phenomenon of children rejecting their parents after a divorce is ultimately much more complex than people who haven't seen it thousands of times realize.
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