When a child rejects a parent following separation, professionals often focus on the immediate circumstances surrounding the family. Questions arise about parenting capacity, communication difficulties, conflict, attachment relationships, psychological abuse, coercive control, family violence, or parental alienation. These are all important considerations.
However, systemic family therapist John Byng Hall invites us to ask an additional question:
What if the story being told by the child did not begin with the separation?
What if some of the beliefs, fears, loyalties, and narratives operating within the family were already present long before the child was born?
The Family Stories We Inherit
John Byng Hall developed the concept of family scripts to describe the patterns, expectations, beliefs, and narratives that are passed from one generation to the next. These scripts shape how family members understand themselves, each other, and the world around them.
They influence beliefs about:
- relationships
- trust
- conflict
- loyalty
- parenting
- gender roles
- separation
- forgiveness
- belonging
Many of these scripts operate outside conscious awareness. Family members often experience them not as beliefs but as facts. Examples might include:
“Men cannot be trusted.”
“Mothers are the real parents.”
“Children must protect vulnerable family members.”
“People always leave.”
“Our family has always been treated unfairly.”
These stories become part of the family’s emotional inheritance.
Replicating the Past
Byng Hall distinguished between what he called replicative scripts and corrective scripts. Replicative scripts involve repeating familiar family patterns. For example, a parent who experienced emotional cut off from a parent may unknowingly recreate similar patterns within their own family.
Corrective scripts attempt to do the opposite of what occurred in previous generations. A mother who experienced neglect as a child may become determined that her own children will never feel abandoned. While understandable, corrective scripts can sometimes become rigid and overprotective.
The challenge is that both replicative and corrective scripts may influence family relationships without anyone fully recognising their presence.
Family Scripts and Parent Child Rejection
Family scripts do not cause parental alienation or parent child rejection. Children reject parents for many different reasons, including genuine experiences of abuse, neglect, frightening behaviour, attachment disruptions, loyalty conflicts, exposure to adult disputes, or other developmental and relational factors.
However, family scripts may provide an important context within which rejection narratives emerge and become sustained. In some families, a child may gradually become aligned with a broader family story that predates the separation itself.
Example: “Men (or women) Always Let You Down”
Imagine a family in which a grandmother was abandoned by her husband. Her daughter grows up hearing stories about unreliable men and painful betrayals. Years later, following her own separation, she becomes highly sensitive to any parenting mistakes made by the children’s father. Missed phone calls, forgotten appointments, or ordinary parenting errors begin to carry greater emotional significance.
The child gradually absorbs the narrative. The issue is no longer simply what the father did. The issue becomes what the father represents. The father is no longer viewed solely through the lens of present day behaviour. He is viewed through the lens of an inherited family story.
Example: “Children Must Protect Their Mother (or father)”
In some families, children may inherit an implicit belief that their role is to care for, protect, or emotionally support a vulnerable parent. Following separation, a child may become increasingly aware of one parent’s distress. The child begins monitoring that parent’s emotional state. Expressions of affection towards the other parent may feel disloyal.
Over time, rejection of the other parent may become less about dislike and more about loyalty. The child is not necessarily choosing between parents. The child may be choosing between belonging and exclusion.
Whose Story Is the Child Telling?
One of the most striking features of some high conflict separation cases is the discrepancy between lived experience and family narrative. A child may describe a parent as uncaring, dangerous, or absent despite evidence of years of meaningful involvement. This does not automatically mean the child’s concerns are invalid. Children’s experiences should always be taken seriously. However, systemic practitioners are trained to remain curious.
They ask:
- Where did this story originate?
- Who else holds this belief?
- How long has this narrative existed?
- What happens if the child expresses a different view?
- What emotional risks accompany reconnecting with the rejected parent?
Sometimes the child’s story belongs solely to the child. At other times, the child may be carrying a narrative that extends far beyond their own experiences.
The Role of Loyalty
Family scripts are often maintained through loyalty. Children naturally seek connection, belonging, and emotional security. When family narratives become linked to loyalty, challenging those narratives can feel dangerous. A child may fear hurting a parent, disappointing a grandparent, or disrupting family stability. This helps explain why facts alone rarely resolve entrenched family conflicts.
The issue is often not a lack of information. The issue is the emotional meaning attached to the information.
The Forgotten Influence of Extended Family
Family scripts are rarely created by one parent alone. Grandparents, aunts, uncles, siblings, and wider family networks often contribute to the stories that children inherit.
Comments such as:
“He’s exactly like his father / mother.”
“Men / women in that family are all the same.”
or
“We have always suffered because of people like him / her.”
may appear harmless.
Yet they can create powerful associations in the mind of a child. Over time, the child may begin responding not to the parent standing in front of them, but to the symbolic figure that parent represents within the family story.
When Professional Systems Become Part of the Story
Family scripts do not remain confined to the family. They can enter professional systems. Therapists, mediators, solicitors, social workers, schools, guardians ad litem, and courts may unknowingly become participants in the dominant narrative.
When this occurs, professionals can begin responding to the story rather than critically examining the story. This is not a criticism of professionals. It is a reminder that all of us are vulnerable to compelling narratives. The task of assessment is not simply to gather information. The task is to distinguish between present reality and inherited narrative.
A Systemic Perspective
Byng Hall’s work encourages us to move beyond simplistic questions of blame. Rather than asking:
“Which parent caused this?”
Systemic practitioners often ask:
“What relationship patterns are operating within this family?”
“What loyalties are being protected?”
“What stories have been passed down through generations?”
“What function does the child’s position serve within the wider family system?”
These questions do not replace considerations of safety, abuse, coercive control, attachment, or parental alienation.
They complement them.
Final Reflection
When families become trapped in conflict following separation, it can be tempting to focus exclusively on present day events. Yet some of the most powerful influences on family relationships may have originated long before the separation occurred.
John Byng Hall’s concept of family scripts reminds us that children do not inherit only genetics, homes, or family names. They also inherit stories. And sometimes the most important question we can ask is not:
“Why is this child rejecting a parent?”
but rather:
“Whose story is this child being asked to carry?”