In Miller’s 1981 ‘Prisoner’s of Childhood: Drama of the Gifted Child’ she posits that parents relate to children with the expectation that they will serve as a ‘gratifying object’, and they are rewarded for this. Conversely, they are punished, or unrecognized for any attempts to assert a separate identity.
This results in a molding of the child into the parent’s wished for child, rather than the parent discovering who the child is and helping them develop in a way that is more authentic to them.
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