Children Feel Everything
If a child is in a hostile environment they will quite often respond accordingly.
For example:
A mother and father are having trouble in their relationship. The mother and father are quite often hostile toward each other. The mother yells and screams and the father quietly takes digs and emotional potshots at the mother.
The child witnesses this growing up. At about the age of five the child begins to yell at the father and the father quietly is cold or distant from the child, allowing the child to perceive that the father doesn’t love them.
At about the same age the child does not yell at the mother but begins to act out behaviorally when with the mother. And gets to perceive that the mother yelling at them means they are not loved.
Now even though both parents say they love them there is this silent treatment by the father and the yelling treatment by the mother which continually reinforces the child’s misinterpretation that they are not loved. Now anytime the child feels not loved or disregarded the child will either act out or yell.
The child begins to develop these behaviors based upon their interpretation and feeling of their environment even though the parents in the beginning never directly did this with the child. although now as the child gets older the parents, without noticing, begin to treat the child like they do each other. this then has long term consequences on the child’s life in all their relationships.
A child early on in life does not have the ability to reason or discern the difference between the behaviors and feelings of their environment. Nor do they have the ability to understand the people in it or interpret their environment appropriately.
They will create an inaccurate interpretation based upon the feelings they have in their environment and then create beliefs from that. Then they will use the behaviors they have witnessed as a way to deal with and handle their feelings and their perceptions of their environment and life.