They will suppress all actions that they have inferred will cause their parents to punish them, or be hurt or upset by them. Retrospective Development of Pathogenic Beliefs Children may also come to retrospectively blame themselves for causing a traumatic event and will inhibit whatever major goal they were attempting to pursue at the time. For instance a child who had enthusiastically begun to explore the world, when a parent took ill, might inhibit his future exploration for fear of further hurting the parent. A child does this because he attributes a causal relation between his attempts to gratify an impulse and the traumatic event. He will repress the impulse or goal to prevent further trauma .
Children tend to endow their parents with supreme authority.
They have no prior experience by which to judge their parents' behavior. Since parents are such an important part of their lives, children want to consider their parents trustworthy, powerful and wise. They want to be proud of them, emulate them, comply with them and be loyal to them. Their intense need for their parents causes them to suppress any belief that the parent is malicious or purposefully harmful. Children instead develop the belief that they deserve any bad treatment they receive from their parents.