From the author: This article was written by me for a women's magazine in 2015. I want to share with you my thoughts about the impact on children of some psychological problems that adults impose on them. We know many works by famous psychologists and psychotherapists of different schools and directions, which discuss the differences in the psychological development of children depending on the order of birth. But, personally, I have come across few works that examine the question of the mental consequences of successfully solving or failing to complete “tasks” for children whose birth was “endowed” by their parents with a specific meaning. Among such tasks, the most common in families on our territory, is retaining partners , creating or maintaining a family. Why are these tasks written separated by commas? Because they have the same goal - to hold together something that has cracked or begun to collapse. In a normal situation, it is strange to even imagine the idea that a child should serve as a kind of “repair material” - glue, cement, or whatever else leads to the connection of several parts into one whole! However, in moments of life’s difficulties in relationships between people, for some reason there is a widespread myth that a child can become the “gluing force” that will “forever” unite different, mostly not interested in each other, people, or will return to the family a husband who is looking “to the left” or who has been on a spree; in general, it will serve as a “unifying principle” for a relationship that is falling apart! No matter how viable this myth may be, in reality it turns out that everything is not so “creative.” Over time, relationships still deteriorate and people break up, sometimes immediately after the birth of a child. And one of the parties, usually women, is left with “an object on which great hopes were pinned in the matter of unification and which failed to cope with the task assigned to it,” simply put, a child. At the same time, the child may have several options for development in "ruins" of relationships. Either the mother will be able to cope with the “automatic” correlation of the child with the object of her hatred and disappointment and will be able to find the strength to accept the child as an independent person, or he will become an “eternal” reminder of the “mistakes of youth” and an object of acting out aggression aimed at his former partner In any case, especially at first, when the child’s dependence is great and the need for the mother’s empathy and love is so important for the formation of the child’s psyche, he may lack all this. And then the little person, not understanding his guilt and not realizing this guilt itself, will experience a threat from the outside world that is unclear to him, and will not learn to trust him to the extent that will allow him to form normal relationships with him. Usually, stress and lack of attention and love in early childhood, such children, burdened with early responsibility, will manifest themselves in disobedience to adults, causeless whims, self-will, childish aggression that will not be hidden, learning problems, and antisocial behavior. And all because in their lives there is some kind of reticence, misunderstanding, misrecognition. Now their constant task will be to “test” this world to accept them as they are. And life will be connected with the search for one’s place in it, the desire for love and recognition. This activity will become a serious “distraction” event, which will use up the child’s strength, which he will now not have enough to solve the usual problems of childhood and adolescence. And if the surrounding world responds to such requests with a refusal to recognize his rights, then this may be accompanied by a “search” for himself in another environment - the child will look for this recognition in the companies of his own kind, who are also deprived of attention and love, and establish himself there as available to him for this. in ways that are usually aggressive and destructive. That is why so often children, burdened with “important tasks,” join the ranks of juvenile delinquents, drug addicts and hooligans. Another manifestation of “testing reality for the unconditional