The thing about being young for most kids isn't that they think their parents hate them, it's that they think they don't understand them, and they don't have the same ideas about what is important and what isn't. And they think they know best.

That's quite enough to make the idea of getting away to a totally different world like boarding school pretty attractive sometimes, while frightening as well. That's how it was for me, and in all kinds of ways Hogwarts seemed very familiar.

In my view, by having the parent figures actually hate and persecute Harry, JK was overegging the pudding. It isn't something most kids have any experience of, or needed in order to be drawn in and relate to the hero and the situation. It's a flaw in a pretty good book, which made an even better film, that's all I'm saying.