Do you feel guilty because you don’t love your child?
There are moments in the life of a parent that you would never have thought of.
And I’m not talking about the moments that are simply surprising, but still great.
I’m talking about the “downsides” of parenthood.
Moments or even phases during which you can’t do anything with your child.
You think he’s stupid, you’re ashamed of his behavior and you can’t stand him!
These are strange feelings for a parent.
Mother, father or both wonder how this adorable little marvel could have become so unbearable.
Depending on the child’s age, you’re happy if he or she plays somewhere else, goes to summer camp or maybe even goes to school abroad for a year.
For you, the distance is a great relief.
Well, many parents are in the same situation as you!
Sometimes it’s only temporary.
But certain aspects of your child’s personality that are difficult to accept remain.
And you have to learn to live with them.
Here’s how to deal with this difficult situation.
1. Accept: negative feelings are part of the game
Parents don’t have to like all their child’s characteristics and behaviors.
A guilty conscience and feelings of guilt are inevitable if you pretend that you should never have such feelings towards your child.
It’s healthy if you allow yourself to say: “He’s my child, I love him, I’ll always love him, and yet I don’t think everything he does is great”.
Our children don’t like everything we do either!
The difference is that they often tell their parents outright what they think is stupid, whereas parents often keep this to themselves and secretly nurture their guilty conscience.
2. Stop blaming
ALL parents do things they’re not proud of.
Making mistakes is part of being a parent.
But that doesn’t mean you’re a terrible person.
Not even if your child acts so strangely or stupidly that you wonder, “What did I do wrong?”.
Cross that question out again.
It only makes you feel guilty.
Maybe you’ve made mistakes.
But the most important question is forward-looking: “What do I have to do now to be able to look at my child with love again?
Remember, it’s not the children’s job to make their parents happy.
But it is the parents’ job to prepare their children well for the world, and to live in it as independently as possible.
How they will fulfill this one day, and what personality they will develop, is only partly in their parents’ hands.
So it’s important that parents don’t make their happiness in life depend solely on how well they think their offspring “function”.
3. Understand: you’re not rejecting your child
You reject some of his behavior, but this feeling takes precedence over love.
This is usually the case in moments of incomprehension about the child’s nature.
That’s why it’s also important, in serious arguments, not to scold and devalue the children as a whole, but to say precisely what you can’t stand and what you think about it.
This way, the sides you love are not affected by the criticism, and the children don’t feel completely challenged.
Questioning: why does my child act this way?
There is often a deeper meaning in the child’s behavior that needs to be explored in order to make it acceptable.
Some children just want to see how their parents react: to check trust and boundaries, to elicit new facial expressions from their parents, or to provoke them with pleasure, as there’s a lot going on at home with otherwise stressed or tired parents.
So before you start ranting or judging, it’s often useful to ask: “What’s really going on with you right now?”.
4. Distinguish: don’t take your child’s behavior personally
During puberty, for example, children present different facets of themselves, which confuses parents and makes it much harder to keep a loving eye on them.
And sometimes, children seem to deliberately portray the opposite of what parents really want.
Sometimes parents feel that their children are rejecting them.
But this is not the case.
Behind children’s behavior often lies an age-appropriate desire to get away from home.
This is sometimes easier to do if you create a distance from parental behavior that the child can’t (yet) create in any other way.
In the past, this behavior was often called rebellion.
Today, young people often don’t rebel so radically.
However, there is still a youthful need to distance oneself from one’s parents.
So it’s a good idea not to take it personally, but to resist the offer of friction as calmly as possible without getting involved in an argument.
Why does this behavior irritate parents?
Children often remind us of someone we know – often from the family: parents, grandparents, partner or even the ex.
But it can also be a former teacher, neighbor or classmate.
If there were conflictual situations in these relationships and our child looks a lot like one of these people, we can despair when our beloved child displays exactly one of these characteristics that we have rejected.
So we sometimes react to the child’s behavior as violently as we did then, projecting past experiences onto our child.
And we find it just as terrifying now as we did then.
But just because your child looks like someone else doesn’t mean he’s exactly like them.
He’s an individual in his own right, still developing his personality.
Perhaps your child is simply not nice to you.
So it’s up to parents to find a new way of dealing with their own past wounds so they can see the child clearly again.
5. Stay open: it’s important to seek help
The bond between parent and child remains intact, even if we don’t always think the other is doing the right thing.
What counts is how the parents go about it.
It’s important that the relationship learns not to reject each other’s differences, but to respect them.
The way in which this can work needs to be constantly developed over the course of a lifetime, and therefore through all the developmental phases of children and parents.
Because this is sometimes not so easy, some parents turn to the neutral help of a professional.
This is particularly useful for people who have suffered serious injuries in life and wish to prevent such things from happening again with their own children.
