Context: I’m trying to put myself in my parents perspective.
By “kids”, this includes those that have already reached the age of majority (i.e. adult children)
My kids have pretty strong opinions about the weirdest things, not budge on it, but then change their mind randomly.
For example: my 8yo has always hated drinks that weren’t “watery”. Milkshakes are too thick and gross. Slushies/ICEE has too much “texture”. Don’t get me started on boba tea.
Then one day, they see a cartoon where the MC drinks a milkshake and now suddenly, they’re begging me to get them a milkshake and admits they love it now.
My kid is the same. Or if the food doesn’t look right. Like if the fried egg isn’t round enough.
Used to love cheese. Now pretends to hate it.
Used to love cabbage rolls and Sheppards pie. Now they won’t even take a bite.
To hate them is not useful.
Your kids show your own failures and shortcomings to you. Endure it, or improve yourself from it.
Yes, it is hard.
There’s a good podcast called Your Parenting Mojo. She also does a parenting workshop called Taming Your Triggers. I’ve never taken the workshop, but the podcast has helped me a lot.
Essentially, the problem comes when parents have their own unresolved issues that make parents get triggered by children. Also, many times children are seen as an inconvenience to be controlled and silenced. If a parent can see a child as a person whose feelings and needs are valid, then it really changes the perspective and has certainly changed how I parent. The number of times I get annoyed by my children has gone way down (once I’ve actually reflected to deal with getting to the bottom of my own internal issues) and the solutions are now geared towards getting everyone’s needs met.
Thanks for this recommendation.
No. Our kid do lots of annoying and frustrating things but we love them anyway.
“Hate them” is not what I’ve felt.
When they were young and couldn’t stop crying, I felt really frustrated and wanted them to stop. Stepping out of the room for a lil mental health break is a good way to deal with that.
Now they’re a bit older, I get annoyed by their reflexive “no” when asked to do something reasonable (e.g. clean up after themselves). Ironically, giving them a little bit of space lets them calm down and they usually comply.
I love these lil punks. I hope I’m never capable of hating them. Even if I may be annoyed at what they do.
asked to do something reasonable
Lmao. My parents definition of reasonable is having me be their personal translator for like… EVERYTHING.
😭 Just use Google Translate, mom
I’m thinking more along the lines of sticking the dishes they just used into the dishwasher. Although I’ve also asked them to pick up their candy wrappers.
Hate them? No. Hate what they do, oh yes. Adult ‘kid’ who acts like she knows everything, and won’t do therapy because the therapist is stupid; but is debilitated by anxiety and depression. Obviously anything I say “is stupid” too. Expects endless financial support so they can watch stupid youtube videos all day and through the night (cackling loudly, disrupting my sleep), and threatens suicide if challenged.
I have a 6-week-old baby. It’s 3:30 am and I’m attempting to rock her to sleep for the 8th time already tonight. If I place her in her bassinet, she unleashes screams that no living being with such small lungs should logically be able to produce. She’s possibly loud enough to wake the dead in this town and the next two over. I’ve forgotten what sleep is. Also I’m out of caffeinated drinks. Please send help.
It gets better, I promise.
We had no direct family help and our little one was the same for 12 weeks. We ended up finding a rhythm of three hour shifts overnight. It tremendously helped that I had paternal leave for 14 weeks, so I really hope you or your partner have something similar. It turned out that she was full of gas because of issues with breastfeeding, so we switched to formula. Couple weeks later she slept through the night like a champ.
A big motto we adopted during the time is: “I got to take care of myself, so I can take care of her”. So alternating sleeping times was the biggest benefit, since sleep deprivation was a hellscape.
My grandson is almost 6 months. My wife and I several times had to take him overnight or even sleep in their guest room so they could sleep. How anyone manages without family support, I have no idea.
Take solace, though. Right now she pretty much only needs to communicate that she is hungry, tired, or need to be changed. Before you know it she will have a lot more to say, but the tools she uses (screaming her head off) stay pretty much the same. Sometimes words give you context clues, but I find most of us lack the self-awareness and emotional regulation required for clear verbal communication until sometime in our thirties or forties.
I had issues with this as well, in my case it turns out he wanted to be warm, like very warm. I am not kidding, we are talking 3 hot water bags to setup the bed and leave 2 after he was in
6 weeks old is too young to start this, but around 4-6 months we started waiting 15 minutes after putting our daughter to bed before we would come in if she was crying. It allowed her to learn to self soothe and it made such a huge difference.
Reproduction is a trap we trick ourselves into.
Can really relate to this. When you can, go read about swaddling, when done right it’s a godsend for newborns
Technically not my kid but I’m marrying his mom so close enough.
He never stops making noise. Whether it’s talking, babbling, screeching, squealing, squeaking. The only time this kid is quiet is when he’s asleep.
It wouldn’t bother me so much if what he said had substance but most of it is just him repeating what people around him are saying which makes having a conversation around him infuriating.
I don’t hate him for it because he’s 8 and has undiagnosed adhd but I’ve definitely fantasized about throwing him out of a window once or twice.
Almost identical situation and age. I signed my boy up for karate to help him form some self control, along with discipline and respect, help him quiet his inner mind. Honestly, aside from trying to spar with me half the time, he’s much improved. He probably just needed an outlet for all that energy.
self control, along with discipline and respect, help him quiet his inner mind
Long distance running.
Hate, no, but severely annoyed yes; My oldest (14 y.o.) severely lacks the ability to walk down a flight of stairs without sounding like an elephant trying to stomp a mouse. He has the discretion of a landslide, and I’m sure my neighbors can hear when he comes down for a mid-night or early morning snack.
Lol I remember I used to live in a 4-family house (individually separated units each behind a different door and different locks, but under the same house with a shared hallway) in NYC, and I remember that the landlord, who lived like right upstairs, was getting so tired of the noise me and my older brother made when running around the house and playing, so he (or she? idk) kinda gave a warning, and my mom informed us about it, in a serious tone: “stop making so much noise or we’re getting kicked out”, which sounded terrifying to us at the time, since we were in, what felt like a “foreign” country at the time.
It took us 2 years before our first kid would go to sleep and stay asleep most of the night.
HAHAHA “The Discretion of a Landslide”
HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA
I could never hate my daughter (3 y.o). Does it get frustrating that she purposely tests boundaries every second and malicious compliance is her middle name? Sure! However, the unconditional love is the best feeling in itself. Especially days like yesterday when I only saw her for 15 min, due to work, and we cuddled and read bedtime stories.
Not sure how it changes when they get older, but from personal experience growing up, think it’s always important to embrace them for who they are and guide them the best you can. What helps is a lot of personal reflection, because it’s so easy to want to mold them into a specific individual to feel in control when everything around you is falling apart or you got personal trauma that is not addressed properly. However, that’s so counterproductive. You just got to let your kid be themselves.
The most frustrating things my son does is reflect back to me those things I dislike most about myself. It’s like a beautiful little mirror that I love and take everywhere but sometimes when I look at it all I see are things that make me angry.
TL;DR mental illness.
My son used to have panic attacks. Every time he got in a car, he was convinced they were an undiagnosed heart condition. We spent a couple of hours every single day trying to convince him to go to work, not to call 911, and that he wasn’t going to die. For at least a year to eighteen months, every trip to work or the store or on his way home, we had to be on the phone with him for every mile of the trip.
Sometimes he’d go nonverbal and we’d just have to listen to him hyperventilating. Other times he’d be ranting about how no one took his symptoms seriously, despite getting maybe as many as 3 scans in the emergency room with no finding of anything physically wrong.
We couldn’t go to bed until he got home. We had to wake up for his trip to work. Two hours out of almost every single day. He’d call my wife at work. If she wasn’t available he’d call me. And he would get pissed and tell at my wife if we weren’t available.
Anyway, between therapy and meds, we managed to get over that, but that was so fucking exhausting and frustrating. And the sheer presumption that we had to accommodate him regardless of anything else going on.
That sounds rough but isn’t that what the standard should be though? Accommodation for a panic disorder. Isn’t that the whole point of having a kid, that there’s an implied possibility you may be taking care of them for the rest of your lives?
I wouldn’t have been able to push through panic attacks that bad, phone call or not, it’s likely I wouldn’t be driving again.
My first response is yes but it sucked.
But there is a more nuanced response that goes something like we have an obligation to all of our kids and to the point that his dysfunction made us unable to take care of our other kids either directly through time demands or by extension through exhausting us to the point where we couldn’t care for ourselves and thus for them, you have to do a bit of triage.
Who do we have the greater obligation to, a 25 year old man or a 10 and 12 year old? Also he could have spread it around a bit, but he couldn’t be honest with his dad or grandpa what he was going through. He expected us to all but kill ourselves so he could conceal what he was going through from people who wouldn’t understand or would lose respect for him. He expected us to forsake obligations such as work and siblings, which could lead to loss of job and all the itinerant complications of that. That’s all kinda bullshit, right?
Hell he was on our insurance, so losing our jobs would’ve directly harmed him in any event.
Isn’t that the whole point of having a kid, that there’s an implied possibility you may be taking care of them for the rest of your lives?
Lol my mom would toss me to the curb if I had a lifelong-disability like that. Conservative cultures… ugh…
No, I never hated my son.
The phase of absolutely refusing to brush his teeth, take a shower and make any attempt to have good personal hygiene was maddening.
Once he got out of that phase it was nice.
The rest of the shit he did was typical kid stuff. No kid likes to do chores and would rather play than work, that is normal stuff.
The not brushing the teeth thing was fucking… ARRRGGG.
This is especially frustrating with the 2 to 4 age bracket. When they ask for something, especially when its a treat like chocolate or fast food and especially when you decide you dont want to deal with the tantrum for saying no and you give it to them and then they give you A GIANT FUCKING TANTRUM for giving them the treat they asked for.
You dont hate them but fuck…
I have 2 year old twins. Haven’t encountered this particular shit storm yet.
However, I’ve noticed they’ve recently learned how to tantrum more effectively. They know I can ignore or work around 1 of them at a time but it can get very difficult when they both get lit at the same time.
Example, at the park with just dad and 2 toddlers. If it’s time to go home and one is non-compliant, no big deal you just pick up that kid and let the other walk. If both are non-compliant then you’re a bit screwed. I can pick up both of them simultaneously but they’re 14kg each and it’s hard if they’re squirming around. Even then - you can’t get one strapped in to the car while the other is tearing a rift in the space time continuum.
Sometimes all there is for it is to sit down and hug it out. They don’t “get their way” at least. They don’t have the commitment to keep it up for more than 5 minutes usually. Sometimes you can redirect them.
What I’ve really noticed more recently is that at times the tantrum is mostly performative. Like they’re not deeply and gravely upset, they’re just acting it out.
What I’ve really noticed more recently is that at times the tantrum is mostly performative. Like they’re not deeply and gravely upset, they’re just acting it out.
Literally yes. They’re testing the boundaries of what they can do and seeing what the results of different types of behavior are.
You can also learn to notice by their sound when they are acting. The sound is more shallow compared to when they are really upset.
I’m exactly at this point with my oldest kid and it drains all my energy. I’m genuinely exhausted.
It does get better.
Its replaced by some new fresh hell, but its nice to know the problems change.
Skill issue
Fighting each other again and again, which I don’t hate them for — but it is very stressful. They could accomplish so much more if they would cooperate with each other…
Lol my mom thought by having me that her first son (aka: my older brother) wouldn’t be alone and would have a everlasting friend.
I haven’t really talked to my older brother for over 5 years despite living under the same roof. Lol
Sorry to disappoint you, mom, maybe tell brother to stop abusing me and apologize for the past abuse.
