What to Do with "I Hate You, Mommy!"

by Carol Campbell, MFT

Every parent sooner or later winds up on the receiving end of a hostile and personal attack from a frustrated child. "I hate you!" sends a whole stream of feelings coursing through the body of the targeted authority figure. There is perhaps shock — "How dare you talk to me like that??" Or guilt — "If I were a good enough parent, my child would never feel that way, let alone say something so hurtful!" Or rage — "After all I do for you, this is what you give me!" Or embarrassment — "Did you have to say that at the top of your lungs in the middle of Target?" Or fear — "Have I really screwed things up as a parent?"

From my perspective as a marriage and family therapist, having your child tell you she or he hates you is generally not cause for alarm. Mostly it just shows immaturity of social skills. The younger the child, the less maturity of social skills is to be expected. I think it is important and helpful to keep the acquisition of social skills separate from awareness of emotions. In other words, it can be a good sign if a child can distinguish between what is loved and what is hated. How to talk about it is another matter.

We tend to put a lot of stigma on the idea of hating, particularly hating people. But it is easy to get unnecessarily troubled if we forget that hate is not the opposite of love. Indifference is the opposite of love; we cannot really hate what we do not first love. How we feel about someone can be registered on a continuum, with love at one end and hate at the other. But any point on that continuum registers a point of connection, of mattering, of being in relationship. The nature of reality is that whenever we love people, we also will have the capacity to hate them sometimes. The other person has the power to influence whether our feelings in any moment are moving more towards love or more towards hate. The one thing you can bank on is that your feelings will not stay exactly the same. Being in touch with reality involves being able to truly know what your feelings are at any particular moment. Being delusional is what you are advocating if you tell yourself you should always love a person, even your own child — or parent!

An attitude of curiosity is a lot more helpful than an attitude of criticism, especially when it is time to talk about hatred. A child benefits from having parents who can be just as interested in why a child hates them as why a child loves them. I think it's bogus to try to tell a child, "You don't hate me — you hate that I am making you go to bed." In that moment, I actually think the child hates the parent! The big question is: So what? What meaning does the parent make of it?

An insecure parent will get all upset. A secure parent will be able to say, "Yes, right now you really do hate me, and you wish I were doing something different. It feels really bad to be so mad that you hate me!" The helpful parent will guide the child in recognizing the truth of these feelings, without himself or herself feeling actually harmed by the child's emotions. This is very difficult for an insecure parent to do. If the issue comes up frequently in the household, I would recommend calling a marriage and family therapist for some help in sorting out what is actually happening, and how the issue could be ameliorated.

Obviously we want our children to be able to communicate with others and with us in ways that are socially acceptable. I do not recommend that parents tell children when they are feeling hate towards them! My concern is that parents find ways to instill nice manners in their children without sending a message that the children should feel shamed or guilty for having perfectly normal feelings. If we can socialize good habits for other aspects of being a human being, there's no reason we can't also socialize good habits for expressing a full range of human feelings.

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Carol L. Campbell, MFT, is a licensed marriage and family therapist providing psychotherapy and psychoanalysis for individual adults and couples in Palo Alto, California. She has degrees from Brown University and Santa Clara University and has been licensed since 1991. Carol is a graduate of the Palo Alto Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy Training Program sponsored at Stanford by the San Francisco Center for Psychoanalysis and was a candidate at the Psychoanalytic Institute of Northern California in San Francisco from 2010-2011. She is also a clinical member of the California Association of Marriage and Family Therapists and the Northern California Society for Psychoanalytic Psychology.