Does your child hate you?
Ask Allison
My five year old daughter sometimes yells that she hates me when she can’t do something she wants to do. This really hurts me. Are we doomed for a bad mother-daughter relationship? I can’t give in every time she wants to do something that she can’t.
My five year old son does the same thing to me from time to time. He also hates his basketball when it ricochets off of the goal and conks him in the head. He hates green peas. He hates his favorite pencil when he presses to hard and the lead breaks. You get the picture. Hate is a strong word and in some way helps strong emotions (or ‘big feelings’ as we call them in the gentle discipline world) to be conveyed.
Please don’t take it personally when your daughter screams that she hates you. Really, she hates the situation. She hates that she’s not allowed to *insert whatever here* and you are the only one standing in her way. You’re the adult and have to continue to provide guidance for your daughter even when she can’t bear it.
Now, in our house we are teaching our boys how to be gentlemen. Gentlemen generally aren’t in the practice of shouting “I hate you” and slamming doors. When my oldest son is overcome with emotion and rages at us we remind him that he is expected to be a gentleman. He is allowed time alone to cool off, or time with us spent talking calmly. He can tell us exactly how angry he is and we remind him of the words to use when you want to express certain feelings. We also help him to understand what primary emotion he was feeling that led him to feel anger.
We certainly don’t follow a “happy is only acceptable emotion” rule in our home, but we don’t want our children screaming at co-workers or a spouse or children that they hate them someday.
Give her time, she will grow out of it if proper behaviour is taught and mostly importantly, modeled for her.
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