It’s okay to hate your child sometimes. Maternal resentment is more common than you think.
A Brief Summary
Feeling irritated, angry, or even hateful toward your child is an extremely normal part of the parenting instinct.
A healthy, authentic mother doesn’t need to play the role of the uncomplaining “saint.” Allowing yourself these negative emotions doesn’t mean you don’t love your child, and it doesn’t make you a bad parent.
In fact, the psychoanalyst Melanie Klein believed that being able to recognize the hatred embedded in attachment relationships — and to express it safely, without damaging the relationship — is a milestone of emotional maturity [1].
Becoming a mother can mean living with a constant undercurrent of guilt and shame — feelings you can barely bring yourself to say out loud.
You look down at the wrinkled, pink little bundle you just delivered, and the textbook rush of bonding doesn’t come. Does that mean I’m not maternal enough?
You lie awake listening to your baby cry, on and on, and it starts to feel like a running verdict on your competence. Does that mean I can’t be a good parent?
You hit your breaking point and snap at your months-old baby, telling them to stop crying. I feel like a monster.
Caring for your child has swallowed nearly all of your time. You miss the version of yourself who loved being alone — and now even a quiet, unhurried brunch feels like an impossible luxury. If motherhood always means sacrificing yourself, is it even worth it? You feel a flicker of regret, and then you feel ashamed of the regret itself.
I love my child, but — no, never mind. What kind of mother even thinks something like that about her own kid?
No one tells you how common a feeling called “maternal ambivalence” really is. That’s because we default to the assumption that a mother’s love is supposed to be pure, noble, and endlessly generous — a standard that, for most mothers, quietly becomes a form of moral pressure.
Thirty years ago, the pediatrician and psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott published a paper that caused a stir at the time, laying out eighteen reasons a mother might hate her baby [2]. Among them:
- A baby treats its mother as a “tool,” not a person. Once its needs are met — fed, changed, comforted — it turns away without a flicker of gratitude, oblivious to the effort behind its care.
- A baby is nothing like the “perfect little creature” a mother imagined. It hurts her body, screams, soils itself constantly, and shows its worst side without a shred of restraint.
- A baby steals a mother’s freedom, dismantles her solitude, and can upend her career.
- A baby can rage at its mother, scratch her, treat her with total ruthlessness — while she is expected to keep her own aggression permanently in check.
- In caring for a baby, a mother inevitably starts to see traces of her own mother in herself (sometimes even repeating old wounds), which can quietly erode her sense of self-worth.
In psychoanalytic language, “mother” refers to the caregiver role — not a mandate that mothers alone must shoulder everything.
Winnicott’s insight was a relief to countless parents. It turned out the messy, negative feelings that come with raising a child could actually be spoken aloud — and that no one was alone in having them.
Denying, avoiding, or suppressing negative emotions doesn’t make them disappear. As a well-known line in psychology puts it: feelings that go unexpressed never really die — they just get buried alive, and later resurface in uglier forms. Even if you never put these feelings into words for your child, they can still come through in subtler, nonverbal ways: tone of voice, body language, behavior [3], or quiet passive aggression.
For caregivers, shame around maternal ambivalence can also shut down the capacity to feel joy altogether — gradually numbing you to the good parts of parenting, too [4].
So how should parents actually handle these negative feelings?
How to Cope With Negative Feelings Toward Your Child — 4 Healthy Strategies
1) Notice that these feelings exist
Try writing your feelings down — simply seeing and acknowledging them is a start.
Find a form of meditation that works for you, and gently start a conversation with those negative emotions. Ask yourself: where in your body does this feeling live? What color would it be? If it were a friend who could talk, what would it be telling you? What need is it pointing to?
Journaling is one of the most common ways to validate your own feelings [5]. Give yourself a space — physical or symbolic — where those feelings are allowed to exist safely. What matters most is giving yourself permission for that kind of self-care.
2) Talk to someone who will actually listen
Talk to the people you trust — family, friends, peers, emotional support tools, Reddit communities, or a therapist.
You don’t have to carry these hard feelings alone, and reaching out isn’t a burden on the people around you. The clinical psychologist Orna Guralnik has said that when a difficult emotion is spoken about between two people who are close, it becomes easier to let go of.
3) Separate “hating the behavior” from “loving the person”
Often, the moments parents fall apart during a meltdown don’t mean they hate their child. Hating certain behaviors doesn’t mean you hate your child — it means you’re a normal, healthy human being.
What parents need to watch for is the distinction between behavior and being [6]. Children need to know that certain behaviors of theirs are unwelcome, but that their presence is always welcome, and that their feelings are still held and accepted. None of this changes whether a parent loves them.
For example, a parent might say, “I really don’t like it when you hit,” instead of, “I don’t want to be a mother anymore. I want to tap out. I hate this.”
4) Mistakes are okay — what matters is repairing them afterward
New parents often feel constant pressure to get everything right. But the truth is, over the long course of raising a child, some degree of hurt is unavoidable. What matters is what happens after the hurt occurs.
Research and clinical evidence both show that primary caregivers aren’t always attuned to a baby’s needs, and that the parent-child bond takes hits regularly during early parenting — even within secure attachment relationships. What sets secure attachment apart is that these parents are willing to actively repair the relationship. They treat the relationship as something dynamic, not fixed. They’re honest about their own shortcomings and allow themselves to self-regulate under stress [7].
A “good enough” parent isn’t a flawless one — it’s a parent who is roughly good enough, but genuinely willing to repair the relationship and reflect on themselves.
Why Real Love Always Has Room for Hate, Too
There’s a common, worldly assumption that mental health simply means feeling good. That’s a long-standing myth — and it’s wrong.
Modern psychology understands mental health differently: it means being able to feel joy and also feel pain. It means being able to connect fluidly with each of your emotions, and to sit with them without being overwhelmed.
Even in our deepest human relationships, 100% pure love isn’t realistic. Because real love always comes bundled with some measure of hate.
1) Love and hate are both part of normal emotional development
If parents can allow themselves negative feelings, children learn that it’s okay for them to have negative feelings toward their parents, too — and that supports the wholeness of a person’s emotional development.
Psychologists see love and hate as two sides of the same coin. Winnicott believed that a healthy baby, in the course of development, will inevitably show “violence and hatred” — favoring one parent while resenting the other (loving the dad who hands out candy, resenting the mom who takes them to the doctor), and in the process, learning to feel both love and hate rather than suppressing that instinct.
A baby makes this same split before they can even name it: they love the mother who feeds and soothes them, and in the very next moment they hate the mother who holds them down for a shot at the doctor’s office — as if these were two different people. It’s only a little later in development that a baby realizes those two mothers were the same person all along, and learning to hold one whole, real person in mind — loved and resented at once — is part of how guilt, and the urge to repair, first take shape. Winnicott took the idea further still, arguing that a child needs someone safe to push against and, at times, to hate, in order to develop a self that is truly their own — and a parent is often the only person who can absorb that hate without the relationship breaking.
When a child discovers that hating a parent doesn’t destroy the relationship, they can safely develop their own capacity for “destructiveness” and “vitality” — and ultimately build a self that is authentic and secure.
As the more mature party in the relationship, when a parent can tolerate a child’s aggression without retaliating, and is willing to acknowledge and repair negative feelings rather than avoid them, they teach their child one of the most important lessons about intimacy:
A good relationship can withstand frustration and conflict — and the child learns that their negative emotions won’t destroy the person they love most in the world.
Love and hate aren’t an either/or, black-and-white conflict. Being able to hold both affection and difficult feelings toward the same person is itself a milestone of emotional maturity [1].
As Winnicott put it, hate can sometimes make love feel real. In a genuinely intimate relationship, both people are allowed to keep the full range of their emotions intact — including the negative ones — without having to cut any part of themselves away.
There’s a flip side to this worth sitting with: a child who’s never allowed to feel disliked for anything they do can end up doubting the praise they get for behaving well, too — if disapproval was never allowed to be real, approval doesn’t feel entirely real either. Letting your child feel your genuine displeasure sometimes, without it threatening the relationship, is part of what makes your love for who they are something they can actually trust.
We all deserve relationships that deep.
2) A parent who can’t express negative emotions may once have been a child who couldn’t express them either
Admitting you have negative feelings toward the people you love can be genuinely hard — especially if you never had the experience, or the modeling, to know it was allowed.
In modern psychoanalysis, attachment theory, and family systems psychology, a family’s inability — or refusal — to allow negative emotions to be expressed isn’t just linked to trauma. It’s one of the central, often hidden, drivers of intergenerational trauma transmission [9].
Maybe, as a child, you weren’t allowed to feel that you disliked your mother. You were expected to show gratitude and affection, never aggression, and never allowed to push back or say no to your parents.
That might be because your parent was prone to emotional collapse, unpredictable, moody — praising you for something one day and lashing out at you for the same thing the next. Or maybe your feelings were constantly dismissed or ignored. Over time, that taught you that expressing dissatisfaction in a close relationship was dangerous, because it would destroy the relationship entirely.
If that sounds like your own story, then every new stage of your child’s development — infancy, latency, adolescence — may stir up emotional memories from your own childhood. You might suddenly notice that your own meltdowns as a parent are echoing feelings of helplessness you carried as a child yourself [8].
But you have every opportunity to break that cycle. You don’t have to repeat it — you can use the process of raising your child to, in a sense, re-parent yourself.
Maybe you can remind yourself: having negative feelings isn’t something to fear. In fact, it’s your baby’s way of inviting you into a stronger kind of intimacy — one that has room for aggression, too.
Takeaway Notes
A “good enough” parent allows themselves to make mistakes — and allows themselves moments of disliking their child.
Through a wailing, hungry, ungrateful, chaos-inducing little creature who can’t even talk yet, we feel frustration, joy, disappointment, forgiveness, and tension — and still, we hold them, love them, accept them. That’s the complexity of real love.
What matters is learning to express hatred safely, without acting on unpredictable hostility — sudden withdrawal, emotional shutdown, or intrusive thoughts of harming the baby — and without turning it into action, like neglect or abuse. Learning to lean on a support network and express negative emotions safely is one of the most important functions of a healthy mother.
Being a real, imperfect mother matters far more than being a “perfect” one. The former gives your child a healthy, genuine model for what happiness and psychological wellbeing look like. The latter is a fantasy no one can ever actually reach.
Here’s to being a 60-out-of-100 mom. Here’s to being real, and imperfect.
FAQ: Maternal Ambivalence and Resenting Your Child
Is it normal to hate your child sometimes?
Yes. Psychologists call this “maternal ambivalence” — the coexistence of love and resentment toward the same child. It’s an extremely common parenting instinct, not a sign that something is wrong with you or your bond with your child. What matters is how you express it, not whether you feel it.
What is maternal ambivalence?
Maternal ambivalence is the psychological term for holding both loving and hostile feelings toward your child at the same time. The concept was popularized by pediatrician and psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott, who argued that this mix of love and hate is a normal, even necessary, part of healthy parenting.
Does resenting my child sometimes mean I’m a bad mom?
No. Disliking a specific behavior — a tantrum, a sleepless night, a meltdown in public — isn’t the same as disliking your child as a person. Separating “I hate this behavior” from “I hate you” is one of the healthiest things a parent can do, and it teaches your child that your love for them doesn’t depend on their behavior being perfect.
How do I deal with negative feelings toward my child without hurting them?
Start by noticing and naming the feeling instead of suppressing it — journaling, talking to a trusted friend or therapist, or simply pausing to ask what the feeling is telling you. Expressing frustration about behavior (“I don’t like it when you hit”) rather than about your child’s worth is a safe, healthy way to set a boundary without damaging the relationship.
What is a “good enough” parent?
“Good enough parenting” is a concept from Winnicott describing parents who don’t aim for perfection but instead stay responsive, honest about their limits, and willing to repair the relationship after conflict or mistakes. Research suggests this kind of repair — not flawlessness — is what builds secure attachment.
When should I seek professional help for parenting-related stress?
If negative emotions start interfering with your daily life, sleep, or relationships, or if they persist for more than two weeks without easing, it’s a good time to reach out to a licensed therapist or psychiatrist. See the resources below for free and low-cost support options.
Mental Health Resources for New Parents
- Postpartum Support International (PSI) — North America’s largest free peer-support network for perinatal mental health.
- Maternal Mental Health NOW — Offers free peer support and multilingual (English and Spanish) mental health self-help toolkits.
- National Maternal Mental Health Hotline — Call or text 1-833-TLC-MAMA (1-833-852-6262). Real-time interpretation is available in more than 60 languages, with trained counselors offering emotional support and referrals to local resources.
- PSI HelpLine — Call or text 1-800-944-4773 (Spanish-language text support: 971-203-7773).
- Reddit’s “Bumper Groups” — Connect with other parents whose babies were due around the same time as yours, for more specific, personalized support.
- Institute of Child Psychology — Resources on child psychology and therapy: https://instituteofchildpsychology.com/
If you ever feel like you can’t cope on your own, feel overwhelmed, or just need someone to talk to, remember: asking for help isn’t weakness. It’s courage.
If negative feelings start interfering with daily life, or persist for more than two weeks without easing, it’s a good idea to reach out to a licensed therapist or psychiatrist.
Medical Disclaimer
This article is intended for general informational and educational purposes only and does not constitute medical, psychological, or mental health advice. It is not a substitute for professional diagnosis, treatment, or consultation with a qualified healthcare provider, therapist, or physician. If you are experiencing persistent negative emotions, postpartum distress, or thoughts of harming yourself or your child, please seek immediate help from a licensed mental health professional or contact a crisis line in your area. Momcozy does not assume liability for actions taken based on the content of this article.
References
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