What's a Parent's Role?

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Mothers can feel love but not like for their children, revealing a strong social taboo.

Ambivalence in motherhood is common but stigmatized.

Idealized motherhood can seem to leave no room for natural, complex feelings.

Kate (not her real name) had never been in therapy when she showed up in my office. She had never felt the need or desire to confide in anyone outside her close circle of friends and family. A happy, emotionally healthy woman in her mid-40s, Kate was in my office to talk about one particular problem that she couldn’t talk about with anyone else in her life. As it turns out, the problem Kate couldn’t talk about is also a problem that many women experience, one that women keep secret and never talk about outside the therapy space (which is why she gave me permission to write about it).

The unspeakable, un-shareable truth was this: Kate loved her child, but she didn’t like her very much. She was entirely devoted to her, would do anything for her, but she didn’t actually enjoy being with her.

When she confessed her feelings to her best friend, her friend immediately explained to Kate why everything she was “complaining” about, that she didn’t like, was age-appropriate behavior for a teenager. She told Kate that her feelings were not about her daughter at all, but about the parts of herself she didn’t like, and that she needed to get over it and stop blaming her child for her own issues. She asked Kate if she’d ever been “willing” to give her daughter a chance to be likable. She also reminded Kate (as if she didn’t think about it every day) how painful it must be for her daughter to intuit that her own mother didn’t like her. But all roads led back to the same place: Kate’s feelings were her fault and they meant that something was fundamentally wrong with her, and that she was a bad mother. It most certainly was not OK to feel the way she felt.

When Kate tried to share her experience with her husband (the girl’s father), he became agitated and angry. He defended their daughter and reminded Kate, as her friend had, that everything she didn’t enjoy was typical teenage behavior. He reiterated the sentiment too, that Kate’s feelings were Kate’s problem, which probably stemmed from her own childhood and the parenting she received. He instantly put on his judge and jury cap and made the giant leap from Kate’s ambivalent feelings to the accusation that she was thinking about abandoning their daughter. In a matter of minutes, Kate’s complicated confession had turned her into a coldhearted person who would leave his daughter (for whom, he made clear, he would never have similar feelings).

Kate discovered that there was no safe space to be heard about this particular experience, no place where her ambivalence could be received without harsh judgment and rejection. It seemed that regardless of whom she talked to, her feelings were held against her and used to blame, shame, and pathologize her. It was simply forbidden for a woman to love her child but not like her child’s personality.

Societal Expectations and Maternal Identity

The truth was, Kate’s feelings collided with one of the fiercest taboos women carry. They challenged what may be the strongest belief we hold: a good mother is supposed to feel endless love, enjoyment, gratitude, and the unending desire to spend time with her children. She’s expected to adore her children as people, no matter what, and be naturally and entirely fulfilled by caregiving. Any deviation from this ideal is deemed as a moral failure. Ultimately, maternal love should eliminate her own subjectivity. These beliefs, shared by both women and men, are hard-wired into our system from the beginning.

Regardless of how prevalent it is, women are ashamed to say they don’t always like their kids or want to spend time with them. Motherhood has been idealized to leave no room for contradictory feelings or ambivalence. But the hidden truth is that ambivalence in motherhood is remarkably commonplace, and may even be the norm. Still, when a woman feels boredom, resentment, aversion, or even just not liking her child at times, she often experiences that feeling, not as a normal human reaction, but as evidence that she is defective, guilty, and even dangerous.

Over my decades as a therapist, I’ve heard countless mothers talk about contradictory, difficult, and complicated feelings toward their kids. These feelings in motherhood are normal, part of the process of mothering. In order to shift the idealized, all-or-nothing, un-meetable expectations about what mothers should feel, women need to first release the judgments they perpetrate on themselves, and against each other. Before anything systemic can evolve, women need to stop shaming and blaming themselves for what are entirely natural feelings that ebb and flow, and that can also change. With permission to feel all her feelings, even about her kids, a woman gets to be a real human being, not just a cartoon cutout of an idealized mother who can’t exist without a host of harsh taboos to keep her in line.

What's a Parent's Role?

Take our Authoritative Parenting Test

Find a family therapist near me

It’s rare for women to find a space safe enough to talk about their relationship with their children, if it doesn’t look and sound a certain way. But when we can become that safe space for ourselves; when there can be space for everything, the whole truth, a space not contingent on the contents of what it holds, then we discover a safety that’s irrevocable and infinite. A safe space that includes everything and excludes nothing, that can hold the whole miracle and catastrophe that we are. We find ourselves as our real safe harbor and true home, a place where all of us is always welcome.

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