Can’t our children like us? Is it normal for it to happen? The psychologist Sara Tarrés answers in the affirmative and without any doubt. He says there are several reasons why you might think that. One is the gap between generated expectations and reality: “For example, we believe in expressions like ‘sleep like a baby’ as if they did it deeply and all at once, and no, we face little people who wake up every few minutes up. They demand a lot and the sleep and rest experience deteriorates significantly.” Parenting expectations can frustrate fathers and mothers and make them feel like their offspring are not likable. It is normal and may be temporary.
Psychologist Gema Castaño comments that maternal desire plays an important role. Relatively recently, he treated a patient who rejected her firstborn and “couldn’t accept that she was a mother until she had her next children.” “There are times when an unwanted arrival can provoke a certain resentment towards the new member of the family, since it requires a drastic change in our lives,” confirms this expert. If the desired motherhood and fatherhood turns life upside down and is difficult to mentalize, arriving without mental planning and processing can start with a confused or even negative feeling.
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Psychologists say that mothers and fathers can feel resentment from children whose behavior reflects everything that bothers them. Castaño underwent therapy with a mother who had problems with mirroring. “He talked about his difficulties dealing with one of his children and even wondered if he loved him less,” he says. In the session, they concluded that the woman saw in him some parts of herself that had been rejected by those around her when she was little, and that she repelled him: “The therapeutic work aimed at finding her own way of being, of being able to accept that of his son”.
Another of the most cited reasons is the high demand for creatures. Although Castaño believes that “well, what is well said, it’s not that our son doesn’t like us,” there can be a time when the physical and emotional exhaustion is so severe “that it leads to it.” that fathers and mothers want to leave, albeit temporarily.” The psychologist points out that in this case it is important to ask for help and to be supported by the environment.
Likes and dislikes are very relative concepts, apart from not being immovable categories: you can have that feeling for a season and then live it all again with the maximum amount of love and happiness, as they explain. The experts also point out that dislike is sometimes confused with more or less affinity for one child or another: “Each child is a world, and parents may be more comfortable with one than another.”
Well, how can we manage to like one child less than another? Tarrés assures that it’s best to ask yourself why you like one more than the other: “If you answer this question with a list of specific behaviors, it helps us know where to start because the question is more in our hands, in those of adults”. The psychologist reiterates that one of the first steps is to change the focus with which the child is viewed: “Focus more on what he is doing right and less on what he is not doing likes, but that doesn’t mean that inappropriate or disruptive behavior doesn’t need to be corrected.It means recognizing that the child you least like isn’t all negative: “To do that, it’s important to get into them.” to empathize, to see why he behaves the way he does, and to what extent that behavior is an answer to our journey of dealing with him.
A more concrete solution, according to Tarrés, is to try to find alone time with the child you feel less connected to to reconnect: “Do an activity together that allows you to have pleasant experiences and to reverse the situation for example. We have to accept that we’re having these feelings right now and that doesn’t make us any worse mothers, they’re just emotions trying to tell us something that we should listen to.”
And during puberty?
Puberty can be a great ordeal in the relationship of fathers and mothers with their children. For Castaño, it is a process of change in which the young person must separate from their parents in order to find their own identity and build themselves into the adult they will be. He says that the group of equals with which he can identify is very important. “This separation process can be more or less abrupt, but it has to happen. The task of the parents is to enable the children to separate at this stage so that they will want to return later in adulthood,” he assures.
What needs to be done to deal with this? Tarrés replies, “Dialogue, look for moments of complicity, try to find out what their musical tastes are, what their current idols are, the series that interest them … but without questioning.” He points out that this dialogue is flowing must, without being forced, respecting intimacy, individuality and the need for solitude that they need. And above all, he prescribes patience: “Calm down and a lot of left hand. Authoritarianism, like excessive permissiveness, are not good guides at any stage children go through, let alone adolescence.
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