Hate having kids

[Anonymous]

Why didn’t you leave after the first one?

[Anonymous]

Please don’t ever let your children know how you feel. My kid is adopted and I get it, it’s really hard work, and its 24/7, it’s relentless. Do I love it all the time? No. Do I hate it? Never.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Do you like the children OP? Do you have a spouse that loves the children? This is difficult because you are not discussing them like they are humans, but rather that they are a job. If you enjoy them as people but dislike being a parent well, you're 10 years in. Suck it up for another 8 years and try your best to make them feel like you love them, because you owe it to them after choosing to be in their life this long.

I don't think there's anything wrong with not having kids, or not being a kid person. But there is a lot wrong with abandoning a 10 year old or making a child grow up knowing their parent resents them. You have them, you need to find out how to minimize the damage your dislike is doing.

Some days I like them. But I still hate that I am in this situation. I left the ex that forced this.

How did someone force you to have more than one child in the US?

[Anonymous]

My guess is that it will get easier for you as your kids become adults because the older they get the less parenting is required. You can completely step out of the parenting role as your kids become adults and move into friend zone, if that's what you want.

[Anonymous]

Too late now. Suck it up until they are grown unless you want a real headache down the road.

[Anonymous]

Please get therapy or medication. Children who know they are unwanted — or hated — are scarred for life.

[Anonymous]

Well, OP, here are your options:

- Quit. If you are with a partner who wants to parent, divorce and give full custody if you can. You will need to pay support, probably. Your kids will probably hate/resent you forever, and you will likely cause all kinds of issues for them as adults, but on some level, no one can make you do this.

- Be miserable. Go on hating parenting. Go on resenting the imposition on your time and options. Go on hating the drudgery, the commitment. Go on feeling it offers no rewards. This options sucks for you and your kids, but seems like this where you are at.

- Figure out how to like it. People do this ALL THE TIME. You're problem is that you still see being a parent like an option, a menu item you'd prefer to send back. It's not. At this point, being a parent is no different for you than being a person. You can't quit being a person and be a dog instead, okay? You have to just go on wearing your person meat suit and doing person things.

You need to figure out what you like about parenting. If you don't like anything, you need to find something to like. Here are some things other people like about parenting: hugging their kids, making them laugh, observing them learn how to do stuff, having an excuse to be silly, teaching them about their favorite subjects/hobbies. Some people take pleasure in dressing their kids up and taking photos of them. Some people like cultivating their kids' taste in food and music and then bragging about how sophisticated their kids are. Some of these might be "better parenting" than others but in your case, I don't think it matters. Find something, anything, you find satisfying about parenting. Lean into it.

Also, here's a general tip that occurred to me while writing this response. On some level, and certainly after a certain point, being a parent is just about having good relationship skills. Your kids get older, they learn to feed themselves and get themselves places on time, to make choices about their own educations and social lives. Eventually, your kid is just a person in your life. Do you have good relationships with other people? Friends, partners, sibling? If so, what makes those relationships work, what makes them satisfying to you? Shared interests? Mutual respect? Doing favors for each other? Well, your kids are just more people to have relationships with. Why not just make it a good relationship? Just cultivate good interactions and respectful communication and try to make these relationships positive ones instead of a negative drag.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Please tell me that this improves when they are adults because 10 years in and I still can’t stand it.

Maybe your spouse isn’t stepping up enough with the kids, caring for them, talking with them, supporting them in many ways? Maybe you’re dumped on and hate that part of it.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Why did you have kids? How did you now know this, before you had kids?

That’s such an unhelpful question - being around kids is soooo different than having your own and it’s kind of a crap shoot how you’ll respond to parenting. My husband looooved being around kids and was great with them yet chafes with a lot of being a parent and struggles with it more. I don’t enjoy being around kids (and still don’t enjoy most kids and find them obnoxious) yet have blossomed being a parent and even though I can objectively tell my kids are as obnoxious as everyone else’s I don’t experience it the same way

Not really. It gives you an idea of how you'll respond to the demands of parenting, dealing with different personalities, acknowledging that it's a crapshoot BEFORE you have kids. I don't know how anyone can spend lots of time around kids, and then be surprised about how much work it is or then realize how you hate having kids... until after you have them,

Unless you lived a charmed life of never interacting with kids except briefly here and there. Because it's really not a surprise.

Fascinating I’m explaining that this was in fact both my and my husbands experience and yet even after hearing that you can’t fathom this could be someone’s experience bc it wasn’t yours

DP, but I'd add to this that you don't know what kids you'll get.

Pretty sure my SIL's life experience could not have prepared her for twins with severe autism. She and her husband love them dearly, but Jesus, it's been a hard road.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Also, to continue the metaphor. One would say you push the distaste of cleaning the toilet to the back of your mind in order to enjoy the clean bathroom the rest of the time. If you never cleaned the toilet seat, the bathroom would be disgusting. There is a trade off. It sounds like you find no joy in the clean bathroom here (if the clean bathroom is, 'relationship with your children'). If you did, I'd say focus on the positives because dwelling in this bitterness will do nothing to change your situation and only cause your life to be worse.

I have to pretend. I do that but I hate it. They’re literally are no positives. I posted because I’m hoping I will not feel this way when they are adults but I know I will continue to feel this way as long as they are living in my house.

New poster. OP, please get therapy -- NOT to force yourself to find you don't have, but to help you come up with strategies for raising your kids in a way where they don't grow up feeling they are responsible for your unhappiness. Yes, their existence makes you unhappy but they did not choose to exist and they are at real risk of internalizing your hatred of having them in your life. I say that without judgement, I really do, OP. You can't un-feel what you feel but neither can they just vanish, so to me, this has to be about how you shield them from believing they did something bad or wrong that alienated you.

Not sure I'm phrasing that well, but I'm trying to say: While you absolutely can own your own honest feelings to yourself and your therapist, you do have a responsibility to ensure that your kids do not believe that they, or something they did, are at fault.

Even if you try your hardest to cover up the fact you do not want them in your life, they WILL know, even if it's just a gut feeling they have that you don't like them. They will pick up on it at some point if they haven't already. And it could leave them with permanent issues they will carry into their own relationships in the future. They do exist, they are yours to help raise, and even though you do not want that responsibility or enjoy any aspect of it at all, it's still on your plate. And I'm sorry, because you don't deserve t be so unhappy--but you are the adult here, and the one who can either damage them or power through raising them so they don't feel responsible for something that's about you and not about them.

I actually commend you for pretending for your kids' sakes. Now please get therapy so you can perhaps feel some level of optimism about how you raise them, even if you never can feel any positives or pleasure in that job. It's not a job one can drop entirely, short of leaving the family and cutting off contact and custody, OP, which would guarantee those feelings of "it's my fault" that they don't deserve to have instilled.

[Anonymous]

Above should have been, "not to force yourself to find feelings you don't have"
sorry.

[Anonymous]

OP it is easy to become bitter, to see your life, see its flaws, and know that someone else is responsible for a lot of them, at least in part, and to simmer in that. To go through the day thinking 'I didn't even want kids' and to feel that as you make every peanut butter sandwich, and read every book, and do every math problem. It is in fact, the easy choice, to simply be grumpy, about all of it. To allow yourself to roll around in the knowledge that you had a vision, and it didn't happen, and you KNEW you were right, you KNEW you would hate it.

But you know what, you don't actually HAVE to hate it. There is joy to be found in every life. But people who are thriving off their own anger at their situation miss all the joy. They just don't see it.

I had a microcosm of this recently with mother's day. I have been an enormous b on every mother's day of my being a mother (6 of them so far) because I cannot stand the day. It is manufactured! All I have to do is think about my own maternal figures! Everything anyone does for me is to check a box! But the reality is that I only felt that way because everything I do on mother's day was to check a box. In reality, my children approached the whole holiday with a shockingly sincere earnestness. And all I was doing in dwelling about my bitterness about mother's day, was allowing myself to win an argument I was having with...the world, my own mother, my stepmother, my husband? It doesn't matter, because winning that fight was pointless. It brought me no joy, it simply spread my animus. So this year, I chose to look at it through the eyes of my six year old, and to do only what I wanted for my mothers. And I enjoyed the day. And then all those people who have been telling me for years to do that were proven right. And that didn't feel great, but overall, I enjoyed the day.

So you can continue to hate everything, and be 'right' in this argument you are having with society, with your ex, with your parents? With whoever. Or you can figure out how to release that hate, see fully the good, and enjoy your life again. And maybe some of those people will end up feeling 'right'. Are you so afraid that if you end up enjoying your kids, that the old you will be proven wrong? Was it so much a part of your identity, that figuring out how to enjoy this would feel like a betrayal of yourself? Of what you KNOW to be true about yourself?

You need to reframe that. Lets say it is true that you should never have had kids. And that it wasn't your choice fully to be in this situation. That surfer girl who got her arm bitten off by a shark didn't choose that, and it certainly isn't something she's happy about, but she went on to create an entire life finding the good in being a surfer who overcame a tragedy. It doesn't mean that the version of her with two arms was wrong when they thought 'my life will be better if my arm is never bitten off by a shark.' It just means that she accepted the hand she was dealt and made the best of it, because the only one who would suffer if she didn't was her.

Figure out how to find the joy, or accept that you will be bitter for the rest of your life, and that you will spread that bitterness to everyone you love and care about. But even if you love and care about no one but yourself, know that you are just hurting YOU the most.

[Anonymous]

And this, folks, is Exhibit A why abortion and birth control should be legal.

[Anonymous]

Op I understand. I’ve been a nanny for 20 years and never had my own, because I can only handle kids 50 hours a week. When I’m working, I’m loving, engaged, and happy. On Friday I can’t wait to leave and need the weekend alone, to be able to come back and be my best. If I never worked as a nanny, I probably would have had my own and I’m so happy I didn’t. I’ve been with the same family for 9 years and love the children so much, but I have zero regrets not having my own.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:And this, folks, is Exhibit A why abortion and birth control should be legal.

Yep.