Parents can sometimes regret having children—they love their children, but they hate the job (and at times, they struggle with liking their children because they hate the job). As explored in a recent article in Time Magazine, these are painful and complicated feelings. However, they’re not as uncommon as society would have us assume.
Society likes to only see the positive side of parenthood; the one that is good, wonderful, and amazing. Sure, we acknowledge that parenting is hard but ultimately, everyone in the family should be happy. That’s not always the case. Parenting is challenging and demanding. It takes patience, time, thought, and a ton of physical and emotional labor, sometimes much more than parents anticipate. Parents can also feel locked out of their former lives. With a child entirely dependent on them, they can no longer do whatever they want whenever they want.
This is a real and dramatic role shift, which can leave a parent in a seemingly contradictory bind of loving their child but deeply struggling with the choice they made and the role they’re in. These feelings become even harder to deal with as our culture doesn’t have much room to hold the reality that a parent can be in this type of pain and struggle while also doing all their parental duties and showing up for every parent event.
Because of this pressure, most parents won’t talk about these feelings of regret. They quickly move past the feelings, hide them from themselves and others around them, or shame themselves for feeling this way. It can seem like the worst and most taboo thing to admit: “I love my kid. I also wish I had made a different choice and I have no clue how I will live with it.” While it can seem impossible and counterintuitive, the best thing parents can do is to not keep these feelings silent or deny them.
“I love my kid. I hate the job” is ambivalence
The mixed feeling of loving your kid while regretting the choice you made is called ambivalence. Ambivalence means being stuck in the in-between. Often in therapy, I talk about ambivalence in the context of an individual being unsure of what they want. However, it can also look like being in love with something and not liking it all at once such as deeply loving your child but not the role that same child puts you in. If you think, “Man, I love them, but man, I don’t like this right now,” that is ambivalence.
For parents, ambivalence can come from surprise at how much work, time, and patience parenting takes—that it’s all on you to drive the process, the help, and the time you do or don’t spend with your kid. Sometimes parents avoid thinking about how to get their own needs met or set aside time for themselves in this very big role and commitment so they start to dislike the role. Ambivalence can come from these struggles to set limits or find short amounts of time to yourself so you can best take care of your child with some reserves of a cared-for self. Ambivalence frequently relates as well to historical experiences such as how you were—and still are—treated by your own parents.
Though painful, ambivalence isn’t all bad. In fact, ambivalence can be a step in the process of working through something. Feelings of ambivalence are often how we begin to process being torn between many feelings or different sides of the coin. We frequently come to change with ambivalence, which can actually be a hopeful and helpful process. In a sense, ambivalence can announce: “I can’t choose and I’m struggling. HELP!”
Pushing down ambivalence can lead to stuckness and the feelings coming out in unhelpful ways
While ambivalence can signal a struggle, the pressure to keep silent about it, especially related to parenthood, is strong. Parents shove down this alarm, deny it, or beat themselves up over these feelings. They can say to themselves, “Good moms/dads/parents don’t have unwanted feelings toward their child. God, I must be so fucked up. I can’t tell anyone or I’d be branded a monster.” There is also a more apathetic and resigned internal dialogue: “Well, I’m the one who made this choice so I just have to live with it. No point in complaining.”
Though it can seem easier, silencing these feelings leaves you stuck, which can lead to depression and anxiety, meanness, isolation, or just feeling alone. When these feelings are pushed aside, either consciously or unconsciously, they have a way of coming out through other means, whether directed at yourself, your partner, or your kid(s). You may lash out in ways that are less than your best self like yelling, being withdrawn, or being reactive.
For instance, if you’re numbing your ambivalence, you might start to put these feelings on your kid when they’re just acting their age and giving you a hard time because they’re going through something. This situation can merge with your denied feelings of ambivalence so you think: “My kid is so difficult and doesn’t like me.” Kids also have a knack for knowing when something is going on with their parent and “acting out” or being more difficult in response. This is when you get in trouble and start grasping for a solution, believing that you’re simply a bad parent or shouldn’t have made this choice when that isn’t the case—you’re simply struggling with ambivalence.
The first step to working through ambivalence?: Name it
Often when parents come to therapy, especially new moms and dads, they immediately talk about how much they love their child. What is harder to discuss is just how hard the role is and how they feel about their choice now. Naming ambivalence is the first step in a complex process of unpacking these mixed feelings rather than just routinely performing the tasks of parenting without acknowledging what you’re feeling. Though a simple initial move, naming ambivalence helps separate these feelings from the feelings about your kid, making them less entangled within the family system.
Sometimes just being offered the word ambivalence can be a huge help—that there is a word for having feelings that seem to counter and contradict each other. This makes the emotional experiences more normalized and less like a marker of “bad” parenting.
Once you can name it, ambivalence is no longer just isolated and stuck in your mind and thoughts. While naming ambivalence to yourself is key, it is especially useful when you can share these feelings with someone else who makes it okay to voice multiple competing feelings at once like a friend, a partner, or a therapist. For example, you could tell a trusted friend about how much you don’t want to parent right now and are struggling with it. The experience of having someone else who is willing to hear you out, let your feelings be as messy as they need to be, and take this in with you can help you process and make use of these experiences.
Therapy can help parents be curious about ambivalence and make it more manageable
Granted, because of the stigma against parental ambivalence, it can be hard to share these feelings even with your closest loved ones. Therapy can help socialize ambivalence regardless of taboos. A therapist can teach and model curiosity about these feelings rather than rushing to a conclusion that all is lost if you don’t like the parent role you chose. By asking questions, therapy can be a place to bring these feelings to light, unpack the struggle, and feel all the angles of it, including how the stuckness might be protecting you from really deeply looking at all you’re feeling.
Therapy can also help parents tolerate messiness. Ambivalence about parenthood might come and go, but you can learn to approach it in a more manageable way rather than getting stuck or feeling at a loss. These feelings can be noticed and felt, and choices can be made without beating yourself up. When you better understand ambivalence, you can, then, better understand what you need and make choices accordingly that can shift your relationship with yourself.
This causes a ripple effect on your relationships with your kid, family, and life, allowing you to take new positions out of love, choice, and your values. A powerful result of taking on and talking through ambivalence in therapy is figuring out how to reorganize, disrupt, and relocate yourself in the role you have created. It is a beautiful thing to take parental ambivalence into therapy and the tragedy is not bringing it in at all.
