'I Love My Kid But I Do Not Like Her Right Now' — And That's More Normal Than Anyone Will Admit

It happened on a Tuesday. My daughter had been in a phase — one of those phases where everything I did was wrong, where she rolled her eyes so hard I genuinely worried about her optic nerves, where she responded to every reasonable request with a sigh so theatrical it deserved its own Emmy. And in a moment of absolute exhaustion, I texted my best friend four words: I don't like her.

I stared at the message for a full thirty seconds before I hit send. Because even typing it felt like a confession. Like I was admitting to something shameful. Like I was a bad mom.

Her response came back in seconds: Oh thank God. Me too. Mine's been insufferable for three weeks.

And just like that, I felt less alone than I had in months.

Love Is Unconditional. Like Is a Whole Different Story.

Here's something that parenting culture desperately does not want to say out loud: loving your child and liking your child are two completely separate emotional experiences. You can be absolutely, ferociously devoted to a person and still find them genuinely difficult to be around. Those two things coexist all the time in adult relationships — we just refuse to apply that same logic to our kids.

Licensed clinical psychologist Dr. Cara Goodwin, who specializes in child development and runs the popular Parenting Translator platform, is unequivocal on this point. "Parental love is this deep, enduring, unconditional bond," she explains. "But liking someone is about enjoying their company in a given moment. Children go through developmental stages that are genuinely challenging — for everyone involved. A toddler in the middle of a boundary-testing phase, a seven-year-old going through a demanding period, a preteen whose personality seems to have been replaced by a stranger — these are hard. It doesn't make you a bad parent to find them hard."

In fact, she says, the research suggests that parents who can acknowledge these negative feelings — rather than suppressing or denying them — tend to respond to their children with more patience and attunement, not less. The guilt spiral, it turns out, is the thing that actually gets in the way.

The Confessions Nobody Posts on Instagram

We reached out to our CafeMom community and asked moms to share honestly. The response was overwhelming.

"My son went through a hitting phase at age four and I dreaded pickup from daycare. I loved him desperately and I did not want to be around him. Both were true at the same time." — Dara, mom of two, Chicago

"My daughter is thirteen and she is mean to me in ways that take my breath away sometimes. I know it's developmental. I know she's figuring herself out. And I still go to bed some nights just... not liking who she is right now. It's the loneliest feeling because you can't say it to anyone without sounding like a monster." — Priya, mom of three, Atlanta

"My son and I have genuinely different personalities. He's loud, intense, and never stops moving. I'm introverted and need quiet to function. I love him more than air. He also exhausts me in a way that feels different from regular parenting tired. Like personality-level exhaustion." — Keisha, mom of one, Portland

Every single one of these women added some version of: Please don't use my full name. I don't want people to think I'm a terrible mom.

That right there is the problem.

Why the Guilt Makes Everything Worse

When we feel something "bad" about our kids and immediately bury it under shame, we don't make the feeling go away — we just cut ourselves off from the support and perspective we actually need. We perform the role of the endlessly patient, always-loving mother, and we do it alone, in silence, feeling like we're the only one who has ever felt this way.

Dr. Goodwin calls this "emotional suppression," and she's clear about the consequences. "When parents suppress difficult emotions, those feelings don't disappear. They tend to leak out — often as irritability, emotional withdrawal, or snapping at our kids in ways we don't intend. Naming the feeling, even just to yourself or a trusted friend, actually gives you more control over how you respond."

There's also a cognitive piece worth naming: when we're deep in a hard phase with a child, we often start to see them through the lens of that difficulty. Every interaction gets filtered through frustration. Acknowledging that you're in a rough patch — rather than pretending it's fine — actually makes it easier to notice the moments that aren't rough. The small, sweet things that get drowned out when we're white-knuckling through the day.

This Is Also, Often, About the Phase — Not the Child

One thing worth remembering when you're in the thick of it: children change. Constantly. The kid who is making you absolutely crazy right now is not the kid they will be in six months. Developmental stages — even the brutal ones — are finite. They end. The three-year-old who screams in the grocery store becomes the four-year-old who holds your hand and tells you you're their best friend. The eye-rolling twelve-year-old becomes the fifteen-year-old who asks you to watch a movie with her.

This doesn't make the hard phase any easier while you're in it. But it's useful context.

Dr. Goodwin also notes that sometimes the friction between a parent and child is about temperament mismatch rather than anything either party is doing wrong. "Some children are just genuinely harder to parent — higher sensitivity, more intensity, more rigidity. And some parent-child combinations are harder than others, even within the same family. That's not a failure. It's just human variation."

So What Do You Actually Do With This Feeling?

First: say it. Not necessarily to your child, but to someone — a friend, a partner, a therapist, an anonymous corner of the internet. Getting the feeling out of your head and into actual words breaks the shame cycle and lets you start processing it like the normal human emotion it is.

Second: look for micro-moments of connection, even when you're not feeling it. You don't have to manufacture a magical bonding experience. Sometimes it's just sitting next to each other watching the same show. Sometimes it's a two-minute conversation about something they care about, even if you don't. Connection doesn't have to be big to be real.

Third: be honest with yourself about whether you need support. A hard phase that lasts weeks is normal. A persistent, grinding sense of disconnection from your child that doesn't lift is worth talking to a professional about — not because something is wrong with you, but because you deserve help navigating it.

And finally, the most important thing: let yourself off the hook for feeling it. You are not a bad mom because you don't enjoy every version of your kid. You are a human being in a relationship with another human being who is, frankly, still under construction. That's hard. It's allowed to be hard. And saying so — out loud, without apology — is not a confession of failure.

It's just the truth. And most of us are living it.