When you are finding it hard to love one of your children.

Gasp! Did I just write that as a title!? Surely no good mother ever finds it hard to love one of her children? Surely no good father ever struggles with being as patient with one child as he is with the others?

Isn’t that the hardest thing to admit to another parent? That you have a ‘favourite’ or, perhaps worse, a ‘least favourite’? What a way to induce that most troublesome of emotions – parental guilt!

If you’ve ever felt this way, don’t despair – you are not alone. When I had my second daughter my Mum warned me: “don’t panic if you ever feel you love one more than the other – if you just relax about it, you’ll soon realise your ‘favouritism’ has swapped from one child to the other…and will continue doing so throughout their lives”.

I have to say it was one of the most helpful pieces of advice she’s ever given me, and has carried me through many a guilt-ridden episode of favouring one of my children over the others, as well as the harder times when I’ve actually felt like I actively dislike one of my children.

I have found myself that it is one of the hardest things to live with when this happens and from talking to many other parents I know I’m not the only one. One of the golden parenting ‘rules’ is don’t have favourites, and many of us have found ourselves actively breaking that rule!

And that feeling when you look at one of your children and you are finding it so hard to love them that you begin to hate yourself? Ugh!

The answer? From talking to many, many parents, and getting through many such situations myself, I say the answer is, like in many parenting issues, to simply be with it. Don’t judge it, just accept it and trust in the process. Trust it will pass, because it will.

Time and time again I realise that the child I couldn’t stand last month is the one I am desperate to cuddle and play with this month. The trouble is, the more you focus on the issue, the bigger it becomes. Like a festering sore, the more you pick at it, the more it poisons you and the more pain it causes.

If you feel you need a little help to get you through, confide in a close friend and enlist their help, if only so that you begin to feel less alone. A friend of mine once texted me several times a day reminding me that I did love one of my children with whom we were having a particularly bad patch with – it helped me so much!

Another friend put up post-it notes in her kitchen cupboards reminding her how much she loved her son. Yet another deliberately puts up photographs of her children laughing and being gorgeous so that she can look at them when she’s feeling nothing but disgust and despair.

Until it does pass, it goes without saying that you must do whatever you can to make sure you don’t overtly show your children what you’re feeling. Of course it’s unavoidable that they’ll pick up on something, and for the less-loved-at-the-time child that feeling may well make whatever behaviour it is you’re struggling with get even worse. As long as you can accept that, and know that such behaviour is a worried test of his foundations, it’s not so difficult to avoid using it to confirm your negative feelings about him and to remind yourself that your child is simply in need of unconditional love.

Remember, also, to love yourself and be kind to yourself. You are not infallible – you are a human being who experiences normal human emotions. Every time you berate and hate yourself for your feelings, you block the very emotion you need to be feeding – love. Love always, always comes first, including and, perhaps most importantly, unconditional love for ourselves. How can you begin to reconnect with your unconditional love for your child if you can’t even love yourself in the same way? If you’re struggling to love your child, then you’re in need of love in just the same way your child is.

Image credit: davide, Flickr

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