Quora thread: "Parenting: What do you do when your 5 year-old says "I hate you!"?"

[TheMatrixHasMe]

This is pretty much a no-brainer, but I am having difficulty with the responses I've read on this, an other topics that relate to children on quora.com.

 

Since most people are statists, and most statists have unprocessed histories, and as such support the use of force &/or threat of force against their children, some of the responses are jaw dropping.

[Mike Fleming]

I don't think I could bare to read them.

 

The real question would be "What are the bad things that you have done to your 5-year old child that have made them hate you?"

[meeri]

What's the difficulty you have with the responses? How did it make you feel?

[Mike Fleming]

I didn't read them.  I just know it's going to be full of hypocrisy and I don't expose myself to hypocrites needlessly.  What's the point?  

[Prairie]

Almost all the responses show the adults to be insecure, projecting, angry beings. They consistently ignore that the child is trying to communicate something important to the parent. They display great fear that the child can hurt them, and responses to try to ward off this threat of being hurt deeply by their child. They frame the child as trying to upset their domination over the child. They punish the child for not expressing themselves in the approved way (using words, expressing hatred? nope, you have to do it in a way that mommy/daddy find pleasant). They tell the child that he/she doesn't feel anything important and that it's not nice to express things.A couple at the end aren't like that, and are correspondingly voted up about 1/10 of the others:

He has no idea what he's saying. Don't project your insecurities onto a five-year-old. You need to be the grown-up in that conversation.

At 5 years old, "I hate you" does not mean what it means at, say, 25 years old; and what it means at 45 years old is something else again.A 5 year old has usually a fairly limited vocabulary to try to describe a virtuoso emotional range.S/he is doing the best s/he can with the available and ready.So ignore any hurt feelings you may have; they are a result of projection.If it is a structural thing, you can when things are less heated teach your child the words for various degrees of anger and frustration ( and happiness and sadness and so on). And you can teach a child to recognize his or her bodily responses that warn of, say, fear and anger -- for five year olds, anger, fear, frustration, and many other emotions feel exactly the same, there is a whole process of learning about the distinctions and it takes years.All intense emotions feel more or less the same to a child. And evoke more or less the same response pretty often -- fight or flight.Congratulations, you have a fighter. Now s/he needs to learn about that.

[alexqr1]

I could not make it past the 1st response. As a parent I just could not stomach it.

"If you show a young child they have the power to hurt you then you are setting the stage for them to continue to test your authority as a parent. Once you demonstrate that you do not care, reprimand them lovingly and explain that it is better for them to tell you how they are feeling instead. In other words you want to teach them to voice the second half of the statement beginning with "I hate you because..." This is powerful because it helps them to understand that discussing their own feelings is always welcome and OK, but making mean statements is not.

My wife and I always thought our kids were cute and funny when they were mad at us because we were very comfortable that we were loving and nurturing parents. If it is any consolation, one of my kids got stuck in a mode where we she would just blurt out "DIE!" when she was upset at us. It was impossible to get upset at her because she did not know what death was.

Make them laugh, then talk to them. Very few prepubescent kids have the ability to go into a sustained state of rage or unhappiness. After puberty, all bets are off."

So basically I don't give a fuck if you say you hate me, because I don't grant you the power to hate me. I laugh at your pathetic feelings towards me, once you understand how much of a fuck I give, I will punish you for even thinking your feelings have any value in this relationship... oh, and I love you.

[Kevin Beal]

Isn't the thing you should say "please tell me more"?

 

Finding a way of immediately minimizing it is not terribly mature, and not something to model for children, I don't think.

 

Communicating to a child that their feelings are wrong, or that they should be minimized / don't matter, is sacrificing their self esteem for your own personal comfort in the moment. A discomfort that you might actually need to feel in your capacity as the adult in the relationship, in being responsible for the relationship.

 

The child expresses something you don't like; I'm not sure pacifying, diminishing or placating them is going to achieve anything except erase or suppress an emerging aspect of their personality. If that child were trying to kill the cat, then maybe some suppression is in store, but being upset with you? What a terrible thing to take off the table in the relationship. Yuck!

[TheMatrixHasMe]

I didn't read them.  I just know it's going to be full of hypocrisy and I don't expose myself to hypocrites needlessly.  What's the point?  

The point of my starting this thread was to provide some actual evidence of the insensitivity parents have with regard to their children. That this sort of power lust still takes place in a part of the world considered to be the most developed in human history is, at best, alarming.

 

 

@Meeri: Rage