To just accept I’m not going to have a very good relationship with one of my children?

[Notsureaboutitall]

My first child and I had an OK relationship until I had another baby. He loved me until that point and favoured me over and above his dad. Had the second baby and that was it. We’re nearly a year down the line, he still wants his dad and not me, he often doesn’t even acknowledge me when I speak to him, I just really lost my temper with him and I don’t feel great about it but I don’t know what the hell else to do to be honest.

I hate to say it but I’m just so worn down with it and I think I need to just accept he and I don’t really get on. It’s horrible but maybe it’s more common than we think. I know when I was growing up my brother tended to gravitate towards my mum and I to my dad so maybe it’s a thing, I’m not sure.

What's wrong with his dad being the preferred parent? He'll love you both equally but he may well develop a particularly close bond with his father.

I think you need to see past some of the more cutting replies to your post- have a good read of them and see why people are so shocked at your response to a natural developmental phase in your son's life.

What a shit thing to say to someone who's obviously struggling. That she shouldn't have had her babies.

You sound completely devoid of emotional intelligence.

Don't be ridiculous, that would be opting out of your responsibility as a parent.

You need to spend more positive time together and build your bond.

You definitely shouldn't be shouting at a young child for failing to meet your emotional needs.

I’ve been there and am also still there in many ways (won’t tell you child’s age)
but I absolutely agree with this- 1:1 time to build connection. I know it won’t be easy to establish but once you have it will become a
very special part of your routine.
Try love bombing him. Read love bombing book.
Just send love with no strings attached.
I know how hard this is when you feel so rejected. Your feelings are valid.
He truly loves you.
The 1:1 - he decides on what you do together. Try and give him as much autonomy as possible.

Please keep making an effort. He is still the same little boy. Children do go through phases of preferring one parent over the other, it doesn't mean you won't have a good relationship in the future.

But giving up will

FWIW my mother told me when I was late teens that she emotionally rejected me when I was born. 8t was just

Sorry.
it was a confirmation of what I already knew and felt. She never made me feel loved, and always made me feel bad for preferring my dad to her. Why wouldn't I? He made the effort when she didn't.

It is cruel to disengage and blame the child for it.

Children don't go off their parents for no reason but parents can start detaching from their kids if they don't see themselves in them or they resent them they feel they're taking up to much effort with not enough reward. Being exhausted with a new baby could be a valid reason.

Not judging either, it's just better to accept your part in what's happening then looking for reasons that don't exist because you don't want to think there's something wrong with you for not feeling the former connection. A good therapist can help you get to the core reasons and help develop some ways to feel an attachment again.

I think it's got nothing to do with your child, rather the issue I believe is your low mood. It's a vicious circle in that you want a closer relationship, but your mood (if your posts on here are anything to go by) makes that alot harder. Unless you were just tired today and your posts aren't a true reflection of your mood?

Lets say this is your normal mood.....the catastrophizing ("I think I need to just accept he and I don’t really get on") is often a symptom of anxiety/depression.

"Catastrophizing means that a person fixates on the worst possible outcome and treats it as likely, even when it is not. Therapy and medications can help people reduce or stop catastrophizing."

What you have intimated (well, I think that's us done), that's a clear example of catastrophizing. It's an enormous exaggeration, ie. not sound thinking. Work on that first OP, the other stuff will work itself out.

@IneedHelp29
I had a 2 year gap between my 2 and my eldest HATED the baby. Hated him. She went from being the centre of my attention 24/7 to having to share me with a tiny noisy little thing, plus I was shattered from his every 2 hour feeds so on top of that she had a mum with PND too. Which I had for well over a year

I dont know what you've tried so far but this is what I did which really helped

If both needed me at the same time, I would switch it up who I attended to first and I would always say to the baby "hold on baby, I'm just doing blah blah for DD, I'll be with you in a minute"

I would massively big up DD to the baby and tell the baby how funny, clever, kind DD was.... she absolutely loved it. I said nice things about her loudly when she was out of the room to the baby too so she could hear

***####%%%

BRILLIANT

wish I'd done that.
I did the present from the baby but at 4.5 dd was still jealous of ds - and very bossy.

So does the OP. How on Earth does a mother give up on her tiny 3 year old and ‘just accept’ it’s all over with him? He is 3!!!
In a nutshell that is what I think. Parenting is hard. Toddlers are hard. What was she expecting? For him to say oh look mummy a living, crying, pooing dolly? I love him. He is taking so much of your time that used to be mine, but he is the best thing ever.

This was the advice DM gave me when I had DC2. I think it worked reasonably well . I have to say when Dd (DC2) was days old ( I think about 5) I left her with DH and took DS to the park, I remember seeing him smile and thinking he hadn't smiled much until that point since the baby was born. I also introduced a midmorning/ lunchtime bottle so I could feed her more easily out and about.

I felt similar when I had my second, my DD was nearly 3 at the time. I make sure to 1:1 time with her, and both of them now they’re older. Even now she’s a bit older, she likes me to help her dressed like I do my youngest. They just want to feel important and loved.

I had my second baby when my first had just turned two. My eldest naturally started getting more quality time with his dad as I was tired, breast feeding and always had a baby attached to me.

Dad and son got a really close relationship for a few years. Then as baby got bigger and I could spend more and more time away from them I made a point of giving eldest one to one time with me. He was still close to his dad but we got closer again too.

I think the key is to keep having fun one to one as often as possible. It isn’t easy having two small ones but it doesn’t define the future. Their understanding and emotional maturity is growing all the time too.

I work in a nursery and two and three year olds are challenging even without a baby in the mix. They are just babies themselves still but trying to be more grown up than they are.

Poor little boy is adjusting. He will be picking up on you withdrawing further too. Please don’t give up on him. He needs you. And no, meeting his basic needs is not enough, deep down you must know that!

If anything he probably takes his feelings out on you because he knows you’ll always come back to him, he feels safest with you.

Does the little one not nap at all? They should be having two big naps a day at this age shouldn’t they? You say he would rather be with anyone else who watches the nearly one year old (who’s not really a baby baby - should be fine spending a few hours with someone else!) but you need to be the adult here and say firmly no we are going out together and make it a daily/weekly whatever fairly frequent occurrence until he accepts it. Take him to the zoo don’t worry if he says he wants daddy just change the subject and distract him. He will soon forget.

You need to put your ego aside here for the sake of a very small child who needs you.

Omg the callousness and obtuseness of people on this thread!

OP is obviously just a tired, emotional mum with a 3 year old and a newborn. Parenting is sooo bloody hard, exhausting and thankless at these ages. OP has done nothing wrong, her feelings are normal.
little kids can be brutal. it can be so bloody triggering to the best of parents when their kid systematically rejects them in favour of the other parent or someone else. My kids dad is totally wonderful , and they adore him, but he struggles to control his upset sometimes when my toddler tells him she doesn’t love/ want him, only wants mummy etc. NORMAL. OP obviously isn’t giving up on her child she just needs a space to vent. Because she’s a human, not a robot.

OP, your son loves you. You are his mum . He’ll never have another mum, and there is no one else who can ever meaningfully rival you in that role. It’s so normal for little kids to go through phases of parent “preference”. It doesn’t mean he doesn’t love / like you. If anything it’s a sign of his security in the relationship that he feels safe to express his feelings. he knows he can constantly reject you / be cruel, All the while knowing you will still be there and love and take care of him.

It’s such a challenging time for everyone with a newborn and a toddler. You are only one person, you are doing your best to balance your love and attention for both of your babies. And that is good enough. You are good enough. You have given your son the wonderful gift of a sibling, and although there are things he finds hard about that now, those things will be outweighed by all the benefits to come. Things will get better. xxx

OP is obviously just a tired, emotional mum with a 3 year old and a newborn.

That's the thing though. She doesn't sound emotional at all. Just detached and the way she writes it's as if she's just going through the motions of parenting - and always has done? And maybe her child is starting to pick up on it?

@Tandora at least read the thread properly before you criticise the PPs, or you just end up embarrassing yourself. The OP doesn't have a newborn. Her second child is a year old

You sound overly dramatic but tiredness and or low mood can do that to you. I remember worrying about this when I had my ds as dd1 was only 15 months old. Dh did more with her once he got in and I was looking after ds. Dd1 wouldn't eat well from me and kept crying for daddy which made me feel awful. Ds alaso wouldnt settle with his dad. We changed the routine up and that helped things lots. Now dd1 is 7 and equally close to us both. I expect that will change several times as she gets older and that is OK.

You can change up your routine, your 1 year old will start getting more independent soon and there is a lot you can do with the two of them such as cuddling up with both for bedtime stories, playing with blocks taking them both out for a walk.

that changes pretty much nothing about what I wrote.
replace newborn with “baby” ,
or 1 year old and then read again 👍🏻

Does your dh try and help guide ds? And then doing things as a family such as a 3 year old appropriate game so he sees you and dh together. Dh can also do things like "let's paint a picture for mummy" etc so dh modelling appreciation for mummy

Also all 3 of you could play role play games with ds

@Tandora or, instead, maybe think about how the OP has let her toxic feelings towards her son fester for 12 months and is now seemingly writing him off. I don't disagree with most of your post, and it would be relevant if the OP was showing an ounce of the same self awareness and care towards her own child. But she isn't. We've gone way past the initial understandable feelings of being 'triggered' (your words) by rejection. The damage being done to her son feels very real and as such I think it's right that PPs are being forthright.

It is relevant that her second child is now 12 months old and not a newborn. A 12 month old can be left much more easily with others to enable the OP to spend the much needed 1:1 time with her son. And the OP isn't in the newborn phase you thought she was, so a lot of excuses go out of the window. I've got 2 under 2 so I absolutely know how hard it is, but I show up for my first born everyday, and the challenges now my second born is 6 months are much easier to manage, so I'm struggling to have much sympathy for an OP who writes the way she does about her own child

Sometimes, I think there is not enough shame in the world. So many people jumping to the OP’s defence and saying she is ‘obviously struggling’ or asking if she has PND. I mean, maybe those things are true? Or maybe she isn’t a very nice person? We don’t know because we don’t know her and making excuses for her attitude towards her three year old in the name of ‘be kind’ is more detrimental than not.
If OP has the ability to introspect, maybe she will consider some of the responses here and, after the initial hurt of being told the truth, she may well realise she is being unreasonable and want to make some changes. Or, she might latch on to the ‘it’s not my fault and I am struggling’ comments and decide not to do anything to change it at all.

OP sounds quite childish - that can happen when you’re emotional. It can also happen when you’re just generally a childish person.

I was going to come on and say that kids reject their parents all the time - counter-intuitively they often do it to the parent they’re most attached to. You aren’t interesting to them anymore because you’re ol’ faithful - you’ll always be there no matter how hard they push you away and the other parent becomes more interesting to them. But after reading OP’s replies, I am not sure this is necessarily the case here.

I believe this is real because it’s exactly what my mum did - 2nd baby when I was just over 2, tried for a year then decided I didn’t like her and stopped bothering to nurture the relationship (beyond the bare minimum required as a parent). She spent much of my adult life talking about how I rejected her at 2 and she is a terrible mother but “that’s life”.

Surprisingly we don’t have any relationship at all now. (There is a lot more to that decision, obviously.)

My mum definitely had PND and needed help. I suspect you may too OP. But either way, no, it isn’t just going to be like this forever unless you decide that’s that and write off your 3 year old.

This in spades.

He's not responsible for your happiness. He's a child. You however are responsible for his happiness.