Single Parenting: Responding to "I Hate You"

Q: What should I say when my child yells ‘I hate you?’
 
A: In general, understand that you should take talk of hate, just like talk of suicide, very seriously. Ignore either statement and you risk the possibility of destructive consequences – of harm being done. One scary responsibility of parenting is trying to prevent a child’s desperate words, driven by desperate feelings, from turning into desperate acts. 

Sometimes, because the quality of communication is the quality of family life, parents may have prohibited the use of certain kinds of language in the family, hate statements among them. Thus, when the teenager uses “I hate you!” parents treat this as a violation of family rules and make a corrective response. “You have been told never to use that word between us. Now go to your room. We will discuss consequences later.”

This is not a good decision. What is immediately needed is not punishment, but communication. Parents need to treat “I hate you!” as seriously as they would “I could kill myself!” Both are desperation statements, expressions of extreme unhappiness that need to be talked out to reduce the likelihood of being acted out. 

At the same time, parents do need to understand that most adolescent statements of “I hate you!” don’t really have much to do with actual hate at all. Actual hate is about abiding abhorrence and hostility, a complete or irrecoverable absence of love. “I hate you” from your teenager is neither abiding nor bankrupt of love. It is usually spoken in the moment in response to one or more of four upsetting issues. The young person is feeling frustrated by parental demands, restraints, or lack of understanding. 

“I hate you!” really means “I am at the extremity of my anger at you!” The young person is in a hard emotional place because of unwise decisions made and wants to unload those feelings on someone else. “I hate you!” really means “I feel like taking my bad feelings about myself out on you!”