Why Parents Love Their Kids Even on the Hard Days
The second time I yelled at my son in one evening, he didn’t say anything. He just set down the Lego spaceship he was building and stared at the floor. The first yell was about the wet towel on the bathroom floor. The second was about the fact that he was still in his pajamas at 8:30, even though I had asked him three times to put out his school clothes for tomorrow.
I stood in the doorway, breathing hard. I could feel the heat in my face, the ridiculous anger over a few minutes of lost time. He was eight. He had school in the morning. I had work. Everything mattered, and nothing mattered, and I was suddenly furious at a child who just wanted to finish his spaceship.
I said, “Fine. Stay up half the night,” and walked away.
I didn’t apologize then. I went into the kitchen, loaded the dishwasher, and heard him pad into his bedroom. The door clicked shut. That quiet click did something to me.
Here’s what I didn’t want to admit in that moment: I didn’t feel loving at all. I felt annoyed and tired and like a failure. And if you’re a parent, you know exactly what I mean. Because we have this idea that parental love is a steady, warm current, always there, always patient, always forgiving. But then you spend a Wednesday evening with a child who won’t put his socks on, and you realize that current also has a shallow, muddy bank you can get stuck on.
So what makes a parent love a child? Not the feeling. The feeling comes and goes like a sick headache. It’s not something you can rely on at 8:30 on a weeknight.
What makes a parent love a child is the showing up again.
I didn’t solve anything that night. But around nine, I knocked on his door. He was in bed, reading a book upside down. I sat on the edge of the mattress. I said, “I don’t like the yelling. It’s not fair to you when I get that frustrated.” He turned a page. I put my hand on his shoulder. He didn’t shrug it off.
That’s love. Not the lump in your throat when you watch them sleep. Not the pure joy of their laugh. Love is the awkward apology after you’ve been a jerk. It’s the hand on the shoulder when you still feel irritable. It’s making the fifth version of a peanut butter sandwich because the crust is wrong.
The next morning, I got up early and made him toast. I spread the butter all the way to the edges because that’s how he likes it. He came into the kitchen with one sock inside out, and I pointed at his foot. He rolled his eyes but fixed it. He didn’t say thank you for the toast, but he ate the whole thing. When his backpack was on, he gave me a quick hug, all bones and angles, and then he was out the door.
Does that sound too small? Maybe. But I think we overestimate the grand gestures. We think love is the moment you catch your child mid-fall at a playground, or the speech at a wedding. In reality, it’s the unremarkable texture of a regular Thursday. The toast. The hand on the shoulder. The second chance.
The tricky part is that children need to feel that love, but they don’t always recognize it when it looks like a half-burnt slice of bread. And parents need to feel it too, but we get so caught up in the mechanics—the packing, the reminding, the wiping of counters—that we mistake irritation for the absence of love. It’s not the same thing.
I’ve started to think of parental love as a kind of repair work. You break something, you fix it. Over and over. The repair is not a one-time thing; it’s a practice. And like any practice, it gets a little easier with repetition. You learn that after you yell, you apologize. After you ignore them, you put your phone down. After you say “not now,” you find them later and ask what they wanted to say.
This is not about letting behavior slide. You can still set limits and have your child face consequences. But the repair doesn’t undo the limit. It just says, “I still belong to you.” That belonging is what children actually need from us.
There’s a phrase I’ve heard from teachers, and I’ve adapted it for my own house: “You’re not in trouble. I just want to reconnect.” It sounds a little formal, but it works in practice. When I feel that distance growing, I try to do something physical and simple. Bring a glass of water. Sit on the floor near them. Even just standing in the doorway of their room for a minute without asking for anything. It sounds dumb, but it shifts something. In my chest. In the air between us.
What makes a parent love a child is not instinct, exactly. It’s attention. You notice the way their hair sticks up in the back. You notice that their shoelaces are always the same length. You notice that they only get clingy when they’ve had a hard day. That noticing is love. It’s the thing you can do even when you’re exhausted and cranky. You can look at them and see them, not just their behavior.
That evening, after the toast and the homework and the negotiation about screen time, I sat on the floor of the living room while he built another rocket. He was telling me about the features of his ship—the hyperdrive, the laser cannons, the cup holder for juice. I half-listened. But really, I was thinking about how this particular moment would be gone soon. He wouldn’t be eight and obsessed with space for much longer. I couldn’t tell him that, so I just asked, “Does the cup holder have a co-pilot?”
He grinned. And I felt the current again. It wasn’t a lightning bolt. It was just a little warmer, a little less muddy.
I don’t think there’s a single answer to what makes a parent love a child. It’s not blood, exactly. It’s not the years of care, either. It might just be the decision, repeated a thousand times, to put your hand back on their shoulder after you’ve pulled it away. To make the toast again. To let them fix the sock.
I still got annoyed the next week. I’ll get annoyed tomorrow, probably. But the love is still there, underneath the annoyance, not as a feeling but as a practice. And the practice is something you can hold onto.
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