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The original was posted on /r/bestofredditorupdates by /u/Choice_Evidence1983 on 2025-05-20 04:04:06+00:00.

I am NOT OOP, OOP is u/ExplanationCrazy5463

Originally posted to r/TrueOffMyChest

My 8 year old son hates me, and I don’t understand why.

Trigger Warnings: emotional abuse, violence, struggles with mental health, physical abuse, attention disorders

Mood Spoilers: dark at first but getting positive at the end

Original Post: February 9, 2025

I used to believe that your relationship with your children was a given.

To clarify…I believed that as long as you treated your children with love, they were guaranteed to love you back, and that the most you had to worry about if you did the right things was some kind of terrible illness or accident that ended them early.

I’m here today to warn you that’s not true. There are worse possible outcomes.

My son is 8 years old, and I can not be in the same room as him without being attacked. He will scratch, hit, and bite me constantly until we are separated. He bites as hard as he can, my arms are 50% bruises right now from partially healed wounds. I have done nothing to deserve this, and I’ve tried everything to reach him.

I’ve tried love, discipline, ignoring him, reasoning…nothing sticks and as the years have gone on its only gotten worse. He’s already in therapy, we’ve already tried to get him diagnosed with something, we’ve tried meds, we’ve tried no meds. We don’t know what’s going on, nor does his therapist or doctors.

On Thursday I watched a movie. “About time” very bittersweet movie about how time is limited and we need to enjoy it hest we can. There’s a scene where a boy of about 8 is playing on the beach with his father for the last time, enjoying one last beautiful day together. I absolutely lost it.

My son only communicates with me through violence.

Last night…I finally gave up. I cried for hours and let go of any expectation I had of having a loving relationship with him.

He’s 8 years old and hates my guts. There are worse outcomes than outliving your children.

Please don’t take your loved ones for granted.

Edit: thank you to everyone for the advice. Special shout out to the super weirdo antinatalists, particularly the “feminist” who made super sure to tell me she was a feminist before telling me to have a post-birth abortion. No single comment made me realize how ahead of the game I am as a parent than that one.

We are getting a second psych evaluation soon so I’ll write a 2nd post with results of that.

Many of you are absolutely convinced someone else is abusing him, and are unwilling to accept evidence to the contrary. There is no sign of anyone in his life abusing him, nor is there much opportunity. When he’s not at school he’s with us, save for a few rare occasions where we get a trusted, close-family babysitter to go on a date. We’ve asked him if anyone is hurting him or touching him and he has said no, and we make sure both our kids understand what’s inappropriate and know they should tell us of anyone tries anything like that. This is the least likely possibility.

Edit: I’ve created a follow-up post for those who are interested.

Relevant Comments

Commenter 1: How is the relationship between your son and his mother?

OOP: Mostly normal, except the added strain of how he treats me.

We have a healthy loving marriage and a daughter as well. Everything outside my son is as you’d expect.

Commenter 2: I’ve read something similar before. Is it possible that on some level, your son either sees you as a threat to his relationship with his mother or is jealous of your relationship with her and is therefore attacking you to get you to step away? I remember reading about a young boy who was feral to his father because he felt some need to “protect” his mother and couldn’t stand that anyone else would love her. He was violent towards his sibling too. I really wish I could remember where I read it :-(

OOP: This is a possible theory. Just one of many. We have no particular reason to believe this over any other theory.

Commenter 3: Real question: How is he with animals? The way you describe his behavior seems antisocial at minimum. If he’s violent with you, and callous about animals, there could be a touch of sociopathy or psychopathy at play. And at 8 years old, chances are he’s not opening up to his therapist about his issues, he’s probably giving a lot of “I don’t know” answers when asked questions, which is how kids react when they think they are in trouble for their behavior.

OOP: He definitely doesn’t open up about why he does anything.

No signs of violence towards anyone or anything other than me.

How is OOP’s son at school? Any issues appearing?

OOP: We just had a yearly meeting with his special needs team at school. They had only good things to say.

No indication of bullying. He loves friends and people…except 1.

Has there been any other explanations for OOP’s son’s behaviors?

OOP: As I mentioned we have taken him several placed. He’s diagnosed with adhd. We have told them ADHD isn’t the while story but they seem stumped. We will keep trying.

He may be on the spectrum, seems to have anxiety and sensory processing issues, but doctors aren’t diagnosing him with anything other than adhd so far.

I wasn’t a perfect child but I’m neurologically typical.

Commenter 4:

1. What age did this start?

2. Does he physically attack anyone else besides you?

3. Does he attack you when you are alone, when you are with family, and when you are in public?

4. Do the two of you ever have normal interactions? Morning, mid-day, or night? For example, if you were driving somewhere in a car would he literally be attacking you while you were driving?

5. Has he seen a psychiatrist or psychologist?

OOP:

1. 5
2. No
3. Yes, yes, no.
4. Normal interactions are very rare, it’s been months. He will attack me while driving, typically throwing things at me. We’ve told him it’s dangerous and can cause an accident and then we did get in an accident over the summer and he stopped. (The accident was the other drivers fault not my sons)
5. Yes.

Commenter 5:

1. How old is your daughter? How does she respond when he’s violent?

2. How old was he when this started?

3. Is inpatient treatment possible? This cannot continue and will probably get worse as he gets bigger. Eventually he will be able to take you out.

OOP:

1. She is 5. She will comfort me almost daily. Honestly idk what she does when he’s acting up I’m focused on not bleeding.

2. He was 5 when it started. At first it was just throwing things at walls, then there was a time where he just hated me but wasn’t attacking me. Now it’s directed at me rather than the walls.

3. I’m not sure we are quite ready for inpatient treatment but that’s starting to enter the conversation

Update: May 13, 2025 (three months later)

Hello, some of you folks asked for an update when I first posted, including some who seemed to feel lost in a similar situation.

I’d like to thank the insane people on my last post who told me to give up on my son. The laughs were therapeutic. (and also please never have kids of your own).

We took him to get evaluated again as it was pretty clear what we were dealing with was more than just ADHD. It took us a while to find a place we thought would do it right this time, then it took some more time to get a slot, but today we got the official diagnosis. He has the ADHD, and a severe version of it, but he’s also mildly autistic. On top of this he has high anxiety and signs of depression.

Some of you were suggesting PANDAS and ODD, and he does seem to have some of those symptoms, but like the autism, there are things about him that don’t fit those diagnoses.

There are things about him that aren’t typical of autism, for instance he loves being social, these inconsistencies and the fact he was younger and had severe ADHD which masked the autism made an autism diagnosis difficult at that time.

So why does he hate me?

As best I understand it so far, this is what happened:

When he was halfway into kindergarten is when it started. His disabilities caused him to struggle as compared to his peers, which led to feelings of inadequacy. Being 5, he didn’t have the tools to handle that, so he began coming home from school and destroying the house as a way to express his feelings.

We would try to reason with him patiently but he wouldn’t hear it, we tried many other ways of helping him, butnthe house was getting destroyed and the only thing that would het him to stop would be sharp, loud commands from my scary male voice. “STOP THAT”. So that’s what I would do every time he started acting up, because that’s what worked.

What I was doing, though I didn’t know it, was using his anxiety to scare him into behaving better. As time went on and I continued this, I became this scary figure in his life to be feared, the anxiety built, until it became a complicated hate.

So where are we now?

He doesn’t attack me on sight, usually, which is an improvement,…

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