Parenting

Your Teen Says ‘I Hate You’—Here’s What They Actually Mean, According to ‘After Bedtime’

November 24, 2025

Every parent dreads it. Your kid—the one you’d do anything for—looks you in the eye and says, “I hate you.” Maybe they slam a door. Maybe they say worse. And you’re standing there thinking, “When did I become the enemy? What did I do wrong?”

On After Bedtime, host Kristin Gallant sits down with Dr. Ann-Louise Lockhart, pediatric psychologist and author of Love the Teen You Have, to explain why that blow-up usually isn’t what you think it is. When your teen throws those three words at you, they’re not giving a full verdict on your parenting. They’re showing you something deeper you’ve probably missed—and there’s a better way to respond than yelling back or pretending it doesn’t hurt.

What ‘I hate you’ actually means

Dr. Lockhart knows this territory because she lived it. She says she had a great relationship with her mom as a kid, and then it all shifted when she hit her teen years. “I became more rebellious, I became more like, ‘screw you, I’m going to do whatever I want’ because I didn’t feel heard from her,” she explains. “I didn’t feel like she understood me. So I just kind of did my own thing. And it really created a huge rift.”

To everyone around her, it looked like classic teen behavior. Rolling eyes. Snapping back. Pulling away. Her mom saw attitude. Teachers probably saw defiance. What nobody saw was the hurt underneath. “On the outside, it looked like I was just this angry, rebellious teen who didn’t want to listen,” she says. “But I was really hurting on the inside.”

She eventually learned why it was so hard for her mom to support her. Dr. Lockhart was a rainbow baby, born after her sister passed during childbirth. Her mom once admitted, “When I had you, I said to myself, this one’s going to make me happy.” That expectation shaped everything. Her role became the “easy one,” the “good one,” the one who kept the peace. “If I had things that were happening to me—or happened to me—I couldn’t really share that,” she says. “When I did share something that hurt me, she couldn’t handle it.”

Now as a pediatric psychologist, she sees the same dynamic on repeat. Parents swear their teen hates them. Teens swear they don’t. “It’s the same conversation over and over,” she says. “It’s the narrative that we have in our head that we make up about our teenager and then our teenager makes up about us.”

The two mistakes parents make and why both fail

Most parents, when faced with a teen explosion, swing to one of two extremes—and both miss the mark.

First, there’s the old-school authoritarian approach. “We yell back, we cuss them out, we take away their livelihood and say you have nothing left except a mattress on the floor,” Dr. Lockhart explains. “We go full tyrant mode because we think punishing them enough and making it painful enough will make them stop.” And honestly? It might work. The behavior might stop. But here’s the problem: “You’re still not getting to the root of why the behavior is happening.”

On the flip side, there’s what people think is gentle parenting but is actually “permissive parenting.” Picture this: your teen just called you a b*tch. And you respond with, “Oh, sweetheart, you have big words for mommy. You just called me the B word. That’s not nice.” Dr. Lockhart says they see right through it. “If they’re a tween or teen, it sounds very not genuine to them because in the middle, a real person would be hurt by someone cussing them out.”

Both approaches—the authoritarian punishment and the overly gentle non-response—fail for the same reason: they don’t address what’s actually driving the behavior. Authoritarian parenting might suppress the behavior through fear, but research shows it doesn’t build emotional regulation skills or problem-solving abilities. Permissive parenting might avoid conflict in the moment, but it leaves teens feeling like their genuine pain isn’t being taken seriously.

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The shift that actually works

So if you can’t punish it away and you can’t gentle-parent your way through it, what do you actually do? “The best response is you have to be able to get yourself regulated first,” Dr. Lockhart says. “A lot of parents think, ‘Oh, I have to correct it now because then they’ll think it’s okay.’ Well, no, you don’t have to correct it in the moment, especially if you’re both dysregulated. It’s the worst time to correct.”

Instead, she wants you to take space. That might mean a rage walk, a cold shower, a snack, a breath outside, whatever brings your nervous system back down. Once you’re regulated, you can return with actual clarity.

When you circle back, you set the tone. “You had a lot of strong things to say about me. And wow, I even needed to take a break from that. It sounds like there’s something bigger going on for you that it seems like I’ve missed. So what’s really going on?” she recommends saying. This is the part most parents never get to, because they jump straight to lecturing or fixing. But curiosity lowers defenses. Teens don’t need a solution first, they need to feel heard so the real issue can surface.

Neuroscience calls this co-regulation—your calm nervous system helps theirs settle so they can talk like a human again. And once they’re calmer, they don’t have to yell their feelings at you because they finally feel like you’re in it with them.

For the full rundown, tune in to After Bedtime wherever you get your podcasts.