This is the thought many parents have and almost none say out loud, because the gap between ‘I love my baby’ and ‘I don’t particularly like them right now’ feels like a moral failure. It isn’t. It’s a developmental mismatch — a completely normal feature of early parenthood that the idealised narrative of new-baby life has no room for.
The mismatch between what you expected and what you got
You imagined someone. You imagined a person with a face you’d recognise, who would respond to you, who would offer some small amount of the reciprocity that makes all human relationships work. What you got, at least for the first weeks and months, is someone who cannot see further than 12 inches, whose needs are entirely biological, who communicates exclusively through escalating distress, and whose only emotional register is either neutral or upset.
This is not the baby’s failure. But it is a genuine reality gap between what new parenthood often feels like and what the cultural narrative promises. Loving a person you don’t yet know, who cannot yet be known, who has no personality yet that you can connect with — this is strange and difficult in ways that are almost never honestly named.
When liking arrives
Most parents begin to genuinely like their baby — to feel something beyond the powerful obligation of love — when the baby begins to offer reciprocity. The first real social smile, around 6–8 weeks, is the beginning of this. It’s the moment when the baby is responding to you specifically, choosing your face, choosing connection. Many parents describe this as a significant turn in how they feel.
From there: the laugh at 3–4 months. The reaching for your face. The way they calm specifically at your voice. The recognition in their eyes when you walk in. Each of these is an invitation to liking — to enjoying this specific person — that gradually accumulates into a relationship rather than an obligation.
The guilt around this feeling
The guilt that accompanies ‘I don’t like my baby yet’ is outsized because it runs so directly against the dominant narrative of new-parent love. But the feeling itself is almost universal in early infancy, particularly among parents who are honest about it. Liking requires knowing. Knowing requires time. You haven’t had time yet.
It’s worth distinguishing between: ‘I don’t like them yet’ (normal, temporary, resolves with time and development) and ‘I feel nothing for them and am disconnected from my baby entirely’ (possible sign of PND, worth discussing with your GP). The first is a feeling many parents have; the second is a presentation worth professional assessment.
What helps
Spending time with your baby in ways that invite interaction rather than just caregiving: lying on the floor with them and meeting their gaze; speaking to them at close distance about anything; narrating what you’re doing in an animated voice. This sounds like performance and initially it is. It builds.
Finding one specific thing about this baby that is theirs alone — the precise way they smell, a particular facial expression, the way their hand grips — and paying attention to it. Specificity builds connection faster than generality.
A note on what the research actually says
Studies on maternal attachment consistently show that the immediate rush of overwhelming love depicted in parenting culture is far less common than reported — and far more common to report retrospectively than to actually experience in the moment. Research by Susan Condon and others found that a significant proportion of new mothers describe their feelings for their newborn in the early days as more curious or protective than loving in the way they’d anticipated. The love — warm, specific, reciprocal — builds through the accumulated ordinary moments of caretaking: the thousands of nappy changes and feeds and 3am soothing sessions that build a relationship with a particular small person. Expecting it to arrive instantaneously, and feeling defective when it doesn’t, is a product of how motherhood is narrated, not how it actually works.
Related Reading
- I didn’t bond with my baby straight away – and that’s OK
- Postnatal depression: honest signs, seeking help and recovery
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