Mother speaks out about 'hating' her third child and hoping he dies in his sleep

'I feel guilty about it'

(Getty Images)

An anonymous mother has admitted that she hates her third child and wishes he would die in his sleep.

She explained that she loves her two daughters, aged six and eight, and yet is unable to find any affection for her son, who is the youngest.

The desperate mother took to Reddit to ask fellow parents for advice, however, the post has since been taken down, reports the Mirror online.

She claimed to get pregnant with her son by mistake and it wasn’t until four months into the pregnancy that she realised she was expecting a child, by which time an abortion was out of the question.

She hoped that prenatal complications might require her to have an emergency abortion.

However, her pregnancy ran smoothly and she unwillingly gave birth to a healthy baby boy.

The mother explained that she feigned joy when he was born and felt like she couldn’t give him up for adoption because she was afraid of what her other children would think.

She also claims to have been made redundant when she was 36 weeks into the pregnancy, which only exacerbated her anxieties about having an unplanned child.

"I honestly hated him for the first 18 months of his life," she wrote.

While the mother noted that she doesn’t want to come across as ungrateful to parents who have lost a child, she admitted that she and her husband both had moments of thinking that their lives would be easier if their son did not exist.

"My husband and I both had a period where if he had of died in his sleep, we would have felt relief,” she confessed.

It is possible that the anonymous mother might have been suffering from postnatal depression, which affects more than one in 10 women within a year of giving birth, according to the NHS.

Symptoms can include difficulty bonding with your baby, a persistently low mood and insomnia.

For more information on postnatal depression, visit the NHS website.