Apologizing to kids? Our kids? For what? What did we do? Exactly. Let’s look. One of our kids breaks a rule or social “law” and rudely snatches a toy away from another child at the park. What is our first reaction? It’s worth checking for a moment, because I will go as far as to say, for myself at least, it depended on whether anyone else saw what happened. “OMG, what? Why would you admit that?” Because this work allows us to tell the truth about what was actually happening underneath our behavior, including the parts we would much rather clean up before anyone sees them.
If the whole damn playground witnessed my kid being a perceived asshole, I was much more likely to get up and fix it immediately. I needed everyone to know I saw it too, I wasn’t one of those parents, and don’t worry, I’m handling it. There was shaming, shouting and of course, “Tell them you’re sorry.” My kiddo may not even have a clue what just happened because I haven’t gotten curious or asked one single question. I have no idea what happened before the toy was grabbed, what they thought they were doing or whether they have any understanding of the impact they had on the other child. I just swooped in and fixed what was making me look bad.
What did that inherently teach them about apologizing? Say the right words. Say them quickly. It doesn’t really matter if you mean them, understand them or if your body and words are even remotely congruent. We’ve all heard the kid version of “SORRY” that sounds a lot more like “F you,” but technically they said it, so apparently we’re good here. The adults can relax, the social order of the playground has been restored and everybody can keep moving. What happens to the actual repair? What happens to understanding what your behavior did to another person? Where does the kid get to learn any of that if the goal was getting the apology out of their mouth?
If we want our kids to have these skills, we have to possess them first in order to offer them out. That gets more uncomfortable when we are the one who hurts them. We’re going to react from something that has little to do with what is actually happening, misunderstand them, or let our own overwhelm decide how we handle a moment. Sometimes we know immediately and sometimes it takes a while to see our part. Either way, there will be times when the person who needs to come back and repair is us. Are we actually apologizing to them?
An apology asks us to name the behavior that hurt another person, have some congruence between our words and our body, and understand the impact we had. That gets interesting when the other person is our kid. “I yelled at you” can quickly become an explanation of why we yelled. They tell us we scared them and we want to explain. They’re still pissed after we apologize and we’re uncomfortable that the apology didn’t make it go away. Can their experience be different from what we intended without our intention becoming the most important thing in the room?
A lot of us didn’t grow up with adults who did this. Adults corrected children. Children apologized to adults. If an adult went too far, life often just carried on. Dinner happened. The television went on. Everyone went to bed. Maybe the adult was nicer later and that was the repair. Maybe nobody mentioned it again and that was the repair. If the adults around us didn’t have the capacity to return and name what they had done, we didn’t get to experience what accountability between an adult and a child actually felt like.
So what happens now when it’s ours to do? What happens in your body when you know you owe your kid an apology? What part gets difficult? Naming exactly what you did? Letting them have their experience of it? Does apologizing feel like giving away authority or somehow making the boundary you were trying to hold less valid? Do you start explaining so they understand why you did what you did?
What have they witnessed us do after we cause harm? What happens in your house after you lose your shit? Who names it? Who gets to still have feelings about it? If we stopped requiring our kids to perform apology for a moment and looked at what we are showing them an apology actually is, what would they say they learned?