A good apology goes a long way. A bad apology is worse than none at all. An apology from my children is essentially none at all. My kids are terrible at saying they are sorry. An apology from them falls into one of three categories – forced, insincere, or forced and insincere.
For young kids, I get that most apologies are forced. Much like most thank yous, you’re welcomes, and excuse mes, I’m sorry’s are almost all prompted by a “What do you say?” from mom or dad. However, the teaching tool of a gentle prompt has seemed to transform to a cattle prod. Figuratively, of course. Though, note to self – invent kid-safe cattle prod and become billionaire. The Kiddle Prod we’ll call it. Or perhaps the Aprodogy? Patent pending. Anyway, apologies come from force in our house, not from any feelings of guilt, empathy, or regret.
If anything, the apologizer becomes the victim. As if we are the ones inflicting some grievous harm on them by making them admit that they did something they weren’t supposed to do. How dare we make them consider the feelings of another person. Especially when the other person is crying so loudly. I mean, all they did was wack them in the face with a toy, but the other person is the one making a whole thing out of it. So an equal parts forced and annoyed “sorry” gets spat in somebody’s general direction. Then we play the game of “say it like you mean it”, in which now the apology comes off as even more fake and sarcastic because it has been doubly forced. Or triplely forced. Or how many ever times we need to go through this charade until something resembling a real apology is muttered under defeated breath.
However, I find the more annoying terrible apology from my kids to be the one they try to pass off as real but is really just them trying to get out of trouble. They aren’t sorry for what they did, they are sorry they got caught. Whatever the behavior was, they will do it again, and apologize again, and do it again, and apologize again, and so on, and so on. When I told my daughter that I didn’t need her to apologize, that I needed her to not do it again, she took the first half of that to heart. When of course she repeated the behavior, she seemed off-put by the fact I expected her to apologize. “You told me not to,” she said. How quickly she disregarded the second half of my instructions.
I get that giving a real apology can be hard. Even for adults. How many times do you hear the “I’m sorry if…” or “I’d like to apologize,” instead of a real “I’m sorry.” Perhaps my kids are bad at apologizing because it hasn’t been a behavior properly modeled by me, just something I make them say? Not that I am too stubborn or proud to apologize, or even too arrogant to think that I’ve never done anything to apologize for. I just don’t know how many times the situation has come up where I need to give my kids an apology more meaningful than “sorry I at the last cookie.” Which, to be honest, we both know I’m not sorry for.
I just don’t do the kinds of things to my kids that they do to each other which require apologies. The next time I ruin a game of pretend school because I want to be the music teacher but I was the music teacher last time and I never have a turn being a kid and always have to be the teacher or the mom and it isn’t fair that I always make the other kids be students but never give them a chance to be a teacher, will be the first. Also, is it just me, or is there just something odd feeling about a parent apologizing to a kid. I don’t know if it is the power dynamic, or the sense that the parent is always right, but the bar for what a parent needs to apologize for just feels higher. Does it not? Or is that just me and I’ve been glossing over times when I should have said I’m sorry to my kids?
A few days ago a real opportunity came up for a real apology. My daughters were being too silly at bed time – a common source of them only being sorry they got caught – and my 6 year-old daughter was just too wound up. So I went in the room and put her back in bed with something less than great vengeance and furious anger, but enough to really scare and upset her. Honestly, my reaction was overkill. It wasn’t her, it was me. It wasn’t about what was going on in that moment as much as it was the culmination of the five hundred or so other other times that they were doing whatever they wanted to do instead of listening to their parents. She cried herself to sleep. I genuinely felt bad about it. Especially knowing how my daughter is. She is a delicate soul.
Hearing her cry in her bed, part of me wanted to go in there and calm her down and apologize right then. But, part of me wanted to just let it be. She was in bed. They were quiet. Mission accomplished. Sure, with some collateral damage, but accomplished none the less. And what is the better lesson to teach? That if dad is mean he’ll come back and make it ok, or that if you don’t do what dad says he’ll make you cry? Debatable, but I let her, and me, sleep on it.
The next morning I still felt bad about it. While the kids were getting ready for school I called her over, knelt down to her level, and gave her a real apology for reacting the way I did. I asked for hug, and she gave me the biggest hug she may have ever given me. The kind where I would ease up to signal the end (multiple times), but she stayed clung to me. That little peanut is all heart.
She felt better. I felt better. We got on with our days on a positive note, and hopefully I instilled some kind of lesson the proper way to say “I’m sorry.” Now, I say this next part with the disclaimer that I love all my kids equally – differently – but equally, and that they are all great in their own way. However. Naturally, of my three kids, she is the one who needed the lesson in how to apologize the least. Yesterday, my 8-going-on-16-year old daughter gave me an eye roll and a sarcastic thumbs up in place of an apology. Whelp, guess I gotta make her cry now.
I Think Therefore I Dad 