Is It Wrong to Tell Kids to Apologize?
Some parents argue that forcing children to say they’re sorry is useless or even harmful. The reality is more nuanced.
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Say you’re sorry. For generations, parents have leaned on the phrase during sibling tiffs and playground scuffles. But it has lately become controversial, particularly among a certain subset of Millennial parents—those for whom the hallmark of good parenting is the reverence they show for their kids’ feelings. Under this model, gone are the days of scolding a child for melting down, sending them to a time-out, or ignoring them until they settle. (Joining them for “time-ins” to help them process their emotions? That’s okay.) The guiding principle seems to be to take children’s current or future feelings into consideration at every parental decision point—even when they are the ones who have hurt the feelings of someone else.
At first blush, making a child express remorse would seem an obvious violation of the feelings-informed approach. And indeed, both Big Little Feelings, the tremendously popular Instagram account and parenting course, and Dr. Becky, the internet-appointed headmistress of the school of Millennial parenting, have condemned the practice. Telling your children to apologize, the argument goes, is useless, unnecessary, even harmful. Useless because it will produce an empty apology. Unnecessary because there are other, better ways to teach children to make amends. Harmful because—well, accusations of harm run the gamut: It will train children to lie or to apologize only as a formality to escape punishment; make them “less kind and thoughtful”; alienate them from their feelings; or shame them into never apologizing again.
These points aren’t necessarily wrong. But as is often the case in modern parenting debates, the stakes are lower and the reality is more nuanced than many influencers would have you believe. Instructing a kid to say sorry is sometimes useless, at least in the moment; it could be unnecessary, depending on the child’s temperament; and it might be harmful, depending on how you go about it. But when you account for the emotional complexity stirred up by conflict, you can find as many feelings-informed reasons to insist on an apology as not.
Take the classic anecdote that’s used to illustrate the downsides of “forced apologies”: A child snatches a toy from a friend or pushes him over. A parent barks at him to “say you’re sorry,” which he does, but in a half-hearted manner. He then carries on with his play, having learned nothing and leaving the victim feeling no better for it.
Broadly, those opposed to forced apologies would argue that for an apology to have any value, it must be rooted in genuine remorse. They would say that young kids lack the cognitive capacity to empathize with someone they’ve hurt, and that simply telling them to apologize won’t help them develop empathy. (“You’re not actually teaching your kid to feel sorry,” as Deena Margolin, a child therapist and co-founder of Big Little Feelings, has put it.) Instead, if parents take the time to cultivate empathy through reflection and good example, genuine apologies will naturally flower.
When it comes to toy-snatching or shoving, that could mean modeling an apology on the child’s behalf, engaging your child in a private conversation about what went down, suggesting (not insisting!) that the child find some way to help the harmed party feel better, or some combination of the three. “The goal is to help them recognize that their actions have consequences for others,” Karina Schumann, an associate professor of social psychology at the University of Pittsburgh who specializes in conflict resolution, told me. “In the same way that their actions caused harm, they can also take an active role in repairing that harm by making amends.” These tactics will be more effective if parents themselves, after their own misdeeds, routinely demonstrate what a good apology looks like: one that names the harm and how it affected the other person, and offers a promise to change future behavior. If children “have observed others in their life apologize readily and empathically for their offenses,” Schumann said, “they will learn in time.”
Yet apologies are socially and emotionally tricky. Observing my own children, I’ve found that what stops them from apologizing often isn’t an absence of remorse but the presence of other strong emotions—a lingering frustration over whatever precipitated their actions, embarrassment for having publicly messed up, a vague but overblown fear of what will happen if they do apologize. (This last point is true for adults as well: Schumann pointed me to a study noting that adults anticipate that apologizing will feel more humiliating and stressful than it ends up being.) Sometimes, guilt itself seems to be the obstacle; my children feel bad for what they’ve done and want to disappear into my arms rather than call any more attention to it. In other words, the issue isn’t always that a kid doesn’t feel sorry but that, for a variety of reasons, he doesn’t feel like saying so.
And what of the person who was harmed? Surely their feelings matter. The idea that anything less than a freely volunteered apology is worthless is unsupported by research. Especially among the youngest children, both prompted and spontaneous apologies can help repair kids’ relationships. One study found that only when it’s abundantly clear that a child is apologizing against their will does a prompted apology start to lose its value—and even then, kids younger than 7 thought it was better than nothing.
Younger children’s more ready acceptance of shoddy apologies may have something to do with the very fact that they are emotionally underdeveloped. Theory of mind—the ability to recognize that other people have thoughts and feelings different from one’s own—develops gradually in humans, but it’s a process that starts fairly early. Cara Goodwin, a licensed clinical psychologist and the founder of Parenting Translator, a newsletter that breaks down scientific research on parenting, told me that, from infanthood, children can express concern for others’ emotions; for instance, when babies see another baby in distress, they look around for help. But even after kids develop a grasp on others’ emotions, they still often struggle with making apologies—because the big challenge for them is regulating their own emotions.
Goodwin agreed that modeling apologies and helping children reflect on their actions are essential. But she thinks there’s a place for prompting, or even insisting on, children’s apologies—for the simple reason that apologizing often doesn’t feel good, at least not right away. Nudging a child through an apology, even one that comes out clouded by other emotions, can teach them to cope with discomfort, help dispel any exaggerated fears, and expose them to some of apologies’ upsides—the relief of being forgiven, or the satisfaction of knowing you’ve done something to right a past wrong. Marjorie Ingall, a co-author of Getting to Sorry: The Art of Apology at Work and at Home, compared apologizing to learning to tie your shoes: You can get only so far watching someone else do it. Trying it yourself is awkward and frustrating at first, but fumble through it enough times and eventually it clicks.
As for concerns about harm, there’s little reason to think that making kids apologize will cause enduring emotional damage, as long as parents take an appropriate approach, Goodwin told me. She drew a distinction between psychological and behavioral control. Attempts to psychologically control kids—guilting, shaming, or otherwise emotionally manipulating them—have been linked to a variety of negative outcomes. So you shouldn’t berate children for their lack of remorse or shame them into expressing it. But there’s nothing wrong with establishing ground rules and then enforcing them by setting a behavioral limit. If you’d like your child to apologize when he knocks over someone’s sand castle, or to find some other way to make amends if you’re stuck on not making him say “I’m sorry,” it’s fine to make him leave the sandbox if he refuses.
Of course, there’s no guarantee that getting your child to apologize will succeed in smoothing over a situation. Perhaps he won’t be forgiven. Perhaps his muffled apology will draw scorn from onlooking peers. There are all manner of ways for conflict resolution to result in emotional bruising—but this is true regardless of your approach.
That brings us to the hard reality of feelings-informed parenting: Children’s emotions are slippery and unpredictable. When you put their feelings in command—especially amid the minefield of childhood conflict—it becomes painfully clear that adults have far less sway than they’d like to believe.
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