The Whole Parent Podcast
The Whole Parent Podcast
Should you make your child apologize? #74
In this episode, Jon slows down one of the most familiar parenting moments—“You need to say you’re sorry”—and asks what we’re actually teaching when we force an apology. Rather than treating “sorry” as proof of character or accountability, he explores what’s happening in a child’s brain when adults are tense, watching, and waiting for the right words. The episode reframes apologies not as a demand, but as one small part of repair, shifting the focus from appeasing adults to caring for the person who was hurt. Parents will leave with a clearer, calmer way to handle these moments—one that builds empathy, responsibility, and real reconciliation instead of compliance.
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No one says anything at first. The crying has stopped, but the moment is still tense. Two kids stand a few feet apart, both watching the adults, trying to read what comes next. A parent opens their mouth, closes it, tries again. There's a familiar sentence forming, well worn, inherited, but it lands heavier than expected when it finally comes out. You need to say you're sorry. The child looks up, eyes searching, not for the other kid, but for the parent. They say the words. They are the right words. And still, something about the moment feels unfinished. Like everyone followed the script but missed the point. If you're a parent, you've probably been in some version of this moment. Maybe in public, maybe at home, maybe with your voice a little louder than you meant it to be. The question feels simple. Should I make my kid apologize? But that moment never is. Beneath that sentence lives a tangle of things that we don't usually name. Panic about being judged, fear of who our child is becoming, and a pressure to prove right now that we're doing this whole parenting thing right. Today's episode is about that moment. Not whether apologies are good or bad, but what's actually happening in a child's brain when we demand one. What an apology is supposed to do socially versus what it often does neurologically, and why so many parents walk away from these moments feeling unsettled, even when their child technically did what they were told. Let's get into it. For me, in this episode out here on the porch, this is one that I need. It's an episode that I wrote partially because I feel like I don't have a really good answer to this a lot of the times in my own parenting journey. Uh it just happened, I want to say this morning, but it actually was yesterday morning. The days blend together when you're a parent. And the situation was I had one kid who hurt another kid, but it was not in a way that was intentional. It was a Lego set. And it was just for context, this is probably an episode all to itself. But my kids, one of my kids really, really loves Lego. And I'm not going to say who it is, because it just creates, I don't I don't want to out him like that. But he really loves Lego and loves doing Lego sets, and he excels. He can do Lego sets that are far beyond his developmental capacity, which like the number it says on the box of like this is how old you're supposed to be, regularly for his whole life has done Lego sets that are twice the age that he's supposed to be. And he has this strange kind of quirk that when he finishes a Lego set, and when I say finishes, I mean he puts every single piece meticulously in its place. Like no mistakes, make sure that all the stickers are on straight, like so, so careful putting these things together. And again, developmentally, supposed to be puzzles that are beyond his capacity. When he finally puts the last piece on, he carries it into our front room, which they kind of colloquially call the Lego room because it's the room where we have Legos just everywhere all the time. It's a carpeted room. It does, it's not really temperature controlled, so in the winter, you really have to want to play Lego to be in there. We do have like a space heater, but anyway. And he walks into the room with his Lego set, fully built, so proud of it, excited to show everyone, and smashes it on the ground. And this is not just like a it has happened once thing. This is a this is his ritual when he's done. This is what he wants to do with it. He wants to smash it and then take the pieces that he likes out of it and use those for other things and start creating new builds. Like the point is it's over. And the problem is he's not my oldest, I'll put it that way. Um, and so he doesn't always know how that experience is going to be had by other people. And so my oldest did finish a Lego set. He was working on one as well, and it was not, you know, a five to seven hour marathon like it is for him. Oftentimes he does Lego sets that where he sits with short breaks for five to six hours and then promptly smashes it as soon as he's done. Uh this was like maybe a half hour to an hour to make this Lego set for my oldest. But as soon as it was done, his little brother picks it up, ritualistically carried it into the room, and smashed it. I really felt like an apology was necessary in this moment. But apologizing for what? Apologizing for doing the thing that he, you know, it in that in those moments, you often I often hear myself going back to like what my parents said to me. Like, how would you feel if somebody did that to you? But in this case, it's like, how would he feel? Um I he he would not be upset, like that's what he does. Like that's it's not even like special that he smashes it. He offers other people to smash his Lego set. Like he doesn't even care that he's the one who does it. It's just like now it's time to take it apart, and we take it apart in violent ways, and so it's a little strange to say, like, how would you feel? Instead, I'm really asking, how does your brother feel? And in those moments, I often find myself in in the at the best pausing and going, okay, what do I really what am I really looking for here? Am I really looking for one word, sorry, or I'm sorry, or am I looking for something else? Reconciliation. And I think that's really what this episode is gonna be about at its core. How we apologize real way without just like sorry. Anyway, first question comes from Anders, it's an email. It's not my cousin Anders, who is the best man at my wedding. That would be really cool if he asked me a question and I answered his question. But someday, maybe, maybe Anders, if you're out there listening, you can always ask me a question. But this Anders says my son is five, that's all I know. It's not my cousin. Uh well, also I know my cousin's email address. That was a dumb thing to say. Anyway, my son is five, and today at the park, he pushed another kid off the ladder. Yikes, I'm sorry. When I told him to apologize, he stared at me and then said no and crossed his arms, and I felt everyone looking at me. So I was like, say sorry, and everyone, and eventually he whispered, whispered sorry, whispered it, and then immediately asked for a snack. And now I can't stop thinking about it. Did I handle that totally wrong? Also, he does this thing where he says sorry like a robot and it makes me more mad. This is a great question, Anders, and there are like a bunch of different pieces to this, and so I just want to kind of name each one and then give you a potential solution of how I would handle this. Um, first and foremost, I think that the undergirding of of all of the questions today, but especially the ones of question like the parents have in public, is that I don't think I have to tell you that there's a cultural expectation for kids to apologize when they do things like this. Like everybody knows the cultural expectation. Everybody knows that they're supposed to tell their kid to say sorry. And it and it falls to the parents, right? Like, like you, I often tell people, nobody's judging you in the grocery store for your kid having a tantrum. And and that's generally speaking true. Very few people, if if people are judging you in the grocery store because your kid is having a tantrum, that's their problem, not yours. Like the overwhelming majority, 99% of people who see you are just happy that it's not them who has a toddler screaming in the cereal aisle. Now, when it comes to saying sorry, I do think people judge you. I do think people say that person isn't making their kid say sorry, and that's not okay with me. And also, this is one of the only places where I've seen total strangers intervene to parent other people's kids to say, now you need to say you're sorry. Whether it's the kid who is hurt is their kid, or just they're a bystander. They just see this. Like in the library, I've I've experienced this. There's a librarian who definitely overreaches in how much parenting she does to kids who are just generally at the library. It's it's it's almost as if she thinks if you bring your kids to the library, then automatically they're under her charge. Um, which you know what? Any adult who's willing to interact with kids, even if it's not perfect, I commend that adult because it's a brave thing to do. But uh, you know, she will often intervene with multiple kids and say, like, you know, you need to say sorry, or even with kids to their parents, you need to say sorry to your dad right now. And it's like, ees, yikes! Like, that's a hard moment to intervene on. But at the same time, I find myself often, and in the situation with my sons with the Legos, like I wanted him to say sorry because I thought that it would help the older kid feel better. And I think it probably would have. And that's ultimately what this is about, right? It's like, it's not about you in that moment, kid who just hurt the other kid who just pushed the other kid off the ladder. It's about that other kid and saying you're sorry. And actually, I think often it's not even about the kid who pushed the kid off the ladder or the kid who got pushed off the ladder, it's about the kid's parents, right? The harmed party's parents hearing that sorry so that they don't get escalated and they don't get triggered. And so this is one of those places where because adult emotions are running so high, it's really hard for us to parent well because there's so many different competing resources here, right? Like there's adults and there's there's kids and there's hurt feelings and there's potentially injuries, and there's like all of these other things. And these are elevated moments. And so your son is actually doing something that is not at all uncommon, which is he's experiencing the tension, the social tension of the moment. He sees you seemingly acting a little different, right? Like you're probably a little bit tight and you're, oh, say sorry, right? Like, or whatever, however, you're saying that, you're probably not like loosey-goosey go with the flow like you are at home. Like you're you're feeling the stress in that moment. You're probably feeling in fight or flight. You don't want to be ostracized by the tribe because you've raised your spawn to be inconsiderate and unapologetic. And so you're tight and your kid freezes up and it's essentially like, no, I'm I'm opting out of this moment. And opting out of this moment looks like saying no. Or I'm gonna try and break the tension of this moment by being silly, by saying, like, no, I am sorry, like a robot, right? Or like saying, like, I'm sorry, poopy head, or like whatever they say, because in those moments it feels to them like actually, like that saying they're sorry is all of a sudden there's all of this importance been placed on it, and all this burden placed on it. And now you have to come in and like you're like enforcing this thing. Probably don't make your kid say very many things, right? You're probably not forcing your kid to say anything except for this. So it feels so uncomfortable. So what I would love to do instead of this, and this is like really, really hard in the moment, but I I'll say this. Um, there are times and places where like like there's a the whole Daniel Tiger song is saying I'm sorry is the first step, then how can I help? And for the rest of this episode, we're gonna be talking about the second part. How can I help, right? Like, how can we actually repair? And apologies may be part of that, but but they're they're not all of that. Um, I think sometimes like I hesitate with that because I'm like, no, there is some point here. Like, I I'm I'm culturally aware enough to say, like, sometimes we just say we're sorry because it's like it gets us out of that moment. And so if you're feeling like you're you're really in a tense moment, and you're like, you may have to tell your kid, like, hey, sometimes we just gotta say sorry because like it's not really about us, it's just about diffusing that moment. Um, but that's not what we want, right? That's just like kind of socially going through the motions, and this is the threat of say like the forced apology that the kid doesn't mean it, and the attention is actually focused on the adults and appeasing the adults and not actually reconciling. So, what I would love to do instead of that, or instead of like any any leading with apology, instead of pause on the apology and prompt the repair piece of that, right? So next time, just skip the words, get on your kid's level, you know, get their attention, which is not a bad thing, right? A lot of times parents are like, oh, I don't want to make it feel bad by getting in their face. No, like you can kind of get in their face, not in like an aggressive way, but just like lock in with them, be like, okay, so that was a big thing that just happened. Like, let's treat this with the severity that it's granted. Like, somebody just got hurt. Like, we need to think about the consequences of that. Not the consequence of like, I'm gonna punish you, but the consequences of like somebody's hurt. Like the the game needs to pause. We don't just get to run away and just keep playing. Somebody's hurt, and I would immediately go to like, let's check on that kid, let's see if he's okay. That's an important thing. After somebody gets hurt while you're playing, we got to check on them, make sure that they're okay. And then again, that saying I'm sorry is the first step. Then how can I help? Then we ask, what can I do to help? And one of the things, one of the tools in our repair toolkit is an apology. So now you're not telling your kid, you must say sorry. You're saying, how can we help? What do you think might make him feel better or her feel better? And then your kid can offer, well, either, I don't know, you tell me, dad or mom, well, should we maybe start by saying we're sorry? Or maybe they'll come up with that and go, I think we should say that we're sorry. Or I think I should say that I'm sorry. Now it's coming from the child. And I want you to like really I want you to think about the main point of the way that I'm answering this whole question is where the focus is directed. And there's a lot of things that we, there's there's more than one way that we can do this, right? Another way that we can do this is if this was to happen in our own home, Andres, I know you're saying that this is at the park with another kid. If this was to happen in our own own home, we make a beeline for the kid who is hurt because we direct all the attention towards the kid who is hurt instead of making a beeline for the offender, like many parents do, right? Like they're just looking for the retribution and the and the punitive measures and the you just did that. And it's like the kid who's on the ground doesn't care that you're yelling at their sibling. If they do, then it's only because they've been conditioned to think that that's the appropriate justice response instead of reconciliation. But make a beeline for the kid who got hurt, that that directs the attention. So instead, we're gonna consciously direct the attention to the kid who's hurt and ask the question, what can we do to try and make this better for them? And one of the pieces of that could be an apology. Essentially, what you're doing here is you're recruiting empathy through direct action and conscious attention. Because when we force apologies, really it becomes like all about the parent, just making the parent happy, appeasing the parent, doing what the parent wants them to do. And that's the opposite of what we want kids to be thinking about immediately after they hurt somebody. We don't want, we don't want them to be thinking about how can I avoid accountability for this, or how can I avoid a consequence, or how can I make sure that my mom or dad is not mad at me for doing this, which by the way is the problem with punishment. What's one of the core things with punishment is that like it doesn't actually affect it, it shifts the attention off of the thing that actually is the consequence of the action. Instead, we direct the conscious attention to the child who's injured and we say, How can we help? I think that is the like best thing that we can do. And by the way, when we start thinking about others, when we're consciously directing our attention of how can we help somebody else, we have to do perspective taking. Obviously, like I said, we're we're we're recruiting like empathy in those moments. Um, there has to be some problem solving. There has to be language, right? Instead of just saying, say sorry, and their kids just like, oh, sorry, right? Actual language, how can we apologize? What are the right words to say here? Like all of those things are bringing their prefrontal cortex back online, which is the part of their brain that can think about others, and the part of their brain that can apologize effectively, and the pot of their brain that can take accountability for their actions. So I think in the the otherwise they're just going to be defensive and confused. So I'm not surprised that your kid acts the way that he acts. That's a pretty normal emotional response. And by the way, this is the same reason why adults laugh at funerals sometimes, or they are they laugh when they're like getting arrested. They like start like in hysterically laughing because like their brain is glitching. They're like, they're like, I just don't want out of this situation. This is like so overwhelming and so stressful. Your kid is essentially saying that by by like opting out or like being a robot. He's just trying to diffuse the tension. Okay, let me take a quick break, and I want to get back with my next question. My next question came from DMs, and it is an old one. I did a video on apologies, and Tatiana responded to that in DMs and said, genuine question. I am confused. If I don't make my kid apology, apologize, how do they ever learn accountability? If you can guess, the the video is about why you shouldn't make your kid apologize. Okay. My dad would have never let that slide. My daughter is seven, super sensitive, but also kind of mean sometimes. Like she'll just say something hurtful and then later be totally fine, and I'm still stuck on it. How am I supposed to let this go? I feel like I'm raising a jerk. I don't want her to think that she can just say what she wants, walk all over people, and then move on like nothing happened. Tatiana, this is such a good question. This is I love this question, and I am gonna try and DM you. I'm I've I've like have a lot of these saved with screenshots and stuff, but I'm gonna DM you and tell you that I answered it on the podcast so that you can listen to this. Um I want to tackle the first part of your question, like the first sentence is if I don't make my kid apologize, how do they ever learn accountability? I want to start there. Really clear. The way that we teach anything effectively to kids is number one, not in the moment of dysregulation. We've already covered that a million ways in the podcast. And number two, and I think this is most essentially important, through modeling, we teach our kids to apologize by apologizing in front of them and to them. And you said the reason why I thought of this was you said my dad would have never let that slide. And when I was thinking about my dad, and I'm thinking about all of the parents who I've coached, and all of the parents. Parents who I've worked with and they talk about their childhood origins, um, childhood homes. One of the things that comes up repeatedly when I ask a question on group coaching or to a workshop, how often did your parents apologize to you? One of the resounding things that I hear is that the majority of parents never apologized. The majority of parents, if they did apologize, the apologies were lectures in disguise. What I call Trojan apologies, which is where a parent starts by saying, I'm sorry that I was mad at you and this and that and the other, but you really need to respect me, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. If you didn't do that, then I wouldn't have to do this, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. Right. So it's a Trojan apology designed to get your defenses down by saying, I'm sorry that I was yelling at you or punishing you or whatever. But, right, there's no such thing as a butt and an apology. My my son just said this yesterday about something totally unrelated to the Lego set. Totally, like literally, it was something in the evening, and I don't know if I was the one. Somebody else apologizing and they said but, and he said, There's no such thing as a but and an apology. And what he what he means by that is as soon as you say but it negates the whole apology. The whole apology just goes out the window because you don't really mean it. If you say, but I'm sorry, but it's actually your fault. I'm sorry, but if you didn't act so bad, then I wouldn't have to do these things to you, right? So if parents did apologize, they almost always use some form of manipulative Trojan apology where it's a lecture in disguise. But most parents didn't apologize at all, right? Mom and dad is always right. And if they're not right, we we don't talk about that and we ignore that and we avoid that. And I think a lot of us were taught that you need to say you're sorry right now, and then we just say, Oh, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I don't know, I'm sorry. And we don't actually think about our actions because our attention is focused on not getting punished or not being in trouble with our parents. When actually the way to teach accountability is to take, is to take accountability. The way to teach accountability is to take accountability. You screw up with your kids and you apologize well, and they will learn that the person who they look up more to most in the world when they make mistakes apologizes. I think it's massively important. I think it's massively important. And I think if you don't make your kid apologize, like like this whole episode in in part, and like we're gonna keep talking about this, is about asking how can we actually empathize with the person who is hurt when when we do something, right? So you didn't give me a specific example. You said my daughter says mean stuff sometimes. So if she was to say something mean to somebody, right, the emphasis of this whole episode is okay, we want her to think about how that made that other person feel, and then try and take corrective action, um, including but not not exclusive to apologizing and trying to reconcile the relationship. But actually, I love when I say but after I've just criticized people for saying but actually the best way to teach apologies is not even that. It's just to model apologizing. And most parents cannot even fathom doing this because it was never modeled to them. So they can't, they don't have a paradigm where parents apologize. But let me tell you from firsthand experience that I did not have parents who apologized particularly well. I mean, I had pretty great parents, I'm not gonna lie, but I did they did not apologize very well, and when they did, um it was fleeting and it happened later in in childhood, like teenage years. Um, but I can like remember these times viscerally because it was like a real, like a real mistake that my parents made. But the day-to-day stuff, you know, my dad screaming at me, never apologize for that once in my life. Um, never apologize for punishing, never apologize for like the the stuff that they did that was not ideal, not listening to me, not believing me, like all the stuff, right? Never bullying me in some ways, like like never apologize for that stuff. And so when I got into being a parent, I didn't know that parents should apologize. And when I started doing it pretty early on, thankfully, because my wife was like, You should apologize. And I was like, Oh, yeah, that's a good point. I should. They're human, they deserve the apology. It's amazing how quickly my kids apologize to other people. Like early on in whole parent, I was like, Usually you don't need to apologize, like you don't your kid doesn't need to apologize. Apologies are not even necessary. And today I'm actually I kind of have a different perspective on this because my kids apologize very easily and very freely, and I've never made them. Like, if I've ever made them, it is uh it is in a moment of indiscretion and I'm being triggered or something. And then I I gotta I backpedal that and say, I should I shouldn't have I shouldn't have approached it that way. Again, I'll apologize for making them say sorry. Like, but if you apologize well, your kid will learn how to apologize well. And it's it's I'm not saying that that's 100% on you, Tatiana. I'm just saying if you have a kid who struggles to apologize, it's in part because they have not they're they have just not seen that modeled in a way that they've yet internalized. And so that just means we got to do it more. And so you can you can approach this with something like, hey, you know, something earlier stuck out to me. I'm curious, you know, what you were thinking was going on with your friend when you said that mean thing to them. Like, I think that that's helpful and good. It builds that moral reasoning after the fact and after they're regulated, because a lot of kids say hurtful things in the moment when they're dysregulated. And like we can do all of those things that are like integrative things, friendship, social, pro-social behaviors. But I think above all of them, you just apologize and you you model that. And it's amazing what kids can do when you show them the right way. Do as I say, not as I do has never worked in parenting and it never will. It's monkey see monkey do. It's just how our mirror neurons work, it's just how observational learning works. It's humanity 101. Our kids learn by osmosis. Whatever you want your kid to do, you gotta do it first. Okay. I'm gonna get off my soapbox to answer question three after a break. My last question comes from a former member, but it was in the membership, and it was Bridget who said, My kids are quick to apologize, but sometimes it feels fake. Like my four-year-old will hit his sister and immediately go, sorry, sorry, sorry, sorry, sorry, before I even open my mouth. But I'm like, Okay, but you literally did it again five minutes later. Am I supposed to just accept this, make him say it again, tell him that it doesn't count? I don't know why this gets under my skin so much, but it does. Um, this was something that came up in a in a I think it was like on a lesson on a course that was not deleted, but about we were talking about apologies, and what the way that I replied initially, I think I still stand by to some extent, but I want to ex like expound upon it. The way I responded initially was to ask why it was triggering to the to the mom, to Bridget. And basically what we got into is that like she was not an oldest, she was a younger sibling, and so when older siblings hurt younger siblings, it was very triggering to her. And she was like, I don't want to hear your apologies, I want to see a better behavior. And I was like, Yeah, actually that's ultimately what we want. So instead, I think now knowing more about like four-year-olds and their kind of reactiveness, I think really we would I would actually try and interrupt the apology. Like I would interrupt that reflex. I would say something like, Hold on, we don't need words yet. Like we're let's fix the problem first. Because sometimes kids use apologies as shields from accountability. And this is especially true, I find, with people who don't do a lot of the stuff that I talk about. Like, I experience this when my kids are at the park and they're playing with somebody who's clearly parented in a kind of more traditional authoritarian way. And they're trying to use their very quick sorry to essentially shield them from the accountability or or shield them from the punishment that they're going to incur from their parents if their parents find out that they just hurt somebody. So, like they push a kid by accident or they're, you know, playing rough with a kid and a kid falls down, they get really hurt and they start crying and they're like, shh, shh, sorry, sorry, sorry, sorry, shh, shh, don't let the grown-ups know, sorry, right? Because they're like, I'm gonna get in trouble. But it can also be true that kids kind of shield themselves from accountability from the feelings of discomfort in feeling like they just hurt somebody, right? So even if they're not being punished by a parent, they also might be saying, sorry quickly, so that they can try and like move on quickly, right? Like, and I'll be honest, like I do this in adult relationships. I'm one of the reasons why I became much easier for me to apologize to my kids is because I learned at some point that like apologies were a way to move through conflict if you like just needed to get through. And this is a vulnerability to me for me, like to this day, that you know, if I'm having a disagreement with my wife or something, I will say, like, okay, I'm sorry, but can we just move on? Like, I just want that sorry to be like the band-aid that fixes the the problem, and just say, Well, I've said sorry, like, what do you what else do you want me to do? And so I would interrupt that. I would interrupt that that reflex and impulse because I don't think it's an adaptive one. I think it's self-serving. And I don't mean that like in a negative way, like all four-year-olds are self-serving, like all four-year-olds are self-centered, but that's a negative that's that's a that's not like a particularly positive reaction to say, sorry, sorry, sorry, sorry, sorry, sorry. I think we just say, hey, hold on, we don't need words yet, let's fix the problem. And then we guide them to the physical relational repair, like you know, bringing them an ice pack or helping to rebuild the tower that they knocked down, or the like this is what I did with my son, right? In full circle, I was like, okay, like he didn't want to apologize, but I said, I kind of explained in the moment, like, not everybody wants to do what they're Legos, that's what you want to do. And this one got broken, and he he wants it to be fixed. So, like, you need to help me put it back together. I'll help you. I'm not gonna leave you here alone in this, but you need to help me find the pieces so we can put it back together, because that's how we make the situation right. And so I wasn't really looking, and so in doing that, he actually did it when it was and when he was done, he was like, he felt the weight of like, oh yeah, like this. I guess that was like if he wanted to keep this, like that was kind of not nice. And he apologized on his own without me saying, like, you need to say sorry. Um, or maybe I did say like you need to say sorry at first, but then I like backed off of it. I don't I don't really remember. I'm like kind of blacking out thinking about it. But um, I think that we guide them towards the physical relational repair, and we say, like, let's rebuild this, let's find the pieces for this, let's get them an ice pack, let's just sit nearby, like not let's not move on and keep playing. Let's just like hold space for them. Sometimes, like, you know, in the ancient world, I I this is like a kind of a random tangent to go on at this point in the podcast, but in the ancient world, they had much better grief and mourning rituals than we have now, not mourning as in like M-O-R-N-I-N-G, M-O-U-R-N-I-N-G, like like grieving rituals. And their grieving rituals often were just members of that community sitting nearby the grieving person and just not doing anything, not saying anything. And there's this beautiful example in this really, really ancient. Well, it's actually that ancient, it's like 5th century BCE, I think. 5th century BCE Persian poem about this guy who like everything goes bad for him, and like he loses his family and he loses his friends and he loses all of his wealth and his money. And or he loses his family, he doesn't lose his friends, and his friends come by and they sit next to him and they just say nothing. Like that's how they begin their grieving process with him. They just sit with him for days and days. And this has like frequently been brought up as an example of what good comfort looks like. And so sometimes it's as simple as just like, let's just sit here and like just say stay in this moment. So that, and I think that is the exact opposite of going, sorry, sorry, sorry, sorry, sorry, so I can move on and continue with my day. Like, sorry is not a shield to to prevent accountability, it's part of the repair process. But it's not a substitute for repair, it's not a substitute for reconciliation, it's not a substitute for for trying to like say, How can I help? And so maybe Daniel Tiger was right. And saying I'm sorry is the first step because it makes socially appropriate, you know, actions. And so much of what being a human is and teaching your kids to do live is like, yeah, we wear pants in public. Why? I don't know, because like socially we do, right? Like so much of parenting is preparing your kids for a social world. And so it may be that you want to teach your kids, hey, look, sorries are going to be expected. And so when you hurt somebody, sometimes it's best to give them what they expect in that moment saying I'm sorry, right? But I I think the key with not forcing the apology is is one, it does not it it doesn't cover up and doesn't fix the problem unless it's a part of the solution. Two, when you force the apology, you become the point. You like avoiding your wrath and your frustration becomes the the impetus for them saying that they're sorry, not actually repairing with the other person, like not actually considering what the other person needs. And and three, like I just think I just think that when we focus on the repair aspect, the sorry still come. It's not mutually exclusive. I'm not I'm not sitting here being like, you, you know what, sorry is a terrible word and you should never use it. You should never tell your kid to apologize. Like, like that, that's not true at all. But I think the way in which we do that effectively is to center the person who is hurt. And by the way, this is like a very countercultural thing that I'm telling you to do. Our entire legal system is built on punishing the offender, retributive actions, and intent, right? Like, did you intend for this to happen? Or were should you have intended for it to happen? Or were you negligent, right? Like it's all about offender, offender, offender. It's not about like victims. And when you look at the best reconciliation practices that actually work in the globe on the globe, right? They're not things that happened and originated in Western culture that with with like Americ the American legal system and innocent until proven guilty. Like, there's there are some amazing advances in in the law that were that were adopted in the 18th century in the United States. Like, don't get me started, I could get my history hat on and go into it with you. Like, I'm not saying it was a horrible, horrible system to begin with, but sometime around the mid to late 19th century, our justice system became about retributive action. And it became about hurting people who we felt like harmed society or wronged society or wronged a citizen in society. And when we did that, we kind of forfeited the the whole plot of what we were supposed to be doing. A better model for this, as I write in my book, in the chapter on reconciliation and repair, is uh, which is by the way, a chapter about how to apologize to your kids, not a chapter about how to teach them to apologize. But as I said in Tatiana's question, learning to apologize to your kids is teaching them to apologize. Uh, but in that quest, in that I start with a story of Nelson Mandela and the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa at the end of apartheid. And differently from how we do forcing apologies and we think about the the offender and running towards the offender and punishing the offender for their wrongdoing. Um our justice system does that, but in the Truth and Reconciliation Committee, instead what they did was they centered the victims and they heard from the victims. And and the the offenders were actually not punished if they if they repented and if they listened and if they told the truth, and if they listened to the truth being told by the victims. And so I think this is a radical thought for for the end of a podcast episode, but I think if we want a better world, we have to start to to center the victims, and that means not forcing apologies. It means not going to the place where we make it all about who did the wronging, and we start making it about who was wronged and how can we make that better. And I think that's a better world to live in. Okay, that's all I got for you today. Thanks for the questions, guys. Keep them coming. See you tomorrow. Thank you for your time listening to the whole parent podcast today. I hope you got something out of it. 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I get all of that money, it's just my way of being able to produce the podcast, spend money on equipment, spend money on subscription fees, hosting fees for the podcast, all of that stuff. Email server fees, all that. So if you're willing to do that, I would love it. Thank you so much for listening to this episode, and I'll see you next time.
