We can apologize to our children for how we handled something and still hold the line on what we needed. Humility is what lets us do both at once. And when our children watch us do it, they learn repair, accountability, and the kind of reflection they are going to need for the rest of their lives.
I’m sorry for how I handled that last night. You were being loud playing video games, and you woke me up. I was sleep-deprived and aggravated, and when I think back on it, I can see I was repeating myself a lot. I think there was a half-conscious wish in that to make you feel guilty enough that it wouldn’t happen again.
I do have a right to sleep. I have a right to tell you when I don’t think you’re being considerate of that. And the tactics I used were excessive. I also didn’t do a good enough job of holding on to the fact that in most areas of your life you are above average at being considerate and responsible. So my intervention was imbalanced, and the point still stands.
An apology like that is something we often need to say. It is a specific example of what humility looks like in parenting: taking responsibility for our actions, apologizing, staying calm and reflective when we are given feedback, and being equally calm and reflective about our own interactions with our children so that we can relay what we find back to them.
Several Things Are True at Once
Count what is true in that apology. The need for sleep was legitimate. The child’s behavior affected us. The response was excessive. The motive underneath the response was a little manipulative, and saying so out loud is part of the apology. And one inconsiderate night does not represent the whole of who the child is.
Most apologies collapse that list. They keep one of the truths and drop the rest.
Collapse one
The boundary goes
I’m sorry, you’re right, forget I said anything. The hurt gets addressed and the need for sleep disappears with it.
Collapse two
The apology goes
I’m sorry, but you did wake me up. The need stays and the apology is cancelled by the sentence that follows it.
Humility is the capacity to hold all of it at the same time, and to say it with enough dialectical complexity that our children get to see that things in life are always going to be multifaceted. The apology and the boundary are two accurate reports about the same night, and a child who hears both learns that accuracy is possible even when it is uncomfortable.
The apology and the boundary are two accurate reports about the same night.
The Point Still Stands
It is true that children forget to put the juice away, and that is a waste of money. It is true that they crumple the top of the chip bag and the cracker bag and leave the box open and precariously ready to tip as soon as the next person opens the pantry. It would be nice if they did not do that. They leave their clothes all over their rooms. They forget to flush the toilet. Sometimes they experiment with boundaries and do something wrong. They skip class for the first time. They say they are going to be home and take the bus in the opposite direction.
All of these things are true, and it is fully valid for the parent to offer a redirection.
What is also true is that the parent’s redirection is often excessive, irrational, fallacious, or about something else entirely, like the fact that our boss was a dickhead that day. We had something reasonable to address, and the way we addressed it created an unnecessary hurt, an unnecessary guilt, an unnecessary sense of injustice. Because we are human. We mess up all the time.
This post is not a complaint about parents being imperfect. It runs the other direction. Our ability to identify the times we slip up, to relay what we find, and to take accountability for it is paradoxically one of the most useful things we can offer a child.
The apology does not cancel the boundary. We still get to sleep. The crackers still go away properly. What changes is the proportion, and the child gets to watch us notice the proportion ourselves.
What Goes Into the Apology
Taking responsibility also teaches a child what reflection is made of. We ask children to think about what they did, and we rarely show them what thinking about it consists of. As they grow toward being a mature person, an adult, they are going to need to know what we are supposed to be reflecting on when something goes wrong. The apology shows them the ingredients.
This one was my fault. I didn’t get enough sleep last night because I decided to stay up until two in the morning, and that reduced my cognitive and emotional resources, and it created a situation where I yelled at you for how you put away the crackers.
I’d still love it if you put the crackers away. And I’d love it if you thought about how putting them away properly is a way of respecting the fact that they cost money and we don’t want to waste them.
The ingredients are all there. What I did. What condition I was in and the decision that put me there. What it caused. What I still need from you, and why. The first three are the apology and the last two are the boundary, and the child hears them in one breath, from one person, about one night. There are almost zero instances in which it is useful for an adult to yell at a child over something as petty as proper pantry putting-away methodologies, and the child gets to see that we know that about ourselves.
A Perfect Parent Would Be Imperfect
There is a paradox here worth sitting with. A perfect parent would be an imperfect one, because perfection would limit the ability to display healthy repair. If we never messed up, we would never have the opportunity to model taking responsibility, the integrity it takes to do that, or the resilience it takes to stay in the room afterward. Every one of those capacities only becomes visible after a mistake.
A parent who never messed up would never get the chance to model repair.
Modeling is the best thing we have as parents: engaging in the very thing we would like our children to engage in. We spend a great deal of parenting asking our children to own what they did, to say sorry, to take feedback without falling apart. The mistake is the only occasion on which they can watch us do it. We do not have to manufacture the occasions. Parenting supplies them.
What We Are Afraid Of
Underneath the difficulty of saying sorry is something we all share, which is a fear of abandonment. When somebody gives us feedback, or when our own reflection shows us that we did something excessive and caused a hurt in another person that the situation did not require, we fear the worst possible consequence. The nervous system treats the acknowledgment as a threat to our place in the relationship.
So we defend. We explain, we minimize, we point back at what the child did. Being calm and reflective when we are given feedback is hard for an adult, and it is hard for the same reason it is hard for a child. Acknowledging that we caused the hurt can feel, in that moment, like risking our importance to the person we hurt.
Whichever we do, the child inherits it. If we defend, they learn that acknowledgment is dangerous. If we go ahead and say it, they learn something else.
What the Child Sees
When we say it anyway, the child gets to see something. Oh. A person can take responsibility for their actions, and it does not destroy the relationship. A person can take responsibility, and the world does not end. We can persevere through the difficulty of saying I’m sorry, and we can heal, and the day can move on.
That survival is the validity of repair, demonstrated rather than explained. Repair grows resilience, and it builds a schema the child will carry: within acknowledgment we grow more resilient, more emotionally intelligent, and stronger. The feared outcome did not arrive. Something better did.
Intimacy Grows the Other Way
There is a second thing happening, and it is the one we do not expect. Repeated experiences of repair build intimacy. We can be honest with each other, and not only does abandonment fail to arrive, the inverse happens.
Inside the child
I feel closer to you because I can trust you.
I can trust that you can perceive your own reality with accuracy.
I can trust that when things get difficult there is room for growth in both directions, and that it is not hopeless.
Trust in our accuracy is worth more than it sounds. A parent who can see their own excess is also a parent whose praise means something and whose limits mean something. When we say the point still stands, the child has evidence that we would have said so if it did not.
Humility is what makes the boundary credible.
What Humility Offers
When we offer humility, we are telling the child at least four things about who we are. Each one is something a child has to be able to see in us before they can feel anything toward us.
I am trustworthy
Because I can take accountability for myself.
I am responsible
Because I can identify what needs to change and take responsibility for doing it.
I am rational and reasonable
Because I can differentiate from my emotions far enough to choose a response that is just and proportionate to the offense.
I am congruent
Because my behavior and my value system line up, and when they do not, I say so.
Rational and reasonable is the one that gets missed, and it may be the one that matters most. Differentiation here means the capacity to observe an emotion without becoming it, to feel the irritation and still choose the response. A consequence sized to the offense is the visible evidence of that capacity. A consequence sized to our mood is the visible evidence of its absence, and children read that evidence accurately, often more accurately than we do.
When our kid forgets to put away the chips, and the bag is left open and the chips go stale, and we tell them they cannot go to homecoming, they do not respect us. The offense was stale chips. The consequence was a rite of passage. The child concludes, correctly, that the consequence came from somewhere other than the chips. Among humans in general, we do not feel respect for people who are belligerent, irrational, or unreasonable, and there is no exception for parents.
Respect Is a Feeling
The absence of those four things deserves saying directly. When we do not offer them, the result shows up in my office, usually indirectly. A client will mention that their parent complains of not being trusted or not being respected. When we get into it, the distrust is specific. I don’t trust them to cook food properly. I don’t trust them to be on time. I don’t trust them to take accountability. Trust and responsibility, mostly, and in each case the child is reporting an observation rather than an attitude.
A lot of parents sit in that complaint. I’m not respected. I’m not trusted. They don’t view my opinions as reasonable. They don’t follow my directions. All of these things are often true, and the cause is usually upstream of the child.
Here is the piece that is hard to hear. A child can comply and feel nothing. A child can comply and feel contempt. Compliance is a behavior, and underneath every behavior is a feeling, and the feeling is what we are actually asking for when we ask to be respected. Many parents treat respect as a dichotomous entitlement, something that arrives with the role. I’m your parent, respect me. That sentence asks a child to produce a feeling on command, which nobody can do, for anybody.
What we can do is give the feeling something to respond to. We feel respect for people who have integrity, who have humility, who are congruent with their value system. If we are none of those, if we do not take responsibility for our actions, if we get neurotic when somebody gives us feedback about how we disappointed them or were unsafe or did not meet an expectation, the person in front of us is not going to feel that feeling, whether it is our kid or anybody else in society. In humility and integrity we give our children the opportunity to respect us. An opportunity, offered repeatedly, is the whole of our power here.
Respect is a feeling, and it follows what it sees.
The Imbalance Is Real
As parents we are constantly asking our children to take responsibility, to apologize, and to take feedback without falling apart, and it makes sense that we are. It is our job to help them grow into their best selves, which includes learning the social ethic, how to be considerate of other people while also honoring themselves. In most instances the mentor, the elder, is going to be offering more feedback to the child than the child offers back. That asymmetry is built into the role.
Teenagers feel the injustice of it acutely. They want to know that they also have influence, that their individualness is being taken into consideration, that their observations carry weight. When we violate their importance or cross a boundary of theirs, the relationship needs some way for that to come back to us; our humility is what gives their influence somewhere to land.
We will be giving more feedback than we receive for a long time. The one place our children can check whether that feedback is fair is in how we take it ourselves.
Toward Wisdom
Every one of these apologies asks for several capacities at once. Noticing the emotion. Differentiating from it. Assessing the proportion of what we did. Naming the error out loud. Holding the need that was legitimate all along. Tolerating the discomfort of saying all of that to someone we are responsible for. Taken one at a time, these are the building blocks of emotional and social intelligence. Taken together, in one conversation about crackers, they are a gestalt, the parts integrated into something the child can watch and absorb whole. If we lack the self-reflection that holds them together, the child inherits the gap. If we have it, the child inherits the integration.
At the deeper level, apologizing this way is how I am training my kids toward being wise. Wisdom here means being able to reflect on a value system and know when we are in dissonance with it and when we are in congruence. Every apology that names what we did, what we needed, and where we went too far is a demonstration of that reflection running in real time, on ourselves, in front of them. They are going to have to do the same thing for the rest of their lives, with nobody standing over them to make them, and what they will have is the memory of whether it was ever done in their house.
