Apologies

Photo by Priscilla Du Preez 🇨🇦 on Unsplash

I am traveling this week, and so I have decided to share a post by a Substacker whose work I admire. Lisa Sibbett shares essays and “how-to’s” each week in her “Auntie Bulletin.” It’s a newsletter for people who make serious commitments to their relationships with other people’s children. Lisa gave me permission to share this post from a few weeks ago, which includes two stories: her memory of an apology her mother made to her when she was a child, and a story about an apology she made to a child recently.

Last May I wrote about how a couple of children who have shared stories with me reacted when the adults get something wrong. https://marshawalton.substack.com/p/when-the-grown-up-is-wrong

It’s a topic I will come back to in future posts. These situations are interesting because of how important they are to moral development. In middle childhood, we want our children to move from a morality based on authority (and dependent on surveillance to ensure good behavior) to a morality based on internalized values and principles. The discovery of the fallibility of our authorities is often part of this development. When the grown-ups own up to their missteps, this can smooth the path towards internalized moral values. I hope you enjoy Lisa’s stories. You can click here to see more of her work:

How to Apologize to a Child

By Lisa Sibbett

I have a powerful memory from childhood of being apologized to by my mother. It was so long ago and I was so young (maybe 6 or 7) that the details are nearly gone – but the emotional resonance remains warm, bright, and clear. My brother and I had had some kind of conflict in the car, and our mother became uncharacteristically irritated and snapped at us. I know there was something unjust about my having been scolded: I didn’t start it? I didn’t do it? Our mom was usually very fair, and I felt hurt and angry. Later, she found me and apologized. And what I remember, vividly, to this day, is that her apology made me feel completely understood, and completely cared-for.

Peering back through the lens of what I now know about child development, I suspect this incident made such an impression on me both because I began to recognize my mother as separate from myself (someone potentially unpredictable and unknowable) AND to understand that I could rely on her completely, that she would never abandon or betray me. It was a tiny little drama – an insignificant squabble between siblings, a brief interaction between mother and child – but also, it was everything.

A few years ago, I had the opportunity to pay my mother’s wisdom forward when I unfairly accused a kid in my own life. Again, it was a petty squabble between young siblings. They faced off at the bottom of the stairs, fighting over a necklace. I wasn’t sure what had happened but these two had been fighting a lot lately and now they were quickly escalating toward violence. I swooped down between them, confiscated the necklace, and scolded them both. I remember the older child turning to me in outrage, quivering with perceived unfairness. “You’re a… a stupidhead!” she yelled at me, then ran up the stairs into her room and slammed the door. Her little sister looked smug.

I questioned the younger kid and thought back over what I’d actually witnessed. It became apparent that the younger sibling had been purposely antagonizing the older, trying to steal the necklace, and not responding to repeated requests to stop.

So it seemed I’d made a mistake. To be fair to myself, adults can’t possibly track every intimate interpersonal drama between the kids we’re caring for. We often have to make our best judgment based on limited information, and we need to do so rapidly to prevent anyone from getting hurt. I wasn’t upset with myself for how I’d handled things – I’d done the best I could with the knowledge available to me – but I remembered my mother’s apology to me when I was a child. I needed to make things right.

I went upstairs and knocked on the bedroom door.

“Go away! I hate you!”

“Kiddo?” I called through the door. “Can I come in? I want to apologize.”

There was a long silence and then a small, “okay.”

I went in and sat on the bed, where she was hiding under the covers. I told her I’d realized I made a mistake. I said something like, “At first I thought you two were both being mean to each other, but I talked to your sister and I thought again about what I actually saw and heard, and now I get that you didn’t really do anything wrong.” I told her I was sorry. I said I’d try not to make the same mistake again, and if I did, she could always tell me.

My sweet small friend’s reaction feels like it’ll stay stamped in my heart forever, Aunties. She emerged from under the covers, her face covered in tears, but she was beaming. She said something like, “I was going to tell you that you are so stupid and mean! But now I feel like I love you so much!” We had a big hug. We talked about our feelings for a minute or two. Then we went back downstairs and carried on with the afternoon.

I thought often about this incident for several days afterward. As with my experience as a child, this seemingly-insignificant drama nonetheless made a big emotional impact. I reflected not only on how one can effectively apologize to a child, but also why it’s important to do so.

In retrospect, I’m glad I made the following moves:

1. I let the child know up front that I wanted to apologize. I didn’t say, “I want to talk” (which was my first impulse), because that would have left her guessing about where I stood and whether I was there to scold her some more.

2. I told her what I’d originally observed and thought in the moment, but I didn’t try to make excuses. I explained how I’d figured out that I was wrong. (As I reflected last week in “How to Respond to Owies,” narrating difficult events back to kids can help them make sense of and work through stressful experiences).

3. I didn’t take her to task for her behavior. Although she hadn’t started it, she did eventually yell at her sister and start to shove back, but that was pretty understandable behavior for a 6 year old under the circumstances, and it wasn’t worth undermining my apology to give her a hard time about it.

I didn’t want to undermine the apology because I suspected it was doing some heavy lifting – not only strengthening the trust between me and this child, but also making it easier to successfully hold her accountable in the future.

Now, I’m mindful that both of the examples I’ve shared today – my mom apologizing to me, and me apologizing to this kid – may seem sweetly naive. Compared to the storms many people experience at home over their lifetimes, such incidents barely rate as conflict at all.

But this is why such moments are great opportunities for adults to practice apologizing to kids. Apologizing to anyone is difficult. It requires the discernment to recognize that an apology is required, and the courage and humility to admit that we were wrong. So we need to practice on the easier conflicts whenever we can. Fortunately, in my experience apologizing gets easier and easier and more and more appealing the more you do it. You may be told, “I feel like I love you so much!” You may get a big hug and a chance to talk with a kid about your appreciation for one another. And if these things happen, I bet you’ll enjoy them like crazy. And then the next time you screw up, I bet you’ll discover that you relish the chance to say you’re sorry.

An apology to a child may seem like a small thing. But on the other hand, it truly might shift the direction of history. This is especially the case if, in your own childhood, adults never apologized to you, no matter how much they screwed up. Our default human move is to react to stress more or less in the same way that the people who raised us reacted to stress. So if you do something different – something wiser – you’re making a major intervention on behalf of future generations. You’re passing on a better way.

Looking for photos for today’s post, I learned that Australia has a National Sorry Day to Indigenous peoples (it’s May 23). Australians, is this day widely recognized and celebrated? Please tell us about it in the comments.

When we apologize to a child, we model the wisdom of changing our minds when we find out we’re wrong. If you ask me, that’s a lesson our society sorely needs right now (in the United States for sure, but not only in the United States). And here’s another lesson we learn: Powerful people can and should be accountable to the powerless. We can and should take responsibility when we do harm, especially if the people we’ve harmed otherwise have no recourse.

Apologizing to children also models for them that it’s okay to make mistakes – that what matters is how we react afterward. As I was preparing to write this post, I came across Allison Lichter’s interview with Nancy Reddy for The Matriarchy Report last week. The whole thing is worth a read, but I was particularly struck by Reddy’s argument that “a little stress is protective and beneficial” for children. This feels so true in the context of apologizing to them – the stress of conflict actually creates the opportunity for us to strengthen our loving connection. Love, as Reddy puts it, is “the daily work of connecting and falling short and making repairs.”

Darn right.