Latest / Get Curious, Not Furious / Sorry, not sorry

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Sorry, not sorry · Get Curious, Not Furious

• 0:11
  Colette: Get curious, not furious.
• 0:13
  Colette: Helping parents respond with more calm, connection, and confidence.
• 0:19
  Colette: You love your child more than anything, and some days they can feel like the hardest person in your life to be around.
• 0:27
  Colette: I'm Colette, a speech and language therapist, sense maker, and mum of three.
• 0:33
  Colette: Welcome to Get Curious, Not Furious.
• 0:37
  Colette: I'm here to help you make sense of your child and what's really happening in those moments that feel out of control.
• 0:43
  Colette: So you can stop reacting and start understanding what your child really needs from you.
• 0:50
  Colette: So if you want to get curious instead of furious, keep listening. There's nothing like an insincere sorry to get our heckles raised as parents.
• 1:00
  Colette: So in this episode, we'll explore apologies, how to make them meaningful, how to help our children own their inevitable mistakes and offer a heartfelt I'm sorry, and also understand what it needs developmentally for children to be ready to say sorry.
• 1:18
  Colette: To be genuinely remorseful for something, we need to have an awareness that somebody else's experience, beliefs, thoughts, feelings are different from our own.
• 1:27
  Colette: Now, when children are little, up to the ages of about three, they're extremely self-absorbed and egocentric, and this is a natural part of their development.
• 1:36
  Colette: And our children older than that are also still quite egocentric and self-absorbed.
• 1:41
  Colette: Again, that's all part of natural spontaneous development.
• 1:44
  Colette: Around the ages of between three to five, depending on your child, children begin to recognize that other people do have different thoughts, beliefs, and feelings from their own.
• 1:55
  Colette: This is an emerging skill at that age.
• 1:58
  Colette: As they get a little bit older, sort of six plus, then they can use their more mature language and social reasoning skills to work out what might be going on for somebody else and whether it's a situation that might need an apology.
• 2:13
  Colette: It's worth remembering that this ability to see the world from somebody else's perspective develops differently in different children.
• 2:20
  Colette: For our children who are highly sensitive, children with language delays, autism, ADHD, or other neurodevelopmental differences, it will be much later before you really start to see these skills emerge, and possibly quite a bit longer before these skills will become more robust.
• 2:38
  Speaker: Now I know from personal experience that this is the case.
• 2:42
  Speaker: I have one highly sensitive child who has an ADHD profile if we wanted to put a label on him.
• 2:51
  Speaker: And being able to say sorry was something that took a lot longer for him to develop naturally and spontaneously than for his siblings who don't have the same neurodevelopmental profile that he does.
• 3:03
  Speaker: So I have over the years explored my relationship to apologies and sorries, and I'd like to talk about that a little bit more today.
• 3:13
  Speaker: What I'd like you to get curious about is to pause for a moment and think about what it was like for you growing up.
• 3:19
  Speaker: Did you live in a household where apologies were demanded, where you were told to say sorry or else?
• 3:26
  Speaker: If so, what is that like for you now as an adult?
• 3:30
  Speaker: Is it easy for you to say sorry?
• 3:33
  Speaker: Are you an 'apologize for everything', or 'it's always someone else's fault', or somewhere in between?
• 3:40
  Speaker: I recall being eight or nine years old, and back then we had fountain pens.
• 3:47
  Speaker: If anyone remembers fountain pens, where you filled up the pen from a bottle of ink, and it was a big deal when you progressed from using a pencil at school to using a fountain pen.
• 3:57
  Speaker: One day during the holidays, I was at home playing in my room, and I had a high-up shelf over my bed, and on it I had a jar of ink.
• 4:04
  Speaker: I was tidying up and I pulled something off the shelf and I knocked the bottle of ink all over my bed.
• 4:12
  Speaker: Oh my goodness, the shame that kicked in, I can still feel it in my body.
• 4:18
  Speaker: Now my mum was very kind and very loving, and she was also furious.
• 4:22
  Speaker: She was so mad that I had spilt an entire bottle of ink all over my bed.
• 4:27
  Speaker: Understandable, I can see why that would make a parent really, really cross.
• 4:30
  Speaker: My memory is that I was banished outside the back door and told that I needed to wait there and until my father would come home and deal with me.
• 4:38
  Speaker: And I don't think anything particularly bad happened.
• 4:41
  Speaker: I was probably left outside for who knows, five or ten minutes, but I remember feeling this intense shame storm.
• 4:49
  Speaker: I would have apologized, but I still remember feeling that that apology was never quite enough.
• 4:56
  Speaker: Now, this isn't the only time in my childhood where I felt like sorry was never enough.
• 5:01
  Speaker: And that's been something that as a parent it's come up for me often to think about what it's like to say sorry and what is it like for my children when they need to say sorry.
• 5:12
  Speaker: Now there will be lots of times when we as parents muck up, and how we approach saying sorry is one of the ways that our children learn about saying sorries.
• 5:23
  Speaker: If we offer sorries that are conditional, so "I'm really sorry, but you did blah blah blah", then that's not really a heartfelt, genuine apology.
• 5:32
  Speaker: That's saying sorry, but actually putting the responsibility back on our child because we think they did something wrong.
• 5:40
  Speaker: Now, yes, sure, sometimes our children make mistakes.
• 5:43
  Speaker: In fact, lots of times they get things wrong.
• 5:46
  Speaker: And if we can remember that they are developing humans, learning how to navigate the world, and sometimes they will be okay, sometimes they will make mistakes.
• 5:59
  Speaker: One of the greatest gifts that we can give them as parents is to be okay with them making mistakes and helping them feel okay about themselves, even when they make mistakes.
• 6:10
  Speaker: If our child has mucked up, then we can build a bridge back to making them feel better.
• 6:17
  Speaker: Equally, when we muck up, say we yell, we raise our voice, we offer a punishment that later we regret, we can apologize, we can own that, we can say, "Hey, I'm sorry, I yelled at you.
• 6:31
  Speaker: That's not how I want to be".
• 6:33
  Speaker: It is really important that we don't make them feel bad for that.
• 6:37
  Speaker: So saying, "Well, I'm so exhausted and I'm so tired because you demand so much of me, so yes, I'm sorry, I yelled", that's actually not a genuine heartfelt apology.
• 6:47
  Speaker: That's probably coming from a place of frustration and anger.
• 6:51
  Speaker: And what does it teach them?
• 6:53
  Speaker: That everything is conditional, that they can say sorry, but they can blame somebody else for why they did what they did.
• 6:59
  Speaker: Brene Brown, a leading shame researcher, talks about the difference between shame and guilt.
• 7:06
  Speaker: Neither of those are feelings that we can avoid, but the difference between shame and guilt is shame has us feeling that there's something wrong with us, and guilt has us feeling I did something wrong, and maybe I need to fix that up.
• 7:19
  Speaker: How we model apologies and how we model how we deal with shame and guilt, that is how our children learn to deal with those feelings and emotions as they grow.
• 7:29
  Speaker: Let's talk about forced apologies.
• 7:32
  Speaker: Pause and think for a moment, when is the last time you said to your child, "You need to say sorry?" Or when is the last time you said to them, "You can't watch TV until you've said sorry."?
• 7:43
  Speaker: Any of those moments where we essentially force them to say sorry either because we're withholding something that they want or enjoy, or worse, we're withholding our relationship, we're doing more harm than good.
• 8:00
  Speaker: I can hear your mind thinking, 'well, if we don't tell them and make them say sorry, how do they ever learn how to do that?' Here's the thing: it takes patience and understanding on our part as parents to trust that our children will learn to say sorry, and those sorries will be heartfelt, they will be genuine, they won't say sorry because somebody told them to, they'll say sorry because internally they'll recognize, wow, I hurt my friend or I hurt my sibling or I yelled at my mum, and that's something that I can say sorry for.
• 8:40
  Speaker: So what can you do instead?
• 8:43
  Speaker: Well, you can invite your child to check in with somebody else that they have hurt.
• 8:49
  Speaker: Really important that they only do this when they are ready.
• 8:52
  Speaker: You might have an idea in your mind that you want them to say sorry right away, but usually right after the incident has happened, that is not the time to work on the apology.
• 9:04
  Speaker: Sometimes you might say, "Do you have a sorry in you?" "Are you ready to check in with your sister?" You can help them develop an awareness of how the other person might be feeling, but remember they'll only be able to do that when their own feelings of frustration, hurt, anger, unfairness, jealousy have been heard and listened to.
• 9:26
  Speaker: So say your seven-year-old turns around and takes a toy from your four-year-old or thumps them or does something that children do to each other.
• 9:36
  Speaker: If you jump in straight away with, "Look what you've done to your sister", and "How could you hurt them like that?" and "Say sorry right now.", well, they're too angry and frustrated and wound up about whatever it was that drove them to thump their sibling in the first place, but that's not a good teachable moment.
• 9:55
  Speaker: What you can do is step in and take the lead and say, "I can see you're having a hard time playing together right now.
• 10:01
  Speaker: How about you come with me and do this, and your sibling can keep playing with what they're playing with?" Yes, it is time-intensive.
• 10:08
  Speaker: Yes, it does require you as an adult to step in and take the lead and guide them to do better in their relationships.
• 10:15
  Speaker: But parenting is not a hands-off job.
• 10:18
  Speaker: If we want our children to learn more mature ways of interacting with others and more mature ways of being and saying sorry genuinely when they mean it, then we actually need to be there and spend some time modeling for them, scaffolding them, supporting them.
• 10:36
  Speaker: Some of our children, more than others, find it really, really hard to say sorry.
• 10:42
  Speaker: This is usually driven by shame and feelings of vulnerability that they like to put a mask on.
• 10:49
  Speaker: If you have one of those children who's a real toughie, oh, 'I don't care about anything', 'I don't care if you want me to say sorry, I don't care that the other person is hurt', remember that that's not genuinely who they are.
• 11:01
  Speaker: They weren't born that way.
• 11:03
  Speaker: They didn't come into this world wanting to be mean and unkind and hurtful to others.
• 11:08
  Speaker: There's something going on for them in their internal world that's driving that frustrated behavior.
• 11:15
  Speaker: So if you can see that your child is probably feeling really ashamed, then don't push for an apology.
• 11:24
  Speaker: Give them an out.
• 11:25
  Speaker: Let go of that story in your head that says, we must apologize, I must make my child apologize, or they will never learn.
• 11:33
  Speaker: You can simply say, I can see you're not ready to say sorry, let's come back to it later.
• 11:40
  Speaker: Or let's come back to it tomorrow.
• 11:42
  Speaker: Have a think about timing of saying sorry.
• 11:47
  Speaker: Think about is that your time frame or your child's time frame?
• 11:52
  Speaker: Sometimes the sorry might come later in the day, sometimes it might come the next day, and sometimes with our younger children or those who are slower to develop that awareness of others, the sorry never comes.
• 12:06
  Speaker: We as the adult can let go of that.
• 12:09
  Speaker: Probably what's more important than the words of saying "I'm sorry" is how the relationship is restored.
• 12:16
  Speaker: What I mean by that is our child feeling that even though they've made a mistake, done something they shouldn't have done, that that's not going to get in the way of how we feel about them and their relationship with us.
• 12:30
  Speaker: And also that it's not going to get in the way of them getting on with their siblings.
• 12:35
  Speaker: Now, this is something I've had lots and lots of practice with in my home.
• 12:40
  Speaker: And what I've seen is after years of allowing space for apologies to come in their own time, they now all have a lot of compassion for others, a lot of ability to give space for other people to make mistakes, and it doesn't get in the way of them wanting to get along and reconnect with each other.
• 13:01
  Speaker: This can be hard to watch as an adult because when I see one of them hurt the other and there are tears and someone's sad and upset, and then five minutes later they're playing happily together again.
• 13:12
  Speaker: In my mind, I'm going, 'How on earth can you want to play with the person that five minutes ago thumped you?' And yet that's the beauty of spontaneous apologies and knowing that relationships are bigger than any mistake, is that they can let it go and they can get back to playing in connection without being stuck in bad feelings, resentment, anger about something that happened.
• 13:36
  Speaker: If you have a child who's what we call demand-avoidant, where you ask them to do something no matter what it is, and the first response you get is no, then sorries are particularly difficult.
• 13:50
  Speaker: They stir up big feelings of shame and anxiety for those children.
• 13:55
  Speaker: You can make a suggestion about how you can check in with another person, you can model a sorry, but you cannot tell them or force them to make an apology.
• 14:05
  Speaker: Something else to have a think about is that perspective taking.
• 14:10
  Speaker: So if your child feels justified in doing what they did, then they won't see the need to say sorry.
• 14:17
  Speaker: And pushing them to say sorry is likely to make them more resistant.
• 14:21
  Speaker: Also, if they've heard you saying, "I'm sorry I yelled at you, but you did such and such", well, then their sorries will come with those conditions as well.
• 14:30
  Speaker: Now, have you ever said to your child, "Well, sorry isn't good enough?" I know I have.
• 14:36
  Speaker: I don't feel good about that.
• 14:39
  Speaker: And I know that when those words do come out of my mouth, it comes from a place of pure frustration.
• 14:46
  Speaker: Frustration that the same issue has come up again, frustration that maybe I was right in the middle of doing something and I had to stop because there was another fight or another need for me to step in and parent.
• 14:58
  Speaker: When I think about that though, I go, well, what message am I giving my child if I'm saying to them, sorry isn't good enough?
• 15:04
  Speaker: I heard that lots as a child and it didn't leave me feeling very good about myself.
• 15:08
  Speaker: And when I say sorry, what I want from my children is to know that when they do come forward with this genuine heartfelt sorry, that even though the other person might still be mad, even if that person is me, that they've done what they need to do, and now it's up to me to work through how I'm feeling about it and basically get over it.
• 15:31
  Speaker: So think about what message it gives our children when we say things around apologies, and think about what do you want for them in the future?
• 15:41
  Speaker: Do you want them knowing in their hearts that sometimes we do need to say sorry and take responsibility for our mistakes?
• 15:48
  Speaker: Or do you want them feeling angry and resentful and ashamed that they're saying sorry all the time?
• 15:54
  Speaker: It's really important to play the long game.
• 15:57
  Speaker: Why do we want sorries to come naturally and spontaneously?
• 16:01
  Speaker: Well, because you're not always going to be there, and because you want to help your child develop that theory of mind and awareness that some of the things they do can be hurtful to others.
• 16:14
  Speaker: Remembering that with our highly sensitive children, taking longer to find the maturity to say sorry is completely to be expected.
• 16:22
  Speaker: Something else to think about is to not how I like to say, wallow in sorries.
• 16:29
  Speaker: So that if you do something wrong, if you muck up as a parent, say sorry and then move on.
• 16:36
  Speaker: Don't make your child feel bad.
• 16:38
  Speaker: If you're feeling sad and upset, then that's for you to deal with, not to be put on your child.
• 16:46
  Speaker: Likewise, if your child does say sorry, even if it doesn't seem like a heartfelt sorry, accept the apology and move on.
• 16:54
  Speaker: As parents, we really can take the lead in bringing connection back when our child has mucked up.
• 17:00
  Speaker: One of the greatest gifts we can give them is letting them know that nothing can come between their relationship with us.
• 17:07
  Speaker: Letting them know that their relationship is more important than any mistake they've made, than any sorry that hasn't been coming forthcoming, than any thump that they've given their sibling, than any swear word that they've thrown at you.
• 17:21
  Speaker: We can invite our children to depend on us, knowing that their relationship is stronger than any mistake they might make.
• 17:30
  Speaker: The other place where we can take the lead is in cultivating good intentions and positive relationships between siblings or between friends.
• 17:39
  Speaker: This might mean doing things like pointing out things that are alike about them, things that they enjoy doing, things that they have in common, no matter how tiny those things are.
• 17:49
  Speaker: Now, the time to do this is not when they've just had a fight, or not when you're hoping one of them will say sorry to the other.
• 17:57
  Speaker: But you can make a comment maybe to your child who's hurt.
• 18:01
  Speaker: "I can see you really got hurt by your brother, and it's not okay that your brother hurt you.
• 18:07
  Speaker: And I know that your brother cares about you, and I'm looking forward to playing a game with both of you together later." or whatever it is.
• 18:16
  Speaker: If they need to vent about their sibling because they feel really hurt, then guide them to do that when their sibling can't hear them.
• 18:24
  Speaker: We can take the lead in helping them build positive relationships and also being able to forgive each other for when they make mistakes and then get back to being in the right relationship.
• 18:34
  Speaker: So think about the timing.
• 18:36
  Speaker: Definitely not when they're mad or angry.
• 18:39
  Speaker: Now, I know how hard it is to do all these things.
• 18:43
  Speaker: When you've been sworn at or had things hurled across the room at you, the last thing you feel like doing is offering warm, loving connection to your child.
• 18:53
  Speaker: So give yourself permission to take a break and to soothe your anger before responding.
• 19:00
  Speaker: You might say, "Oh, I'm feeling really mad right now.
• 19:04
  Speaker: I'm not quite ready to play with you.
• 19:07
  Speaker: I'll play with you in five minutes/ ten minutes/ when you're finished reading that book." As long as you let them know that you will get back into right relationship with them and you can restore that connection, even if it's not straight away, that helps build their security and sense of safety.
• 19:26
  Speaker: Now, how long should you wait before an apology might be forthcoming?
• 19:30
  Speaker: Well, actually, sometimes you might need to wait forever, and sometimes you might need to just let it go.
• 19:35
  Speaker: There's no point hanging on to anger and resentment about your child not being able to say sorry.
• 19:41
  Speaker: There will be lots and lots more opportunities every day for them to learn and develop this skill.
• 19:47
  Speaker: I waited a couple of years before I really saw spontaneous apologies emerging.
• 19:53
  Speaker: At times I doubted that my approach of never asking for a forced apology was going to yield the rewards that I was hoping it would, but I can honestly say that it has.
• 20:08
  Speaker: I now have a child who, when he was younger, found it really, really difficult to say sorry.
• 20:15
  Speaker: Often had times where a sorry was warranted from the other person's perspective, and I never pushed and I waited and I trusted that they would come in time, and now they do.
• 20:27
  Speaker: And it's been one of the most, I guess, heartwarming things as a parent to trust that letting our children mature in their own time with the right guidance and support from us actually brings them to being able to offer an apology all by themselves from the heart without feeling ashamed when they're ready.
• 20:49
  Speaker: Now, as we wrap up, you might be wondering, well, "What do I do if I can make these changes at home but when my child goes to school or they go to somebody else's house, they're made to say sorry?".
• 21:01
  Speaker: I still shudder when I think of when my eldest was in his first or second year of primary school, and he told me how one of his friends, who would have been six years old at the time, wasn't allowed out to play because he had to write a letter of apology for something that he had done.
• 21:17
  Speaker: Now, I struggle to see how any teacher would think that this is going to be useful, helpful, productive for a six-year-old.
• 21:27
  Speaker: How is that six-year-old in that moment of writing a letter going to remember that the next time they get a bit frustrated or they interact with their peers in ways that are unhelpful, that writing that letter of apology is the thing that helps them learn the skill to behave in more socially appropriate ways?
• 21:45
  Speaker: It doesn't.
• 21:46
  Speaker: What does writing a letter of apology do?
• 21:49
  Speaker: Shame.
• 21:50
  Speaker: Shame, shame, shame.
• 21:52
  Speaker: It creates a shame storm in our child.
• 21:55
  Speaker: If your child wants to write a letter of apology and wants to write a sorry note and that's their way of expressing it, that's fine as long as it comes from them and it's not something they've been asked to do.
• 22:08
  Speaker: So I would encourage you as a parent, don't be afraid to take the lead and have a conversation with their teacher about the benefits of waiting for sorries to come naturally and about the downside of shaming a child into writing a forced apology.
• 22:24
  Speaker: You will meet resistance when you do this.
• 22:26
  Speaker: What I'm inviting you to do is to get curious about why we think apologies must be forthcoming and why we think our children should offer them before they're developmentally ready.
• 22:42
  Speaker: What part of your child's world are you finding hardest to make sense of?
• 22:46
  Speaker: Leave your question in the comments.
• 22:48
  Speaker: It might inspire a future episode.
• 22:51
  Speaker: If you're enjoying the podcast, make sure to follow or subscribe so you don't miss what's coming next.
• 22:57
  Speaker: Until next time, stay curious.