Warning: This may be a bit triggering. 

Superpower # 6: Apologizing to Kids

Let’s face it, apologizing is super hard, you feel your chest refusing and yourself low key sweating.😰 Our egos hardly ever allow us to apologize readily.

Apologizing to your kids? That’s another beast. It takes a high level of humility and vulnerability.

You’re older than them, so how could you possibly be wrong? There’s this idea in our African traditional contexts that an older person should not be corrected.🤷🏽‍♀️

Many times we see ourselves in our kids, see them as an extension of ourselves. And as a kid, no one apologized to you, so you don’t even think to, or you don’t know how.

Your inner child takes over and says well, if nobody apologized to me, why would I apologize to this one.

I know parents love the scripture that says kids should honor their parents, but they often neglect to continue to a later verse in the same passage: Fathers (parents), do not exasperate/provoke your kids!

I have exasperated my kid more times than I care to count, and I’m not proud of that. I’ve been exasperated many times by the rents myself.

The offenses range from not paying attention, not keeping promises, controlling behavior, emotional neglect, and punishments to serious reactions from being triggered as a parent.

If getting beaten up for punishment as a kid left you with a safe, loving and trusting relationship with your parents or yourself and others, then by all means, please continue hitting your kid.

If not, let’s learn, pivot and break such generational trauma together.

I follow Dr Shefali, the therapist and conscious parenting guru. I’m learning a lot from her.

She reminds us, and I agree, that our kids’ behavior is the fruit of a tree that grows in the soil that we parents form a huge part of. Others, mostly teachers, and the environment form the other parts.

And add to that their immature cerebral formations and processes and you have plenty of good ground to explain that they are not aliens out to get us.👽

Their dysregulations are not personal attacks on us! They are simply a mirror to the source of our own dysregulations.

Your perception is the projection of your inner world. As a parent, when you react to your kid because you got triggered for instance, you do so out of your own inner battles, traumas and stress.

Any reaction that is born out of being negatively triggered, and we know when we are, is never a good idea.

We shout, we lash out, we say words we regret, we throw a tantrum, we slap OUR traumas out of our kids, we take anything and we beat OUR pain out of our kids, we give them the silent treatment, we neglect them, we deprive them, we disown them.

We inadvertently inflict a lot of harm on our kids, because we have not understood that 1, we played a big part in how they are now reacting by the way we are parenting them and projecting our issues onto them.

And 2, they don’t yet have the cerebral functions to process things fully as they learn and explore.

I want to emphasize that we always have good intentions with our parenting no matter the style, and we’re only doing the best with what we have or know.

However good our intentions are, the harmful emotions are still experienced, and they often leave indelible scars and festering wounds as kids grow and become adults.

What started me on my own transformation journey, was the realization that I had inflicted so much hurt on my kid because of my then unresolved childhood hurts.

You wanna be aware of just how much pain and trauma you are carrying from your childhood? Have a child!

But thank God for the kids of today, at some point she told me ‘I feel like nothing I do is good enough for you, I feel like you are taking your issues out on me.’

I’m not saying this so that if you have similar experiences you can beat yourself up. I’m saying it so we can start reparations, now that we know better.

✨Apologizing will validate their feelings and model to them what it looks like to take responsibility for your own mistakes.

✨You’ll strengthen, preserve and/or re-establish connection with your kid.👨‍👩‍👧‍👦

I don’t know about you, but my second biggest desired parenting outcome, after teaching her about God’s love and her own personal relationship with Him, is becoming a safe space for my child.

The good Lord knows that was far removed from me when I was walking in self-unawareness. Now it’s a consciously crafted and documented goal with steps including apologizing.

I’m still learning and tripping up, not down, but up. It’s a work in progress, and sometimes I forget to practice self-compassion and patience, but ‘a luta continua, vitória é certa!’✊🏾

All of the superpowers will have you on the process of becoming a safe space for your kid. It’s called conscious or gentle parenting.💪🏾

The elements of an effective apology

‘I’m sorry’ just won’t cut it. An apology needs to be genuine and well constructed with elements that will make it effective.

The late Dr A. Lazare, a psychiatrist & an apology expert, said a good apology has 4 elements:

1. Acknowledge the offense. Take responsibility – I did this & that. Be specific and not vague or evasive. Acknowledge that your behavior was hurtful/unacceptable. And please I beg, drop IF out of an apology. I’m sorry if I hurt you???
2. Explain what happened. Explain why you did it, without making excuses for it, and without blaming them! Not ‘you were being rude, you were disrespectful.’
3. Express remorse. If you regret the error or feel awful or ashamed, tell them.
4. Offer to make amends. If it’s a physical thing that can be repaired or replaced, do so. If it’s emotional hurt, resolve to doing better next time. You can also ask them how you can be or make things better.

Resolve and intend to do better, not just say it. If you find yourself having to say this over and over again, you need assistance. Get into therapy or transformational life coaching.

‘I’m sorry I didn’t know it was a sensitive issue for you’ is not it, because you’re low key blaming them for their ‘sensitivity’.

Merely explaining it away, e.g. saying you were just doing the best you can, is not enough.

If there was a gun to my head and I had to choose just one apology element, I’d go for 1. ‘I apologize. I know that was very hurtful.’ Period.

The idea of right or wrong should be thrown out the window when an apology needs to be rendered to your kid. Empathize to understand their experience.

They felt the hurt, they felt the pain, they felt the disappointment. Even if it the same offense would not have offended you or someone else.

Some examples:

I’m sorry I forgot to get that. I got caught up at work and lost track of time. I know how important it was for you and I shouldn’t have done that. Next time I’ll write a reminder alarm on my phone.

I apologize for lashing out at you. There’s no excuse and I feel awful for doing that. I’ll take a deep breath next time and think about it before I say something.

It’s never too late to apologize to your kid/s, you’re never too old, they’re never too old.

If you desire to improve your strained relationship with your older kid/s, you’re going to have to have the humility to effectively apologize to them.

And it’ll have to start with us, don’t expect it to come from them.

Not because of arrogance, but because kids, no matter their age, will be at a place of vulnerability and some level of disempowerment (consciously or subconsciously) if our parenting style got them there.

In other words they’d still be afraid of and disconnected from us, even at 30, 40, 50, and would not want to start any deep conversations with us.

You agreed to be a parent…

Said what I said, said it with my chest…😑😊

THE TAKE HOME

Apologizing to kids helps build deep connection and trust with your kid.

It helps them learn that when they make mistakes, they can do the same.

I get it, this idea of parenting kids with the consciousness that we don’t own them, they have feelings, they have a say, they came the way God made them and therefore already an individual, is hard and requires an overhaul of the traditional parenting philosophy.

Add to that the mandate that we are to instruct them in the way that they should go and you have a whole pot of confusion.😲🤯😵‍💫

When we’re not aware of these dynamics and their immaturity, we inevitably hurt our kids for life in our quest to doing the best we can.

I heartily thank you if you’ve managed to build a safe healthy connection and trust with your kids.

But if you haven’t, for a start, I recommend you buy Dr Shefali’s short Parent Reboot Workshop. 

I also highly recommend we use all these 6 superpowers for healthy parenting: self-awareness and self-control, vulnerability, empathy, flexibility, compassion and forgiveness, and apologizing where we need to.

💡This requires that we do the work to heal, especially our inner child, to be harmony with them.

In the meantime, let’s be forgiving of ourselves, practice self-compassion, and let’s not crucify ourselves, we’ve been parenting the only way we knew how, the way we were parented.

But, there’s another way…

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