I recently had another mothering misstep. You know, one of those times as a parent where you know you have officially lost any hope of winning the Mother of the Year Award again. My oldest daughter was recently inducted into the National Honor Society at her high school. Needless to say, my husband and I are very proud of her hard work that went into achieving this honor. We were looking forward to going to the awards ceremony and celebrating her hard work. The night arrived for the awards ceremony and, due to our schedules, we all ended up driving separately to the awards ceremony. After the ceremony, I headed to the cafeteria for the reception to wait for my daughter. She however, hopped in her car to go find her friends, thinking that I had headed home. I began to wonder if she left but kept thinking to myself, there's no way she left. I mean, seriously, when in her 16 years of having me as a mom have I not wanted pictures and to celebrate these special events? I finally find out that she left and I was mad, not just mad--hurt and angry. So I call my daughter and it all goes wrong from there. I order her home and not so nicely tell her that I am angry. Of course, this leads to an argument. The whole time this is going on I know I am not doing a great job of handling the situation and yet I can't seem to right the ship and defuse the situation. It ends with her in tears and me still feeling mad at the situation and myself. In the end, I calm down. She calms down. And I know that I owe her an apology for how I handled my anger.
Apologizing to our kids is important. Kids learn what it means to be sorry, apologize and forgive another person by being on the receiving end of an apology. We model all of these for our kids when we truly apologize to them. When we truly apologize to our children, they learn to recognize right and wrong. We repair and strengthen our relationship with them. Kids also learn how to take responsibility for their actions.
Think about the last time you apologized to your child. Was it a true apology? All too often as parents we apologize to our kids by saying things like, "I am sorry you are mad that you can't have a cookie before dinner" or "I am sorry I yelled at you but.." Neither of these are a true apology. Parents use apologies like these to soften the blow of setting a limit or in the case of the second example, point out what their child had done wrong.
When we truly apologize to our children, we accept responsibility for what we did wrong. We name it and claim. In the case of my example above, it went like this. "I owe you an apology. I am sorry I yelled at you. My feelings were hurt and I let that shape how I talked to you. I should have just told you my feelings were hurt without yelling and making you feel bad. I am sorry." Of course once I apologized, she apologized too, knowing she was in the wrong too.
