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Stop Overapologizing To Your Kids!

Frequent readers of this blog know that I advise you to stop letting your kids treat you like garbage, stop feeding your kids fake praise, and stop overvalidating them.  This all falls under the larger umbrella of not overparenting.  One common type of overparenting that I see is the ubiquitous overapologizing that characterizes many parent-child interactions in this child-centered parenting era.  This is a surefire way to make your child think they are the center of the universe as well as a constant victim.  Do any of these sound uncomfortably like you?

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  • Apologizing that your child’s snack isn’t the ideal one they would have picked
  • Apologizing for being on time when other parents were early
  • Apologizing for not listening fully to a story that is being told while you are cooking, working, or with another child
  • Apologizing for not being adept at a game or activity that your child wishes you were better at
  • Apologizing for being tired (!) when you were up because the child was up early and woke you, or for any reason
  • Apologizing that the child has to leave a playdate to get home to dinner

I am very pro-apology, and I constantly help couples learn when and how to apologize meaningfully to repair relationships.  I also believe kids should learn to apologize.  And adults should certainly own their own REAL ISSUES.  But endless apologizing for being a human being doing a well-intentioned or neutral behavior just teaches your child that other people should fawn over them and put their WANTS over their own NEEDS.  You can imagine a child who learns this will be what we clinically call “A Real Ass$%^$” with friends, partners, and coworkers later in life.

Parents who compulsively apologize to their kids are usually scared of their child’s anger, frustration, sadness, or any negative emotion.  They are not allowing their child to sit with a negative feeling and recognize that nobody is to blame for it, and that sometimes, things just don’t go the way you want and it’s nobody’s fault.  Instead, the parent is presenting themselves as the target for the child’s distress.  Later in life, the child will have learned that there is always someone to pin negative feelings on, and this person may be their spouse, their boss, or even their own child.  

If you are a compulsive over-apologizer to your kid, it is highly likely you also overapologize to many others in your life.  Most likely, you were raised by a parent who expected you to apologize for everything that went wrong, and who required a lot of bowing and scraping.  Parents with narcissistic and borderline traits often create children who feel everything in the world is their fault, as I discuss in this post about people-pleasing women and covert narcissist moms

If this resonates with you, read the book Children of the Self-Absorbed and see if it applies.  It is possible you are treating your own kids in the way you learned to treat your parents as a child, which may lead to your kids developing the self-centered traits that you so dislike in your parents.  I discuss this cycle more here.  The only way out of this cycle is to model healthy self-esteem for your child, which includes responses like these instead of apologies:

  • “It is rude to tell me you don’t like your snack. You should thank me for preparing it for you, which I think is a pretty nice thing for me to do for you.  If you don’t like it in future, feel free to make yourself another one for practice ahead of time.”
  • “Pickup for this class was supposed to be 4pm on the email I got.  But it sucks when you’re the last one to be picked up.  I remember that happened to me as a kid.  Next time I can get here five minutes early now that we know the deal.”
  • “You are right, I’m not listening.  When you asked if I could listen to your Minecraft story, I said I was in the middle of something. So then I am not going to be able to listen if you go ahead anyway despite me saying I can’t focus right now.”
  • “I wish I was better at chess too but it’s rude to tell me I’m terrible.  Maybe you can play online instead.  Also, how about apologizing for insulting me?”
  • “I’m tired.  Next time please read in the morning until 7am as we discussed, which lets me get the sleep I need to be a good mom to you and your brother.”
  • “We have to leave now.  I’m sorry you’re sad but dinner with the family is more important than the playdate ending exactly when you want.”

Note in the last one I gave an example of empathizing with the child’s emotion, which can certainly take the form of “I’m sorry” sometimes.  This is way different from “I’m sorry you have to leave! Next time Mommy will plan it better.”  You are both sorry that the child is sad and also showing that you are an adult with confidence in your values, which in this case are the importance of family dinner.

This overapologizing is part of a larger issue, which is that parents nowadays often feel no confidence in their ability to steer the ship in terms of making choices for the family.  Often, these parents were raised in very strict households or very permissive ones.  In the first case, they never learned to make a choice for themselves.  They desperately want their kids to be confident in their own decisions, but this isn’t the real reason they let their kids run the show.  It is because they themselves are not confident in their own decision-making.  In the permissive case, these adults never saw rules enacted in their homes growing up, so they really have no idea how to create and enforce them.

The parenting style associated with the best outcomes in kids is called authoritative parenting, which is warm and firm, with some rules flexibility in special situations. If you struggle with overly permissive parenting, therapy and parent coaching can help you determine what rules and values are important to you and how to set up a routine-based household where kids understand what’s coming next and why.  Having a framework like this can eliminate many of the child tantrums and freak-outs that you are currently overapologizing for.  Individual therapy that includes work on your family-of-origin issues can also help you understand why you have such low frustration tolerance for your child’s negative emotions, and how to be a more centered, calm and confident parent moving forward.

Of course, when you actually hurt your child intentionally or unintentionally, certainly own your issues so they learn to own theirs.  Examples: you accidentally knock into your child when you don’t see him behind you, you forget to pick him up on time from school, you forget to wake him up on time so he is late for school, you burn dinner and apologize to the family in general.  Be a kind person, and your child will learn to be kind as well. By extension, if you overapologize for things like the examples I gave in the first part of this post, your child will emulate this behavior.  Then you will cringe as you hear your child apologizing on the playground to a peer for picking a game that the peer didn’t like.

Share this post with your parenting partner if you found it relevant, so that you can have accountability for your overapologetic tendencies!  And till we meet again, I remain, The Blogapist Who Says, Kids Learn Self-Respect From Observing Parents With Self-Respect.


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