Why You Should Not Force Children to Apologize (also discusses forced apologies in abusive narcissistic families)

Note: this is part of a series:

1. Why you should always apologize to your child when you hurt him or her (avoiding trauma in your child)

2. This post: Why You Should Not Force Children to Apologize (also discusses forced apologies in abusive narcissistic families)

more posts to follow 

Since this blog is about abuse, I will be talking about the difference between the healthy "prodding" of children to be empathetic (and therefor remorseful) when they have done something wrong versus strong-arming, threats, blaming and shaming typical of abusive parents to get children to apologize to people they probably should not be apologizing to.

The following articles are written for parents who are invested in "healthy parenting", who want to be the best models of healthy parents for their children, and who, through "healthy parenting tips", have kids who are "genuinely empathetic" and capable of heart-felt apologies.

If you have children who don't apologize for what the parent sees as "obvious transgressions and wrong-doings", usually something is either going on with the child, or with the parent, but most of the time the reasons are intricately linked in the relationship between the parent and the child.

While there are some exceptions like conditions and disorders that can make a child unempathetic, most of those conditions would mean the child having an unempathetic approach all of the time, in almost all situations (and becoming part of the personality). All children but future psychopaths are born with empathy. If empathy goes away over time, there is a reason for it (environmental reasons tied to how they were parented is usually the most common).

In some cases autistic children can present as appearing unempathetic, but on the inside of the child there is so much empathy and they feel others pain so deeply that they freeze (here is another link to another article on that phenomenon).

For the sake of this post, I will be discussing both the healthy style of parenting (where communication lines are open, judgments about what happened are kept open too, and empathy is calmly discussed) versus the unhealthy style of parenting (where parents push and strong arm their children to apologize, threaten or punish their child if an apology is not given, all with a lot of rage, blaming, shaming and impulsive judgments which are rigid).

But first we get to the health tips for parents who bend towards healthy resolutions with their kids.

You will notice in these articles that most psychologists strongly advise parents not to force children to apologize, but that apologies (which boil down to an outward expression of empathy) are best when authentically felt and expressed by the child. Many psychologists' advice is to talk to children more about empathy than a singular apology. Also the most long lasting impression for a child is seeing his or her parent making apologies, making amends, talking openly about how they have hurt or overlooked another person, and showing how they want to resolve it. Children learn from example more than from words.

I saw some parents once telling their kids to stop swearing once in this way: "Shut your f*cking trap! I told you both to stop swearing now! I mean it, you little sh#ts!"

Needless to say it doesn't work. The parents are now dead and the kids, in their fifties, still swear most of the time (every other word is a swear word in all their family get-togethers, but they mostly don't swear while out in public unless they are irate about something). So it is like the parents might as well have been talking to a brick wall in terms of the impact they made with their words on the kids.

It's the same with empathy: "You need to be sensitive to other people's feelings, you rotten, no-good  child! If you can't apologize to me right now (and I mean right now!) for crying in that store, you're going to get a good spanking on your little bottom when we get home! You want a sore bottom? You are really going to have something to cry about then! In fact, I hope you cry all night long! And it will hurt like Hell! You asked for it! You're going to get it good!" - A parent who talks this way is teaching the opposite of empathy. They are teaching cruelty. And the hypocrisy is rampant!

What is more, children can detect hypocrisy as young as seven years old, and furthermore, they know that it is wrong. You cannot fool children to do as you say and to ignore what you do. While we think of teens as having lost respect for their parents, young children can lose respect for a parent too. The parent will have a very hard time winning respect back once it is lost. Trying to force a child with commands to respect you because you are their parent does not work either. 

In this article by the online magazine "Fatherly" (written by Virginia Pelley) children want respect as much and as deeply as adults do:
The crux of the matter, however, is that parents who complain about kids being disrespectful often treat their kids with disrespect, says John Petersen, Ph.D., a clinical psychologist in South Bend, Indiana ... 

... A helpful way to think of respect for you as a parent is to strive for cooperation, not compliance, Petersen says. When you’re ready to head out with your kid to do errands, for example, it can be trying to say calmly, “I know you’re having fun with your toy right now, so take another minute to play with it, but then we have to go pick up your sister at practice,” instead of, “Put it down and let’s go, now.” But the payoff is a kid who knows how to show respect for others ...

... You’re going to make mistakes. All parents do. You can mitigate the damage to your family relationships with an apology that makes them feel heard and understood, Petersen says.
First, ask your family what the experience was like for them. Listen, honor their emotional experience and summarize what they expressed, he suggests. Even if you see the situation differently, talk about what you’re prepared to do so it doesn’t happen again. 

In order to have a healthy approach to teaching your child how to have empathy and how to apologize, think about yourself as someone who is on stage in front of someone who is really impressionable (your child), and they are watching everything you do, and may very well be normalizing what you do too. If they are critical thinkers, they may not approve of everything you do even though you are their parent (it is actually natural for them to have different perspectives than you about your behavior: you cannot expect to be thought of as an exemplary parent throughout your life, and if you aren't narcissistic, you won't become enraged about that fact either - which is to say that narcissists become enraged at the thought that they aren't perceived as being "wonderful" or "better than other parents").

Parents should always understand that if they are critical, analytical and discerning of how other people behave, their children will probably be too. Likewise if you are critical of your children, they will probably be critical of you (even if they do it behind your back). Narcissists want to have the entitlement to criticize others on steroids while never being criticized themselves. Good luck with that.

Apologies will work the same way. Healthy approaches to apologies are about you, the parent, modeling good apologies towards a person or people you have hurt and want to make amends to.

If you are a child abuse survivor and reading this, realize that growing up in an environment where you were expected to apologize too much and too often, but never or rarely saw your parent apologize, it is crazy-making. These are really not teaching moments. I go into how it effects children when I flesh out the section for child abuse survivors below (recognizing what you went through and the symptoms you may have as a result of your upbringing). 

Following are the articles on healthy ways to help kids understand the impact they have on others. Note: I could not find a single article that suggested forced apologies were good parenting practices. 

After these articles, I talk about why abusers have such a hard time taking the healthy approaches as stated in these articles. But for the rest of us, I hope these articles (most of them written by experts in the field of child psychology) make sense:

Parents: Take a timeout before you force your child to apologize - by Laura Bailey from The University of Michigan

excerpt:

... Parents who force unremorseful kids to apologize to others before they’re truly sorry may do more harm than good.
That’s because the main point of an apology—to express remorse and repair relationships—is lost because children may dislike the apologizer even more after the insincere apology than before. Children know when you mean you’re truly sorry.
The new study from the University of Michigan looked at whether children distinguish between willingly given and coerced expressions of remorse—and they do ...
... “Coercing your child to apologize is going to backfire. Other kids don’t view that apologizer as likable. The teachable element of having the child apologize has gone away and the goal of the apology prompt—to help your child express remorse, soothe someone else’s hurt feelings and make your child more likable—is lost.” (quote by Craig Smith, research investigator at the U-M Center for Human Growth and Development).
How can parents help their young children respond with empathy after they’ve upset another person, and ultimately deliver a willing apology?
“When your child is calm, help them see how the other person is feeling, and why,” Smith said. “An apology is one way to do it, but there are lots of ways. Research shows that even preschoolers value it when a wrongdoer makes amends with action. Sometimes this is more powerful than words.”

Children Are Wired For Empathy And Insisting On Apologies Is Not Necessary - by Adriadne Brill

excerpt of the headlines in the article:

* Children are Wired for Empathy

* A Child’s Apology Might Not Look Like One At All

* Going Beyond Just “I am Sorry”

* How to Teach Children To Say Sorry Without Insisting on Forced Apologies

* Creating opportunities for Children To Learn How to Make Amends
   1.Listen with Curiosity

   2. Avoid Blame (talks about having a blame free home)

   3.Activate Empathy

   4.Patience and Flexibility ("A rushed sorry is not nearly as valuable than thought out way apology")

   5. Notice the Sincere Apologies

   6. Model Making Amends (i.e. model apologies to others and your children)

* The Take Away

   "When it comes to helping children learn to say sorry, remember that more valuable than the words our children use, it is what they take away from each moment".

Why you shouldn’t force children to apologize - by Alison Bowen for the Chicago Tribune

excerpt:

In his latest research, released Nov. 19 in the Merrill-Palmer Quarterly, Smith and his co-authors found kids were aware when apologizers were coerced and didn’t like that — for them or the recipient.
Parents often urge children to immediately apologize, he said. And although that is not out of bad intentions, it can be counterproductive. Other children see a lack of authenticity, and a child forced to apologize is learning to feign remorse.
“One of the reasons I think we do it, with apologies, is because it’s a really accepted script that we use; it’s really almost an expected script,” he said. “We want to prepare them to be successful socially, and part of what that entails is being able to make amends.”

... The researchers wanted to explore whether children are sensitive to the fact that some apologies do not convey true remorse. Even young children, Smith noted, understand that an apology is a way of showing that someone feels bad about something. “They understand that if a victim gets an apology, they’re typically going to feel better than a victim who did not get an apology.” ...

Chiding your kids publicly to apologize can make them less 'likable.' Here's why. (Maybe you both need a time-out) - by Robby Berman for Big Think

excerpt:

A new study finds that making children apologize can make things worse.
When kids say fake "sorry" their victims dislike them even more.
Children respond most positively when regret is sincere.
"You did what? You apologize right now!"
That may be the sound of a grownup making a mistake. According to new research published by the University of Michigan this year, forcing a child to apologize when they don't mean it usually does more harm than good.
"Coercing your child to apologize is going to backfire," says the study's author, Craig Smith, of the University's Center for Human Growth and Development. "Other kids don't view that apologizer as likable. The teachable element of having the child apologize has gone away and the goal of the apology prompt — to help your child express remorse, soothe someone else's hurt feelings and make your child more likable — is lost."

Should Parents Make Their Children Apologize? (This is what decades of research say about children and apologies - by Denise Cummins Ph.D.

excerpt:

... Should parents insist that children apologize when they cause intentional or unintentional harm to another? The evidence seems to indicate the following practical course of action:
1. Encourage young children to apologize to each other because it will help mend hurt feelings, and very young children don't seem to distinguish between prompted apologies and spontaneous apologies.
2. As children reach elementary school age, spontaneous apologies have more impact, so parents should think twice about whether and how to prompt apologies. If your child's apology doesn't seem sincere, it will have less impact in mending broken relationships.
3. Offers to make restitution not only heal hurt feelings, they also make the repair to broken relationships. Parents can be helpful in making suggestions of how children can make up for the damage or hurt they caused either intentionally or unintentionally ...

There are many more articles on this subject, but they more or less say the same thing in different ways.

As you can see, most of these approaches are anti-authoritarian. The authoritarian approach is: "You MUST apologize!" And in cruel, punishing abusive families it is: "You MUST apologize or there will be dire consequences for you including our cruelty."

IF YOU HURT OR WHIP THE CHILD

DOES HE BEHAVE AND APOLOGIZE?

THE ABUSIVE APPROACH TO GETTING A CHILD TO APOLOGIZE
AND THE EFFECTS TO THE CHILD

One of the things people learned back in the olden times when torture devices and torture chambers were all the rage is that it did not necessarily work in getting the truth out of victims (if the prosecutor and the monarch were looking for the truth). The thing it tended to get out of victims is what the torturer wanted to hear - and it was done mainly to get the torture to stop. So a lot of people ratted on people who were innocent. Even the victim might be innocent. So you and the innocent people you ratted on might go to the stake or chopping block or get drawn and quartered. 

One of the reasons why America adopted "innocent until proven guilty" was because they had the foresight to reject these practices. 

Killing innocents probably did not move monarchs to much regret in these circumstances because the people who worshiped them ("Our Great Leader") were brainwashed to seeing them as close to God (and God's perceptions and benevolence). Also, there were so many documents to sign and court intrigues that the monarch often made hasty decisions just because he or she was overwhelmed by so many of them. There were also "persuasions" to listen to by cabinet members. If you killed a lot of innocent people, it was the cost of doing business, and you could find the real people responsible eventually and kill them too. 

And, of course, you had to find a few others who might be perceived as getting out of hand and kill them at the same time. Rebellions were not allowed and monarchs never thought much about the why part of rebellions. That got some of the monarchs killed themselves (the last Russian Czar comes to mind). 

For all intents and purposes, child abusers act like corrupt implacable monarchs. Like monarchs, they expect to be flattered. They will go into a rage if you don't flatter them. That is because there is an assumed hierarchy. They expect that you will follow their orders and conform even if the orders are clearly not to your benefit and cruelly designed. It is watered down monarchy, typically referred to as "authoritarian parents". 

Parents should never have been allowed to have as much power as they do. In the present legal system, if you want to make your underage child a slave to you and a whipping boy for everything that goes wrong in the life of the parent, or in the family, you can pretty much get away with it, especially if you home school or otherwise indoctrinate your children.

And a lot of psychologists think that after these child abuse victims have been damaged by years and years of this treatment that therapy can heal these victims.

But the problem should not look like this. It is really like this:

"You get to do anything you want to your child (and be sure to home school so there will be no eyes on the situation), be abusive, invalidating, cruel, scary and unhinged, and destroy your kid as much as you can ... because when he or she is 18, or 25, or 38, he or she might discover they were abused and seek therapy from us. Then we may be able to heal the child." - it is just wrong. It's like saying "Drive down the highway any old way you want, in which ever lane you want, and even recklessly, flex your 'freedom muscles', even drive drunk if you choose, and anyone that you hit? We'll be there for therapy for them."

There is a reason why we, as a society, should not expose people (and especially children) to danger. And yet, children under 12 are beaten a lot more than adults, are abandoned more than adults, they are raped quite a bit more more than adults, they are abducted far more than adults, and they suffer a lot more than adults because their constitutions are simply not ready for this level of cruelty.

Part of the problem is that narcissists have hair trigger rage (based on shame) which a child can never solve. It should never be a child's responsibility regardless. I have included a video below where psychologist Dr. Ramani Durvasula talks about the rage cycle of narcissists, the unpredictability of the rages, the vindictive part of the rages, and how the rages can be about something else but are taken out on you, the child, instead.

But ... in order for the narcissist to keep himself (or herself) emotionally regulated (i.e. out of experiencing the overwhelming rage-which-is-based-on-shame), they constantly want apologies from you. They want you to take on their shame so that they will not feel shame (and feeling so emotionally unhinged that they want to hurt you and the relationship they are in with you). Always remember, the discard stage happens around issues of their shame, and their inability to handle it.

If you don't offer the apology, or cannot be talked into an apology, the rage gets quite a bit worse in the narcissist and they become very vindictive, petulant and cruel to make you bend to their will. It's in the video.

Obviously this should never be a child's responsibility. We do have to have laws to keep this from happening to children. But in the meantime, children are counted on by these parents for regulating their parent's rage via apologies. Children who are abused for "lack of apology" often don't know what they have done and don't mean to hurt their primary caregivers anyway, and most of the time don't even understand what is going on, in the same way that a victim in the torture chamber says something to the torturer to end the torture. It doesn't work.

If you actually click on Dr. Ramani's video, you can see the comments from many, many child abuse survivors. The high majority of the people who comment tell others to walk away from these relationships.

If something has been un-fixable for 18 years, you don't keep trying to fix it. And by age 18, you know that all of the apologies over all of the "nothings" and erroneous stuff and the fantasies the narcissist has about your character and intentions (they are exceptionally bad at reading people), never ever fixed anything any way, at any time. I think every child gets to the point of "this is my last apology. I can't do this any more." And they walk away from their parent. The parent can cry the blues, make up even more stuff about the child, go on a retaliation binge (which they do), whine to their friends about how they are the victims and how much you wronged them (which they do too, and I bet if you are the child, you have lost a lot of respect for your parent for doing this), and you can be vilified to everyone you know without breaking your resolve.

The reason you don't give in to them is because these apologies are so wrong, and make you so ill, you can't do them any more. Adulthood gives you the strength to walk away. And it is like walking away from a cult where they will punish you if you try to run away with anything other than the shirt on your back.

Once you are out of the role of apologizer for all of these rages, the narcissist will hate you, and the hate will eat them alive. They become obsessed and possessed by thoughts and plans of putting any and all culpability on to you, their child, especially if you have served that role for them in the past (the scapegoats are the children in narcissistic families who generally get put into these roles). Sometimes the smear campaign is enough for some narcissists, especially if they can collect a lot of people, but often it isn't enough because part of narcissism is paranoia. They focus so much of their energy on people, and triangulating people, and manipulating people to get into positions of power and dominance, and vengeful thoughts and plans, especially if they are malignant narcissists, that hate is just another "people focused" thing of theirs that they get fixated on, unlike the rest of us who are just trying to bring up our kids in the healthiest way possible, keeping food on the table, working our jobs, and being with our spouses. They desperately want to harm you more, much more, but they don't know how to do it without narcissistic fall out (i.e. without the possibility of moral people ashamed of them).

And despite all of the hate they have for you, and all of the damage they want to do to you, all of the head games and chess matches they want to play with you, and the push-pull love-you-hate-you scenes, you just want out of the crazy cult of their paranoia-and-rage cycles and start a new life. That is obvious from the comments sections for children of narcissists.

Anyway, if that wasn't enough to deal with, you will be expected to apologize to other members of your family who are abusive and bullying. The strong-arming to apologize to other abusers is a big red flag of Malignant Narcissism. There is a reason why they want this so badly from you, and I will be covering it in another post.

In order to coerce and terrorize you to continually apologize for things you didn't do or say throughout your childhood, they have to do an incredible amount of gaslighting and invalidation of your experiences, feelings and thoughts. They can't really get you to apologize for nonsense without those tactics.

Children experience both of these tactics as confusion and anxiety. If you have seen the Gaslight movie you see how the main character becomes very confused and anxious, almost unhinged by the possibility that she does not know her own mind and perceptions. She gets talked into being crazy. If you have ever had terrible arguments where you are defending yourself over what you are feeling, or thinking, or experiencing, you know how infuriating or frustrating it is when the narcissist insists you were feeling or thinking or experiencing something else entirely - that is an instance of invalidation. When they feel entitled to tell you what your reality is, that is gaslighting.

And believe it or not, they even gaslight you and tell you what you were going through when they weren't there for the experience that you had. It happens more than you would think!

If you are a child, you may have even been punished for your narcissist's crazy-making fixed opinions about how crazy you are and the narcissists insistence that your feelings, thoughts and experiences are not valid. The only reality that the narcissist accepts is their own opinion about the feeling, thought and experience you were going through.

If a child is forced to apologize with all of this going on, and for at least 18 years of it, it adds up to trauma in the child. With other kinds of traumas added to the mix, the end result may be full blown PTSD (or C-PTSD - which is recognized by The World Health Organization but not by the Diagnosis and Statistics Manual of Mental Disorders, the latter using the term PTSD instead).

The problem for children who have been put in the endless apologizing role where the apologies always go from the child out to the parent and extend to other abusers, is that their trauma cannot be resolved inside the family. One of the big reasons why it cannot be resolved is that narcissists lack empathy and self reflection. They aren't going to be soothing their child. They aren't going to be apologizing to their child for hurting them.

The common narcissistic apology, in fact is, "I'm sorry you feel that way" (I will be discussing the narcissist's apologies in an upcoming post). This is why tougher laws must be instated for victims of child abuse. This is why children need to be given some rights to go into foster care if they want to. I will also be discussing what I found were adult children's wishes about what they wanted in terms of stopping the abuse, but to give you a nibble, about half of all child abuse victims would have jumped at the opportunity to be placed into foster care. If you are psychologist, run these statistics yourself, and I think you will see similar numbers to what I saw.

Now some of the reasons why the forced apology with invalidation and gaslighting happens so frequently to victims of child abuse is that the parent may have suffered child abuse too. Alternatively, they could have been a Golden Child in their family of origin and feel that shame is beneath them, something for other people, never for them.

In terms of the non-Golden child abuse victims who tend to take on a victim-type mentality, and be the covert vulnerable type of narcissists: they could have seen or experienced too much shaming in their childhoods and cannot stand any more of it landing on them. So to make themselves feel better from all of the trauma triggers that shaming brings to them, they do what their parents did: put the blame and shame on the child instead. In fact, where you find covert narcissists, you often find that they are super-sensitive to any criticism and any hint of shame. They become wildly destructive over perceived criticisms and perceived shaming, in fact (and yet they dish out plenty of it). It is common for covert narcissists to present with cormorbid conditions like PTSD.

For the Golden Child types of narcissists (who tend to be more of the grandiose style narcissists), they were groomed to feel they could do no wrong, as well as not to feel empathy for victims of bullying, and to go along with flying monkey pursuits and agendas like bullying, shaming and smear campaigns for the head narcissist in their family of origin. While they, too, are rageful and sensitive to criticism, they are not as sensitive as someone who has had direct hits of erroneous shaming in childhood and is saddled with trauma. They appear smug and unmoved emotionally while shamed (much like Jeffrey Epstein when interrogated by police).

Not being able to handle shame in a healthy way other than to be vindictive and rageful would also explain why perpetrators often choose going to prison over intensive daily therapy and anger management classes. And they do. They cannot stand the thought of feeling or dealing with shame in a therapist's office, or in front of other perpetrators at classes, so they think that prison will be a lot easier for them.

It means that most narcissistic parents will not be practicing the kinds of healthy parenting tips I discussed at the beginning of the post. Without any consideration for healthier parenting approaches, not caring about how this impacts the child, no way out for the child unless the child knows to call 911 or Domestic Violence Services, you have a more and more traumatized child (something that society will be saddled with in terms of on-going cost for trauma therapy).

"The Narcissist and the Shame-Rage Spiral"

by psychologist, Dr. Ramani Durvasula

(my hope is that this video of hers explains why you can't "win" with a narcissist

who wants you to take on all faults within a family):

further reading:

Gaslighting: is an apology necessary to heal after you’ve been abused? (Restorative justice is an approach to healing. But how is it possible with sociopaths, pathological liars, blackout drinkers who rely on fractured memory for truth?) - by Ariel Leve for The Guardian

Characteristics of Abusers 

Sorry Not Sorry -- Do You Force Apologizing in Your Home? (Forced apologies are as common as forced sharing in our culture. But apologies that are insincere are also ineffective.) - by Avital Schrieber Levy, Contributor for The Huffington Post

Apologies (Abuse and Relationships) - by Michael Samsel

The value of an apology in sexual assault claims - by Tracey Emmott

Apologizing When You’ve Done Nothing Wrong - by Laura Polk for Crosswalk.com

You’ll Be Sorry – Children and Apologies - by Janet Lansbury for Elevating Child Care

Cult leaders often have the same characteristics as abusive parents (or abusive heads of a household): here is an article I found on Psychology Today by Joe Navarro who explains the characteristics of cult leaders

Here's what works way better than forcing your kid to say sorry (You can insist that your child apologize, but how can you help them to feel genuine remorse, make amends and do better next time?) - by Rachael Rifkin for Today's Parent 

What to Say to Little Kids Instead of 'Say Sorry' - by Michelle Woo

Instead Of Forcing Preschoolers To Apologize, We Should Be Doing This Instead - by Lauren Celenza for Scary Mommy

What to Do When Your Child Refuses to Apologize - by staff of Sleeping Should Be Easy