Owning Up
Our sons are saying a new thing: “I’m sorry.”
They are, at last, expanding their range of empathy to include acknowledgement of where they have gone wrong.
They are saying it for things they do at home—messes, mishaps, etc., and they are also saying it when they hurt each other.
It’s rewarding to see my children normalizing apology because as men of the future, I hope they continue to utilize that tool with grace and honesty.
With this new sense of acknowledgement however, they are also really laying it on thick sometimes. Their “I’m sorry’s” become, “I’m soooo sorry.”
Where are they learning this from?
Two places.
From me, because I apologize quite often: when I have genuinely misstepped, and as a verbal misread of someone’s feelings.
And two, their environment of guilt. It’s true my wife and I have high standards for them. We would like them to contribute to the household chores and feel empathy and acknowledge their faults and have feelings and be gentlemanly and—you know, all those things that six and eight-year-old boys should be doing.
Should be doing.
But they’re kids. They are children, and children are born innocent. They do not need to feel like they are on trial.
We’ve discussed apologies and how and when to do them. When they’re genuine and when they’re groveling. When they’re warranted, and when they might not be.
This will take time for them to understand, the same way it will take me time to dismantle the Catholic guilt and boil down the lifelong fallout of my father’s narcissism. It will also take time for my wife to shed the “do it right the first time” mindset her Vietnam vet father drilled into them.
At the very least, I hope our sons’ apologies will be different from the only two that are available today:
1. A forced apology called out by someone’s self-righteous grievance (e.g. de rigueur far left wokeness), or
2. The non-apology, where the accused reminds the confronter that they should be sorry for feeling the way they do about the actions of the accused. (e.g. anything that comes out of a Republican lawmaker’s mouth)
Neither work.
So, can we try to create an environment of owning up with humility, whereby our sons become men who know when and how to apologize? Can we do this and not feel bad about it? That’s the hope.
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This post is republished on Medium.
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Photo credit: Unsplash
