Q&A | Should you make kids apologize?

Hello, welcome to episode 188. And today I'm answering the question. Should you make your kids apologize? Hi, this is Denaye. I'm the founder of Simple Families. Simple families is an online community for parents who are seeking a simpler more intentional life. In this show, we focus on minimalism with kids, positive parenting, family wellness, and decreasing the mental load. My perspectives are based in my firsthand experience, raising kids, but also rooted in my Ph.D. In child development. So you're going to hear conversations that are based in research, but more importantly, real life. Thanks for joining us.

Welcome to Simple Families. I'm so glad to have you back. If you're new to the show, this is our weekly Q and A episode where I take a question from an audience member this week. I'm going to answer a question about making our kids apologize and how do we handle it. If someone else tries to make our kids apologize and furthermore, how do we handle it when other adults are talking to our kids in a way that we don't love before we get into that question for the day, I want to share my something simple that I'm loving this week. This week, it's a book it's called the knowledge encyclopedia. It's a Smithsonian book. I'll put the link in the show notes at simplefamilies.com/episode188. First, let me give you a little background on why I like this book and how we use it with young kids, because at first glance, it doesn't really seem like a book that was made for young kids.

If you were following her around the holidays, you know that one of the things that made my gift guide this year was the library kit. And the past few months we've really started taking advantage of our local public library. More in the past, we had really struggled to get books and get them back on time. I don't know if that resonates with anybody, but the problem was we would get books from the library and they would get mixed in with our other books. And it would be hard to find them when the time came. So the simple system that has worked for us is to have a dedicated tote bag for library books and a dedicated bin. So when new books come into the house, they get put into the bin, which is right in the center of our play area for our kids. And they're easy to access.

We can see them and grab them quickly and we put them back there when we're done. Now, when we're done, done with a book like ready to take it back to the library, it goes back into the tote bag. That way on our next trip to the library, all the books that are ready to go back are right there, ready in the tote bag. So there's only one of two places in our home for library books, either in the bin for active reading or in the bag to go back to the library. Now that we're utilizing the library more often, I've been trying to integrate a tiny bit of structure into library trips. Back in episode 162, I interviewed Emily Cook and we talked about the big book overhaul that we did in our house. After I read Emily's book and Anne Emily's book, she talks about choosing high quality literature for our kids.

Now, when my kids go to the library, they're immediately drawn to the pop patrol books and to the Lego Ninjago books. A lot of things that I wouldn't call high-quality literature. These are the type of books I don't buy at home. If you want to learn more about that, go back and listen to that episode. simplefamilies.com/episode162. But the short of it is we only have so much time to read to our kids. You might have 10 minutes, 20 minutes an hour a day, whatever it is now, if you had like six hours a day to read to your kids, sure. Why not let them read paw patrol books for two hours. Most of us have less of a bandwidth for reading books aloud. And because of that, it's great. If we can choose really good literature for our kids, when we did our big book overhaul and got rid of all of our character books and a lot of the Disney books and stuff that my kids loved, I felt like a total jerk, but they didn't miss them even for a day.

The quality of the books that we have been reading has improved dramatically, but it doesn't stop. The fact that when they go to the library, they're still drawn to these books. They're still attracted to these books and they are absolutely allowed to bring those books home once in a while. But to avoid this, we'll often go to the library with a topic. And I will tell you that I'm not usually the one taking my kids to the library. Usually they go with our AU pair, our childcare provider. Often, most often they just go and play and read whatever they want to read while they're there. But sometimes we go with goals in mind and this knowledge encyclopedia has been really great for this. It's a really beautiful book. It's just one big book and it covers pretty much every topic. You can imagine everything from earth to nature the human body science history, and it has beautiful illustrations.

And my kids will often flip through it and see pictures of things that spark their interest. We'll read a tiny bit about it. And then we'll take that topic, go to the library and ask the librarian to help us find some more books. An example of this is robotics. There's a two-page spread on robots. And my son read this and got super interested in robots and has started to want to get other books about robots, other books that are age-appropriate for him since he's nearly six. So he's taken this topic and been able to dive deeper at the library. Now, many kids acquire interests like this randomly, and they don't necessarily need a book like this one. However, I do think this is a really cool way for both kids and adults to learn new things together. And because it covers such a broad variety of topics and just one book, there are a lot of conversation starters, a lot of invitations to go deeper and to learn more about things that they would have maybe not been exposed to otherwise.

So again, that book is the knowledge encyclopedia and everyone in our family loves it. It's been really fun and interesting for us to be able to just flip it open and learn something new together. And I'll put that link in the show notes for you simplefamilies.com/episode188. Before we get into today's question, here's a 62nd word from our sponsor. The sponsor for today is Kara. Kara is a company that I've been talking about for quite a while because I truly love it. As a podcast. Host care of gave me one month free to try and I loved it so much. I've been a paying subscriber for approximately the past year and a half. It's been a total game changer in the way that I feel day in and day out. You start by taking a really simple and easy online quiz about your diet, your health goals, your lifestyle, and then you get a list of recommended vitamins and supplements specifically for you.

Kara makes it really simple to take your vitamins every day, each month, they ship you 30 days worth. And in my case, I get 30 packets of vitamins and each day I open up the packet, take that day's worth of vitamins and then dispose of the compost friendly packaging. So if you're committed to making 2020, the year of getting on top of and staying on top of your health, I recommend try and care of. So give it a try for 50% off your first care of order. Go to take care of.com and enter the code "families 50" again, for 50% off your first care of order, go to take careof.com and enter the code "families 50" at checkout. Today's question is coming from Christine in Ridgefield, Connecticut, and Christine wrote, how do you handle if another adult forces your child to say, I'm sorry, this happened recently.

And it really upset my five-year-old ended upset me to actually, I found it to be very intrusive. How can I support him? And what can I tell him to say, if it happens again, I don't want him to feel the pressure to apologize for something that he's not sorry for, but I also don't want to raise a kid who would be flippant to an adult. Thanks so much for your question, Christine. It totally depends on who the adult is. If it's a random person, you're never going to see again. I'd probably just tell my kid to say no thanks. But if this person is a regular caregiver or an influential person in your kid's life, then I think it's worth having a conversation with them. There's two things going on in this question. One is addressing this idea of, should we force our kids to say, I'm sorry when they're not really feeling so sorry.

And the other is what do we do when other adults talk to our kids in ways that we don't really love? So first let's take the apology question. So I don't force my kids to say, I'm sorry. And it sounds like from your question, Christine, you don't either, and you don't want anybody else forcing that upon your kids. Apologies and saying, I'm sorry, are something that I really want my kids to come to on their own. I want them to say, they're sorry, when they truly mean it. I definitely think we can. And we should prompt our kids for manners. There are certain things like saying thank you that we often do need to remind our kids of, because thank you is something that we use second nature. If someone holds the door for you, you say thank you. If a cashier helps you at the grocery store, you say, thank you.

It's an automatic programmed response that comes with socialization. So at times we do cue our kids to learn these socialized behaviors. Although one might argue that they're going to learn these things naturally on their own, just from the people that they're around. I don't think there's anything wrong with gentle reminders when it comes to manners. Now apologies and saying, I'm sorry, that's something a little bit different because you're asking kids to profess a feeling or a sentiment that they might not actually feel like sometimes when my three-year-old says something unkind to my six-year-old. If I asked her to say, I'm sorry. Sure. She could say the words, I'm sorry, but she's not actually, sorry. She meant what she said. Now. She might be sorry, later on. But in general, I think particularly with females, we tend to say, sorry, a lot. It has become sort of our programmed response for everything, even in times when it's not necessarily appropriate.

And I just don't want my kids running around apologizing for everything when they don't mean it or when they don't need to be apologizing. Now I don't ask my kids to say, I'm sorry, but I do ask them to acknowledge the impact that they have on their environment. So let's say my six year old was in a hurry and running and accidentally ran into another kid. They collided. It was an accident. I could prompt him to say he's sorry, you just ran into that kid. Tell him you're sorry or I could prompt him to check on the kid. Hey, can you go ask that kid if he's okay. So I prompt him to walk over and say, Hey, I just ran into you. Are you okay? I did this a lot with my kids with one another too. I prompt them to check on each other.

So if they accidentally hurt or if they purposefully hurt each other, instead of forcing an apology, I do prompt them to go to the other person and say, Hey, are you okay? And by doing that, it cues them into this idea that their actions have an impact on the people around them. And they need to take a closer look at the impact that they had on the world and on the people in the world, whether or not they feel sorry about it, or the personal sentiments that surround that, that's really up to them to decide. I'm just not a big fan of empty apologies. And I will say my six year old has really never been forced to say that, he's sorry. And he didn't really say he was sorry until he was probably about four. And when he started saying it, he really meant it.

So Christine I'm with you on this. I'm not big on prompting kids to say, I'm sorry. And I also don't love it when other adults try to prompt my kids to apologize either. So unless there's an adult being completely inappropriate with my kids, I usually let it slide. I will say the exception to this is if it's someone that spends a lot of time and as a caretaker for my kids. So if it's a grandparent that spends a lot of time with my kids, if it's my full-time care provider, my husband and I, those people that are really influential, I want them to be intentional about the way they're interacting and the way they're talking to my kids. Yes, but I'm more flexible when it comes to other people in our world, because the truth is my kids are going to encounter a lot of different people with many different types of interaction and communication patterns.

And I do want them to be exposed to a variety. I think it's kind of unfair to ask everyone to speak to my kids exactly the way that I speak to my kids unfair. And I think it does a disservice to my kids. It shields them from opportunities to learn how to engage with different types of people. My karate teacher makes them do pushups when they're not paying attention. I don't love that, but whatever. Again, I'm not in the business of controlling every single aspect of my kid's life and the way that other people address them. My daughter's nursery school teacher makes her apologize to other kids when she does something undesirable. Again, I don't love that, but she's only there nine hours a week. And in those nine hours, this is probably doesn't happen that often. So I don't make a big deal out of it when it comes to picking my battles with other adults and my kids, I look at two things.

How influential are they in my kid's life? How much time do they spend with them? How much of an impact do they have on them? And just how inappropriate is it that they're acting towards my kids. If they're using profanity or calling my kids' names or being aggressive towards my kids, something like that. Yeah, that's a no-brainer. But otherwise, if it's just small differences in language and things that I don't love, but they're not the worst thing ever. Those are battles. I don't pick. I let those things slide. And then I trust that the influential adults in my kids' lives are setting a positive example. That's going to outweigh anything these other adults are doing. So I try not to sweat the small stuff. I pick my battles. I hope this has been helpful. Thanks for tuning in this has been episode 188 code of simplefamilies.com/episode188. If you want to leave questions or comments as always, thanks for tuning in.