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Apologize To Your Children
Especially If You Owe Them That
I read an article recently where the author lamented that “It seems the world wants us to blame everything on our parents. That way no one has to feel responsible for their negative actions.” I don’t want to name the schmuck who wrote that, because I’m really mad at that guy.
He went on to say that we, as parents, ought to maybe issue one blanket, cover-all apology to our kids for “ruining their lives” and then just move on. Be done with it. We should wash out hands of it, he claimed. His stance was that we pretty much all do some perceivably irreparable harm to our kids in raising them, so a patent apology ought to cover things and we can all just go back to the holiday dinner table and move on with our lives.
Except we can’t.
Not all of us, not all the time.
Sure, there are plenty of minor infractions that parents make along the way that don’t deserve a grand gesture, and maybe kids hang on to those even though we, their parents, have long since forgotten them.
But…did you get that part where the kids haven’t quite let them go?
Do you know what that means?
That means we hurt them. Intentionally or not, with malice or not, we caused harm to another human being. And it cut deeply enough…
