Why Children Need Adults Who Apologise

“Say sorry.”

It’s one of the first moral instructions children receive, delivered early and often. Sorry for snatching. Sorry for shouting. Sorry for the thing you said to your sister. We mean it genuinely. We want them to understand that their actions affect other people, that repair matters. It’s a good lesson.

It just tends to come with an unspoken rule: one that seems to exempt the adults who do the teaching.

And then a long day happens. We’ve all been there: as an adult who loses their temper, says something unfair, or handles a moment poorly. But suddenly, the rules seem to change. Sometimes we explain it away. Sometimes we simply move on, assuming the child will follow. Sometimes we expect them to understand because, well, we’re the adult, and adults have their reasons. What we less often do is what we’d ask the child to do: stop, acknowledge it, and say sorry.

It’s an odd lesson to leave a child with. You are responsible for repairing your mistakes, but I am allowed to move past mine by virtue of being older. Or with more complex reasons to justify my actions.

Here’s a lesson that bears repeating in our line of work at Imagine If: children don’t need adults who never get things wrong. That would be an impossible standard, and an exhausting household to grow up in. What they need is adults who can recognise when they have, and do something about it. There’s a big difference between authority and infallibility, and making that distinction is uncharted waters for a lot of us grown-ups. Being the adult in the room means having more responsibility, not a monopoly on being right.

This matters because children learn about relationships far less from the instructions we give them than from the relationships they actually experience. If we tell a child that people should apologise when they cause harm, but rarely do so ourselves, they receive two lessons simultaneously. The spoken one says accountability matters. The experienced one says accountability is mostly something expected of people with less power. That second lesson tends to be the one that sticks, and the one to worry about.

At Imagine If, this comes up more than people might expect. Not as a grand philosophical discussion, but in ordinary moments. A parent recounting how they snapped at their child during homework and didn’t quite know how to deal with that afterwards. A child who’s learned to go quiet after conflict because that’s what they’ve seen modelled. The gap between what adults teach about accountability and what they demonstrate is rarely intentional, but it shows up, over and over again.

A genuine apology does something quite practical inside a parent-child relationship. It tells the child that they’re not simply required to absorb whatever an adult does because the adult has more authority. “I was frustrated, but I shouldn’t have shouted at you.” “I misunderstood what happened. I was wrong.” These are small sentences, but they change the shape of things. They communicate that another person’s feelings matter even when that person is smaller, younger, or dependent on you, and they demonstrate something children genuinely need to witness: that relationships can survive mistakes.

That last part is particularly important. Children will inevitably get things wrong. They will hurt people, say things they regret, lose their temper at the wrong moment. If their experience of adults is that mistakes lead to shame, defensiveness, or withdrawal, they may begin to associate being wrong with being unsafe; with the relationship becoming suddenly fragile or cold. But if they regularly see that adults make mistakes too, acknowledge them, and repair them, something different becomes possible. That you can mess up and still take responsibility. You can hurt someone without being a terrible person. You can admit you were wrong without losing your dignity. All of which are considerably more useful lessons than simply teaching children to say sorry on cue, or to say it for the sake of it.

There’s also a key difference between an apology and forcing one. Many parents know the familiar scene: two children argue, one pushes the other, an adult intervenes and says, “Say sorry.” The child reluctantly mutters it. Everyone moves on. Technically, an apology happened, but very little repair may have taken place. A meaningful apology requires some understanding of what happened and some willingness to own it, which is something that develops gradually with age and experience. Younger children are still building the capacity to understand another person’s perspective, regulate their strong feelings, and connect their actions with consequences. This is precisely why modelling these things matters so much. We cannot lecture children into emotional maturity. They need to see what it actually looks like in practice, from people they’re watching closely.

And adults are in a particularly powerful position to demonstrate it, because children are constantly observing how we handle the uncomfortable parts of being human. What do we do when we lose? What happens when someone challenges us, or when we realise we were wrong? Do we become defensive, blame someone else, or pretend it didn’t happen? Or can we stop, acknowledge it, and repair what we can? These moments are educational whether or not anyone calls them lessons.

Some — too many, in fact — adults worry that apologising to children will weaken their authority. That it opens a door to endless negotiation, or signals that we don’t really know what we’re doing. In practice, the opposite tends to be true. An apology doesn’t require giving up on a boundary. A parent can still hold firm that using physical violence isn’t acceptable while also acknowledging they shouldn’t have shouted when addressing it. Both things can be true at the same time, and children are perceptive enough to understand the difference when it’s modelled clearly. If the rules are genuinely about how people treat one another, it makes sense that they should apply in both directions.

However, the distinction between adult and child still stands. Adults carry greater power, greater experience, and greater responsibility for the environment children grow up in. Which is precisely why the adult carries more responsibility to repair when that power is misused — not less.

This is something we think about carefully at Imagine If, where the adults working with children are expected to hold themselves to the same standards of conduct they’re helping children develop. Not perfectly (nobody manages that), but honestly. The culture of a learning environment is built less from its stated values than from what adults actually do when things go wrong.

There’s also something in this that reaches well beyond childhood. Children who grow up watching adults apologise learn that relationships aren’t maintained by pretending conflict never happened. They learn that disagreement doesn’t automatically mean rejection, and that being hurt doesn’t mean a relationship has to end. These turn out to be fairly important things to know in adult life: in friendships, partnerships, workplaces, and eventually in their own parenting. Yet many of us arrive at those relationships without having seen much healthy repair modelled. Adults often know how to defend themselves, insist we were right, or wait for the other person to make the first move. What they often haven’t learned is how to simply say: I got that wrong. I’m sorry. Here’s what I’ll do differently.

What we see every day at Imagine If? That children are learning this from us long before they have the vocabulary to describe it.

And perhaps this is where it gets uncomfortable. Sometimes apologising to a child means confronting something about ourselves, like that we were harsher than we meant to be, that we reacted from our own stress rather than the situation in front of us, that we were so focused on correcting the child’s behaviour we stopped noticing our own. None of this asks a parent to spend their life forensically analysing every interaction for evidence of failure. Parenting already often generates more than enough unnecessary guilt. It simply asks us to leave a little room for humility. And to recognise that authority doesn’t make us exempt from the same standards of conduct we’re trying to teach.

Remember: children don’t need perfect adults. They need adults who can say “I got that wrong” and mean it. Because one of the most important things a child can learn is that having power doesn’t make you infallible, and being wrong doesn’t make you worthless. You can hold boundaries and still be humble. You can be the person responsible for a child and still be willing to look them in the eye and say, genuinely, I’m sorry. That may be one of the clearest ways we ever teach children what respect actually looks like. Not by defining it, but by showing it, even when it costs us something. It’s also, if we’re honest, one of the harder things we ask of ourselves at Imagine If: not just to talk about these values, but to practise them in real time, with real children, on the days when that’s less than easy.

For more grounded, practical reflections on the everyday realities of raising children, Unfiltered Parenting explores many of these ideas in depth, including boundaries, connection, and the ways our own patterns enter the parenting relationship.