(It turns out Snarly and Sumac have slightly different apology approaches, as you’ll see.)

Here at SorryWatch we are grieved and intrigued* to find that not everyone agrees about the goodness of good apologies. There are many reasons for this because, weirdly, people are different.

(*Also we are stunned.)

Here’s one I think is major: bullying kids to apologize.

Wait, aren’t the SorryWatchers big fans of apologies from children? Aren’t we always posting enchanting and hilarious apology notes from impossibly winsome children? Don’t we have a whole category called “Youth Apologizes”?

What are we, HUGE HYPOCRITES?

No, my friends, not so. There’s a huge difference between insisting that kids apologize to others they’ve hurt, and making them apologize to you.

Or your spouse, or the whole family. I think it’s because when you make kids abase themselves that way, you push them out of the family circle, and make them grovel to get back in. Or partway back in. That’s sadistic.

I first thought about this when a friend – a charming, outgoing person – gingerly asked me questions about apology and what use it could possibly be. It turns out that she fears and suspects apologies. During her interesting childhood, it often happened that her dramatic mother would complain tragically to her Important and Busy father about some alleged mischief or rudeness from the kid. The father would descend from intellectual heights and order his daughter to apologize.

She remembers apologies as her mother getting her in trouble with her father. It’s hard for her not to view them as manipulative ploys she wants no part of.

Those apologies celebrated the alliance between mother and father, and pushed the daughter away.

I started noticing references to such apologies in things I read.

In a book about psychotherapy, Deborah Anna Luepnitz’s Schopenhauer’s Porcupines, she describes a patient, “Dave,” who recalled his father “punishing him by making him stand up at the dinner table and apologiz[e] for making a mess.”

Where had I heard of a routine like that? In Irène Némirovsky’s The Wine of Solitude, she describes a regular feature of family meals, young Hélène’s mandatory abasement for decorum breaches. Thus, at a family lunch where she has been criticized for having her mouth open, and for knocking over a glass:

“But for Hélène, the hardest part was still to come: she had to kiss the pale face she so hated, and which always felt cold to her burning lips; she had to place her closed mouth against the cheek she wanted to lacerate with her nails, then perhaps say, ‘I’m sorry, Mama.’

“She could feel a strange sense of self-pride shudder and bleed within her, as if a more mature soul was trapped within her child’s body, and this offended soul was suffering.

“’You won’t even say sorry, will you? Oh! Please, for heaven’s sake, don’t bother. I don’t want an apology that comes from your lips but not from your heart. Go away.’”

I heard the same revulsion from a friend who hasn’t forgotten the long-ago indignity of being forced to apologize to an assistant principal and kiss her cheek.

It was second grade. Wendy’s lunch was missing. Mrs. Taylor insisted that she and Wendy would look in all the lockers for the lunch. Wendy didn’t think this would produce the lunch. “What I said was, ‘This is silly.’ What she heard was ‘You are stupid.’”

The principal made Wendy apologize. “You hurt Mrs. Taylor’s feelings. You upset her.” Which is an interesting way of looking at the relationship between an adult and a second-grader.

“I had to kiss her horrible powdered cheek and smell her perfume,” says Wendy, still disgusted. I asked if this had turned her against apologies. “I’m much less interested in apologies than in a change of behavior,” she answered.

My friend Felicity told me about the time in fourth grade she did something to outrage mean Sister Bernadette at St. Gemma’s in Leeds.

“I was forced to stand up and apologize to the whole school, at an assembly. I had no idea what I had done. Still don’t know, to this day. She was hissing “YOU KNOW EXACTLY WHAT YOU DID” in the meanest tone imaginable. I was sobbing (I was 8 years old) and deeply embarrassed and shamed and could barely say anything, but she had a painfully tight grip on my arm and forced me to utter an incoherent apology, the gist of which was that I didn’t know what I’d done but I was sorry.

“This memory is still extremely upsetting to me 64 years later. Sometimes it makes me cry! So, yeah, traumatic.”

Felicity doesn’t hold this episode against nuns or Catholic schools (she speaks well of the “sweet, gentle Sinsinawa Dominicans” at her previous school). She doesn’t hold it against apologies. (She might have a thing about Leeds, though.)

But I think many people do associate all apologies with adults humiliating children by making them apologize inappropriately.

What was wrong with those incidents? Sometimes it’s making children apologize for unstated things, sometimes for trivial things, or even things that didn’t happen. Sometimes the point is to dominate the child. The element of humiliation in front of a group – the school assembly, everyone at the table – is also an ugly thing. The forced cheek-kissing is also unpleasant.

Forcing children to go through rituals like these is teaching them the wrong things. (Plus? Mean.) It teaches them that apologies don’t spring from feeling bad about something you’ve done and hoping to better – they spring from submitting to humiliation and cruelty.

Sometimes it is appropriate to make children apologize. I think my mother was right to make me apologize to the scary old lady across the street for picking her tulips, even though I sobbed. They were just so pretty! I didn’t know it was different from picking buttercups from our lawn! I didn’t know it wouldn’t bloom again for a year! (I wasn’t made to kiss her cheek.)

But that’s the only time I can remember her making me apologize. I was never forced to apologize to her (even when I refused to eat the scrambled eggs she had colored green just for me and Jeannie) or my father (even when I leapt upon him while he was digesting his dinner, shrieking “ROMPO!”)

My husband remembers just one occasion in his childhood when he was made to apologize. He went to the corner store with an older kid, and came in eating cookies. He told his mother ‘The cookies in the barrel are free! Chuckie told me!’

She took him back to the store. He wept as he confessed and apologized to a surprised and embarrassed storekeeper. Mostly he was crying because he was a good kid, who would never steal cookies. He sorrowed at having been led into crime. But he feels it was right that she had him apologize.

He doesn’t seem to have forgiven Chuckie.

I won’t even get into times when fighting kids are forced by adults unconcerned with justice to shake hands. The adult doesn’t inquire and doesn’t care whether one kid was fighting in self-defense, having been attacked.

“I don’t want to see any more fighting. Now, shake hands. JASON. SHAKE. HANDS.”

Oh yeah, people are different.

Snarly says: I believe in making LITTLE kids apologize when they have hurt someone else. Ontology begets phylogeny. Embryos advance as they grow. Make them model the behavior and they internalize the behavior and it becomes part of them. When they’re little OF COURSE it won’t come from the heart. They’re tiny narcissists.

I agree with all your examples about the HOWS of the forced apologies being bad — no KISSING, no using apology as a way to shove conflict under the rug and forget who wronged who and turn apologizer/apologizee into equals.

But if you hit or bite, you fucking apologize you little fuck. And the “How would you feel if” is useful in a Jewish-guilt-instilling sort of way — at this point I can say, “It’s up to you but I really think you should apologize,” and they pretty much do it. That line about parents being able to push your buttons because they installed them — I’ve INSTALLED THE BUTTONS.