Just goes to show you, I guess. Don't let your hopes get too high, and you won't have to suffer the crushing disappointment that failure brings.

The mother of the little boys who went nuts yesterday brought them in for a forced apology. She set one of them in front of me to make his amends, then backed off with the other to wait his turn. The first little boy stared and smiled at me; he was obviously not feeling particularly penitent. Why should he? At the time he was acting up, he wasn't trying to be "naughty." Now, more than twenty-four hours later, he probably wasn't even remembering the behavior in question. His mom wasn't in hearing range; the boy and I were smiling at each other, and I wasn't about to try to drag an apology out of the child.

Frankly, I was, and am, a little unhappy with the whole situation. I'm not a big believer in forced apologies. If another adult makes an insincere apology, I consider it rude. Why should it be any different for a child? Maybe I'm of a different school of thought than the mother, but I don't think forcing a child to repeat "I'm sorry" - when they so very obviously don't know what they're to be sorry for - accomplishes anything.

The boys are three years old. Empathy is just beginning to be formed in their brains. Maybe the mother could have explained to the boys how it made the other children sad to have the stories interrupted; maybe they could have been shown that I was unhappy because I had to stop reading. I'm not in the mother's shoes, so I don't know what she actually did, and I can't say for certain what I would have done. All I know is that the boys were obviously confused as to exactly why they were to say, "I'm sorry" to me.

They finally did say the words, though, when their mother said that if they didn't say them, they wouldn't be getting any treats. "I sowwy." "I sowwy." I could have cried; I could see the connection between the forced apology and the treats forming in their minds. It took me years to be able to break the connection between the words "I'm sorry" and the irrelevancies with which my own mother linked them.

"I'm sorry" - I'm sorry I got caught.
"I'm sorry" - I'm sorry you're mad at me, and would do anything to make you stop scowling.
"I'm sorry" - Please don't hit me! See how subservient I can be!
"I'm sorry" - I said I'm sorry, so stop crying before Mom comes in the room!
"I'm sorry" - And if I say so ten more times, I might not be grounded anymore.
"I'm sorry" - I'm sorry that you don't seem to love me enough to apologize for calling me those awful names; I'm sorry that I had to crawl down here on bended knee to break the silence; I'm sorry that my friends had to hear you screaming at me again; I'm sorry that the spark of fury is still in your eyes, and I don't know how to make it go away, so I'll say I'm sorry again and hope for the best. I'm sorry...

It took a great long time before I learned the real meaning of those words, the one where you truly regret your actions and would love to take them back, not out of personal fear, but out of regret for how you've made another person feel. If I can help it, I don't want cause my child any confusion over that meaning. If my child does something wrong, then I want to help them right it; I want to help them see how other people have been made to feel by their actions. I want to let them see through my actions, and my own, honest apologies, just what those words mean; I want to know that when they say those words themselves, that they are honestly and truly sorry.

Maybe that's hoping for too much. I suppose I'll have to wait and see.

I checked out a bunch of classic bedtime stories, and I'll be reading a different one to him each night. We'll have this man knowing his Keats from his Milne in no time flat. I just wish we had a more pressing reason for it at the moment.