Why teaching by rote a sorry idea

LAST week, my youngest clobbered my first-born with a sponge sword. You wouldn’t imagine so, but sponge clobbers painfully if delivered with brute force.

It must have been obvious from the pink welt left behind the little tot had done wrong. A simple sorry to patch up sibling relations would work; but he refused to say it.

There’s little more disconcerting for a mom than a child who won’t apologise. It taps into our primal fear that we’ll have the one who grows up to embrace a life of crime and change his name to Jericho “Big Daddy” Goldfist.

One of the reasons humans tend to suffer in relationships, is we apply a lot of rules that don’t make sense – unless you delete emotion from the equation.

We have created a script for our children ( and ourselves) to follow and, quite often, they (and we) would far rather improvise than be told what to learn.

This is why the “magic word” theory that governs conventional parenting doesn’t always work, argues American writer and teacher Joellen Poon. We expect a lot from our kids these days, as we pick our way through a dog-eats-dog world, and figure that if we can train them to respond and act robotically to natural, humanly things, we’re sorted.

But we’re not. Take the example of how to say sorry to someone, says Poon. We tell little people saying sorry is enough. But Poon, a primary school teacher, has found in practice it isn’t. Plus, what is the point really of forcing an apology from someone who isn’t actually sorry, is too young to understand why a Lego brick to the head is bad, or is just apologising to avoid getting into trouble?

“When did we get this idea that two simple words had the power to absolve all offenses and heal all wounds?” asks Poon. “When did we get the idea that we were allowed to let our tongues flap loosely, make selfish decisions, and then simply shut the lid on the whole ordeal with these two little words? We’ve been trained to believe that these words do the trick, but make no mistake – there is no magic in them.”

Poon reckons many of us grew up being forced to say “sorry” too, with nobody actually taking the time to look at the incident in its entirety and helping the victim and perpetrator to do so, too.

This is exactly what Poon has done and it works. The formula she has taught her Grade Four class is simple, but effective : “I am sorry for. . .” followed by “this is wrong because. . .” and “in the future I will. . .” Once these three aspects of the dispute are covered, the fourth and final bit is a simple: “Will you forgive me?”

It’s a solution that takes into account the storyline, the characters, and their emotions. If you have to think about why the average, empathetic person would be sorry for an incident and come up with a positive way to stop it happening again you’re really writing your own script.

And if that helps me to avoid being mama to a Jericho “Big Daddy”, I’m on it.