“Mom, I’m sorry I didn’t listen about cleaning up,” my 7-year-old says as he wraps his arms around my waist. “It’s OK. I forgive you.” Just one hour earlier I had been red-faced and hollering at my children to clean
“Mom, I’m sorry I didn’t listen about cleaning up,” my 7-year-old says as he wraps his arms around my waist.
“It’s OK. I forgive you.”
Just one hour earlier I had been red-faced and hollering at my children to clean up their playroom. They didn’t listen. I gave them the typical parent rant:
“How difficult is it really to clean up one room? These are your things. You took them out. You need to be responsible. I clean the rest of the house. This is the one room you are supposed to keep clean. What is so hard to understand about that? Why don’t you just do it?”
They ignored me. So I sent them to their rooms for an hour and grounded them from video games. That’s when they suddenly realized I was talking.
After an hour of sitting in their bedrooms in solitude, the words I thought they hadn’t heard me saying must of sunk in. Or maybe it was the promise of more punishment. But the playroom was cleaned up.
My youngest son asked for forgiveness.
I forgave him.
In my opinion, forgiveness is one of the most difficult things to teach a child. Most adults have a hard time forgiving someone. How do you teach it to a 3-year-old?
It’s hard for a kid to forgive when his older brother hit him on purpose, when his younger sister dismantled the dump truck he spent hours building out of Legos, or when his younger brother threw his toothbrush in the toilet.
But hitting back or any type of retaliation isn’t going to make you feel better, I tell my children. And it’s going to get you in trouble, too.
The next step, of course, is forgiveness.
While my kids, at ages 3, 7 and 9, can understand that they don’t want to do something naughty back to a sibling because they might get punished, why they need to forgive the person that just hurt or irritated them is not so easy to comprehend. They don’t understand anything about bottled up anger or how carrying around thoughts of revenge can hurt them.
I simplify it. I just tell them forgiveness is good for the soul.
It has to start with the abuser saying, “I’m sorry.”
Parents often prompt their children to say this. But you rarely hear parents prompting their kids to reply, “I forgive you.”
I expect it to be said in the same way I expect my kids to use “please” and “thank you.” And the best way to show them how to do that, I suppose, is by saying it myself.
Someone told me last week that the world has become very unforgiving. I agree. I think there should be room for some mistakes. No one is perfect.
And there should be room for forgiveness, especially for a
7-year-old boy with a hopeful face and open arms.
• Mommy Talk is an online parenting blog written by Journal Times reporters Janine Anderson and Marci Laehr Tenuta. Find it online at www.journaltimes.com/mom.
