What Happened When I Asked My Children to Forgive Me
Parenting in Australia often comes wrapped in a particular kind of bravado. From the sidelines of a Saturday junior rugby match in Brisbane to the carpools of suburban Adelaide, mums and dads trade stories about how their kids shrugged off another parent's harsh word with a casual "yeah, whatever." We are taught to model strength, to keep a stiff upper lip, and to believe that authority means never buckling in front of the people we are raising. The idea of a parent kneeling down, looking a child in the eye, and saying "I was wrong, please forgive me" feels almost countercultural in a country that prizes resilience and self-reliance above most things.
I spent years telling my children to say sorry to each other, to friends at school, to the neighbour whose garden bin they had accidentally knocked over during a backyard game of cricket. The lesson was always delivered with a straight face, a pointed finger, and the expectation that the words would come quickly. What I never did, until a long winter evening in our Melbourne home, was turn that instruction back on myself and offer a genuine apology to the small humans I was raising.
That night, with the heater humming and the kettle cooling on the bench, I sat my three children down and asked them to forgive me. I had read enough, listened to enough sermons, and spoken to enough pastoral mentors to know it was overdue. What followed was not what I expected, and the lessons from that hour around the dining table have stayed with me through every school drop-off, every tantrum in the Coles aisle, and every quiet conversation since.
The apology I kept putting off
For nearly a year, I had been carrying a confession I could not release. There had been an afternoon in which I snapped at my eldest daughter over a minor mess in the laundry, a mess that did not deserve the sharpness in my voice. She had walked away quietly, and I had pretended not to notice the slump in her shoulders. The scene replayed in my mind every time I drove past her primary school in the eastern suburbs, and every time I packed her lunch with the careful precision I had previously reserved for my own reputation as a calm and measured parent.
I told myself I would address it the following weekend, and then the next, and then again after the school holidays. Each time I rehearsed the words in the car during my commute along the Monash, the apology felt bigger and more unwieldy. Australian parents, especially those shaped by the stoic narratives of the bush and the unrelenting pace of urban life, often treat asking forgiveness as a sign of weakness rather than a hallmark of integrity. I was buying into that script, even while telling my children the opposite.
Eventually, a friend who runs a small prayer group in Geelong asked me, with that gentle directness Australians sometimes deploy when they sense someone is struggling, whether there was anyone I needed to ask for forgiveness. I knew instantly who it was.
The lounge room confession
When the moment came, I did not have a plan. I only knew that if I waited any longer, the apology would calcify into something self-serving rather than honest. After dinner, as the dishes were being cleared and the dog was sniffing around for crumbs, I asked my kids to gather in the lounge room. The television was off, the phones were face down, and the curtains were drawn against the early dark of a Canberra winter.
I sat on the floor, which felt more honest than the armchair, and I told them what I had done. I named the moment. I described how their sister had felt. I confessed that my words were unkind and that I had let my frustration spill over onto a child who had done nothing wrong. I did not minimise, deflect, or pivot to talk about my own childhood. I simply asked each of them, including the one I had wronged, to forgive me.
The room was quiet. My younger two glanced at each other and then at the rug. My eldest stared at her hands. In that stillness, the Australian habit of brushing past hard emotions with humour or a quick change of subject felt miles away. We were sitting in the discomfort, and I had to trust that the discomfort itself was doing some necessary work.
The silence that stretched
For what felt like a long time, no one spoke. I had imagined that one of them would respond immediately, perhaps with the easy absolution that Australian parents are conditioned to expect when we say "it's all good" after a small blunder. Instead, the silence held, and I had to sit inside it without rushing to fill it.
I had read in a faith-based resource years ago that forgiveness offered too quickly can sometimes cheapen the wound it is meant to address, and the wisdom of that thought settled over me as my children processed what I had said. My eldest looked up at one point, her eyes a little wet, and asked whether I had truly meant it or whether I was just trying to make the problem go away. That question, asked without accusation, was a gift.
Around us, the house was ordinary. A stack of school permission slips for an upcoming excursion to the Australian War Memorial sat on the coffee table, alongside a half-finished jigsaw of the Great Barrier Reef. The ordinariness of the scene made the gravity of the moment feel even more significant. This was not a curated, picture-perfect confession. It was a parent, on a weeknight, admitting fault in front of witnesses who would remember.
What my children taught me in return
When the silence finally broke, my children did not deliver a tidy speech about grace or mercy. They were children, and they responded the way children often do. My youngest asked whether we could all have ice cream. My middle child asked me to promise that I would try not to do it again. My eldest, after another long pause, said she forgave me, and that she had been waiting a long time to hear me say those words.
That last phrase has stayed with me. She had been waiting. She had noticed the weight of what was left unsaid, and she had been carrying her own version of the apology she hoped would arrive. It is a sober reminder for parents, especially in a country where the Family Law Act and the broader framework of child protection legislation shape much of the public conversation about parenting, that children are not passive recipients of our care. They are observers, interpreters, and forgivers in their own right.
I think often of the advice offered by writers and pastoral voices whose work has helped shape my own faith walk, and one piece of writing that has stuck with me, which you can read at Sarkozy's reflections, captured something I could not have articulated at the time. Forgiveness from a child is not the soft, automatic thing we might imagine. It is a deliberate act, and it comes freighted with the child's own longing to be seen.
How it changed the rhythm of our home
In the weeks that followed, something shifted in our house. Not in a dramatic or theatrical way, but in the small, daily textures of life. We started checking in with one another more often at the dinner table, asking not just how the day was but whether anyone needed to say or hear something important. The ritual felt particularly fitting in a season when so many around us were juggling the demands of work, school pickups, and the quiet anxieties of a cost-of-living crunch that has shaped so much of contemporary Australian life.
I also noticed that I became quicker to apologise to my husband, to my own ageing parents who live across town, and even to the barista at our local café when I was unnecessarily curt about a milk order. There is a ripple effect when a parent models repentance, and I began to see it in places I had not anticipated.
My children are still children. They will still need correction, and I will still sometimes lose my patience in the rush of a weekday morning. The difference is that the door of confession in our home is no longer sealed shut, and they know, because they have been invited through it, that they are free to walk through it themselves whenever they need to.
Lessons worth keeping in any home
- Choose the moment carefully, but do not delay too long; the apology ages poorly with time.
- Sit at eye level with your child and name the specific harm, rather than offering a vague "sorry if anyone was upset."
- Allow silence to do its work, even when the silence feels unbearable for the parent.
- Treat a child's forgiveness as a serious gift, not a routine courtesy, and respond with gratitude.
- Keep returning to the practice, because one apology will not undo a pattern, but a pattern of apologies can reshape a family.
Forgiveness asked of a child is one of the bravest conversations a parent can have, and it is one that returns more than it costs. The next time you find yourself rehearsing the words in the car or the kitchen, finish the sentence out loud, with the people who are waiting to hear you finish it.
