Misty Felner

Melissa wrote:
>>>And my especial pet peeve, my friend, when someone apologizes to her
children, makes them say "It's okay", when it obviously is not okay
to them, and they need some more time to grieve. :-( Talk about an
immediate dismissal of emotions, devaluing someone's opinion, and
removing power from them! Breanna hits the girl sometimes out of
anger, and sometimes just for a reaction, and when her mom says that,
i say "NO! It is NOT okay to be hit, and it hurts. I'm sorry
Elizabeth, that she did that."<<<

I just wanted to say in response to this that when my dd was about 14 mo.
she began picking on another kid in our play group. The mom would always
kind of laugh it off and say it's okay when I would apologize to her for it.
I really think dd heard that phrase and learned that it was okay to hit. We
dealt with hitting as an issue for over a year after, as some of you may
recall from previous posts, it became a huge problem. Things are finally
improving with that, but I still feel that maybe it became such a problem
b/c the first thing she heard about it from the mother of the "victim" was
"It's OKAY" so I agree 100% not to do that.



Also, dh and I are actually just now reaching the no forced apology thing.
Until I read "Unconditional Parenting" I assumed the best way to get dd to
learn to say I'm sorry was to force her. Ironically dh forces me to
apologize after heated arguments, and we've even argued about that since I
don't necessarily think one should apologize for being angry. I'm curious
to see, now that we are both subscribing to the non forced apology if he
still tries to force one out of me. Time will tell.



Misty



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