How to Apologise to Your Teenager

Repairing after you lose your temper does more for the relationship than never losing it would have.

I said something to my son last spring that I'd unsay if I could. It wasn't cruel exactly, it was just unfair, delivered at volume, in a hallway, about a chore. He went into his room and I stood there with the specific, hot feeling of having been the adult and not acted like one.

For a day I did what I usually do, which is be extra nice and hope it gets absorbed. Pancakes as an apology. He took the pancakes. Nothing was repaired.

What repaired it was going in and saying the actual sentence: 'I was unfair to you yesterday and I shouldn't have spoken to you like that. I'm sorry.' Full stop. No 'but you had also.' The 'but' is what turns an apology back into an argument, and teenagers hear it coming a mile off.

Don't ask to be forgiven in the same breath either. That makes them responsible for your discomfort, which is the thing you were supposed to be relieving. Say it, mean it, and leave the room if they need you to.

This is not a loss of authority. It's the opposite. You've just shown them what accountability looks like performed by someone with more power than them, and that's a lesson you cannot deliver by lecture.

And it teaches the most useful thing they'll take into every relationship they ever have: that things break, and that people who care about each other repair them on purpose.