A teen girl approaches her parents with a grievance: She believes she is treated unfairly. “I feel like you’re giving my older brother much more privileges. It’s not just my age, I feel like you trust him more than you’ll ever trust me.”

Jean-Michel Robichaud, a psychologist at the Université de Moncton in New Brunswick, studies situations like this when adolescents feel hurt by their parents’ actions. While working as a therapist at Jewish General Hospital in Montreal during his Ph.D. studies, he saw families with damaged relationships—often because of a hurt that occurred when the teen was younger. This led him to be curious about how parent responses to an offense impact family relationships and teen well-being.

In this hypothetical scenario, Sophie—we’ll call her—feels compared to her older brother, who is high-achieving and a good kid, while she is thought of as the rebel in the family. Her parents are worried about her, so they give her less autonomy.

Robichaud wanted to offer his clinical patients research-based advice to help them where they felt stuck in moving forward in a conflict. His research addresses where apologies fit into parenting—whether they’re helpful, and what they should sound like. He wondered how to offer an apology that brings satisfactory resolution and well-being, but he didn’t find many studies on the topic when he began his work.

What apology research says

Previous research supports the idea that apologizing can facilitate forgiveness from those who have been hurt.

Karina Schumann, who was also in her Ph.D. program in the late 2010s, noticed that most work on forgiveness studied the victim’s perspective: “How do people perceive apologies? Does it contribute to forgiveness?” But she wondered about the transgressor’s side of things. “What does it mean to be a person who has harmed someone, and what then moves you toward engaging in a reparative action?”

To fill that gap, Schumann, now a University of Pittsburgh psychologist, began focusing on apologies. “What might influence our willingness to apologize? . . . How can we understand what motivates transgressors to apologize?”

Meanwhile, Robichaud saw that the scant research that existed addressed dynamics other than parenting—such as governmental or institutional apologies and romantic relationships. When he took his first faculty position at the Université de Moncton in New Brunswick in 2022, he became intent on researching apologies in parent and child relationships.

Schumann and Robichaud teamed up. “Right away the results were astonishing. . . . It seems to be something that is very important in parent-child relationships,” says Robichaud.

What prevents apologies?

Schumann wrote about three main barriers to apologizing based on insights from a review of recent research. The most common obstacle pertains to saving face. People protect their self-image. “It’s an icky, uncomfortable feeling for us to face our mistakes. We want to be good people, partners. All of that can make us feel really uncomfortable,” she says.

In the moment we realize our behavior was hurtful, we immediately think of all the reasons why we behaved the way we did. “I’m stressed, tired, or you haven’t done these things for me or supported me. We can create excuses around our behavior, even if we don’t verbalize it,” she says.

Adding to that, many conflicts are characterized by dual responsibility.

“We often feel like we’re not the only ones responsible. We find ourselves in a situation, ‘Yeah, I probably shouldn’t have done that,’ but we have such a strong inclination to want to feel good about ourselves.”

People feel that if they apologize first, it makes them more responsible for the conflict than the other person. “I worry you will think I’m 100% responsible,” explains Schumann. While conflicts are often thought of neatly as having a victim and a transgressor, sometimes both parties are responsible for misbehavior—even though the blame might not be evenly shared.

In another paper, coauthored with her graduate student Anna Vazeou-Nieuwenhuis, Schumann found that more Self-compassion.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/05/Vazeou-Nieuwenhuis2018.pdf” title=””>self-compassionate people are less likely to withdraw in shame after they’ve done something wrong. Shame does not lead to forgiveness-seeking, according to a 2013 study led by Calvin University psychologist Blake Riek. When people perceive mistakes to be self-defining, they’re inclined to avoid admitting responsibility in order to protect their self-image, says Schumann. However, people who understand that they will make mistakes and don’t let mistakes define them are more likely to apologize.

Another reason people avoid apologies is that they struggle to empathize with the victim, she writes in the review. MacEwan University psychologist Andrew Howell that people with certain personality traits (like higher self-esteem and compassion) are more willing to apologize, while people with other traits, like narcissism, are less willing. In a series of experiments, Schumann found that people with higher empathy for a romantic partner or friend offered higher-quality apologies rather than defensive responses.

Schumann lists a third restraint: the perception that an apology won’t elicit forgiveness or compassion from the victim. A 2012 study found that transgressors stay attentive to any clues that a victim is willing to repair the relationship and tailor their responses accordingly. 

Different types of apologies

Robichaud refers to apologies as “psychological vitamins”—that’s how good for parents and children he believes them to be. “When you make a mistake, you just created an opportunity to teach several key values to your child and to nurture your relationship with your child,” he says.

However, successful apologies contain specific elements. “The way you phrase your apologies will also be key in reaching forgiveness and all the benefits that come with it . . . both for the one who apologizes and the one who receives,” he says.

Robichaud along with Schumann tested victim-centered apologies and defensive apologies among French-speaking teens in Canada. Victim-centered apologies included things like “I’m sorry,” “What I did was unfair,” “I hurt you,” or “I reacted too quickly.” They even might request forgiveness but without pressuring: “I hope you can forgive me, but I understand if you’re not ready.”

In contrast, defensive apologies fail to empathize with the hurt a teen might feel. They might explain the mistake, justify particular actions—“I did it for your own good”—blame the child, or minimize the hurt—“It was just a joke.” 

The studies tested apologies in a variety of ways, including participants answering questionnaires about their relationship with their parents, writing responses about a particular situation they could recall, and responding to a hypothetical scenario.

Robichaud found that parents who apologize to their children create an environment that cultivates forgiveness. “We have data consistently showing that the more parents do this, the higher the likelihood [adolescents] will forgive, but also the healthier the reasons they will forgive.” In other words, forgiveness is offered freely without the motivation of a controlling parent.

Beyond forgiveness, adolescents who receive parental apologies have higher well-being and act in kind and helpful ways, says Robichaud. When parents apologize, adolescents are more likely to disclose their own mistakes to their parents and less likely to lie.

Taking responsibility in your apology

Sometimes in Robichaud’s clinical work, parents offered apologies that included justifications for their behavior: “You were difficult,” “I was sick,” “Your father wasn’t there.” In the scope of things, he thought that “those seemed like very legitimate reasons, but the families weren’t doing better.”

In the example with Sophie, her parents felt accused of being neglectful and reacted highly defensively. “How can you even say that? We give you so many privileges. You have a TV, and your brother never had one.”

But that kind of response fails to address how the teen feels and instead focuses on the parents’ feelings. What it sounds like to the teen is: “What you are living is not real,” while the parents intended to communicate: “We love you equally.” Teens either react back or close up when parents act defensively, says Robichaud.

“What I noticed is that the families where the parents could find it in themselves to apologize and take accountability for what they had done . . . they were doing much better after months of therapy,” he says.

Later, let’s say the parents realized that their teen’s complaint had some truth in it: “Even though they valued treating their children equally, they failed to do it,” describes Robichaud. He explains how they could offer two apologies: one for their initial reaction and another for their unfairness, while opening a discussion about how to give Sophie the same opportunities that her brother had.

Parents who hope for positive outcomes should leave out any explanation for their behavior. “If you want to apologize, don’t defend yourself at the same time. That’s the equivalent of having done nothing,” says Robichaud. “They might be tempted to defend themselves, minimize the harm that was done, or blame the child—‘if you hadn’t acted so horribly for so long, maybe I wouldn’t have freaked out.’ That defensive language has been shown to have the opposite effect. It increases lying, reducing disclosure, reducing forgiveness.”

Parents can model what it looks like to take responsibility for your mistakes. “You give [teens] the experience of how good it feels to be validated after being hurt,” says Robichaud. “When parents apologize to their children, the more teens or children are inclined to apologize to their parents later. . . . They learn from that.”

What we know—and don’t

The research on apologies is less robust than the psychology of forgiveness, and Robichaud is still working through some remaining questions.

However, one apprehension Robichaud sought to address early on in his research is a popular concern about parent apologies. Some blogs and online advice from clinicians suggest that apologizing to children might undermine parental authority in some way. When parents apologize, it upsets the typical power dynamic: Parents must put themselves in a position of weakness. Some wondered if that shift creates an insecure environment and leads to a passive-aggressive pressure for the child to forgive their parents. Though appearing humble, apologizing may actually be controlling.

In a separate paper, Robichaud and Schuman tested for that in multiple ways but didn’t find any significant effect that apologies had on parental authority.

“When you apologize, you tap into the relational trust, bond, care, love, but you don’t tap into the hierarchy rules or respect,” says Robichaud. “It’s not about that. It’s about repairing the bond that has been broken, the relational damage, the trust that has been hindered by the mistake.”

Robichaud also wants to know: Could severe cases of abuse or chronic patterns of mistreatment diminish the benefits of apologies? “What happens when it’s a cycle or the parent repeats the same mistake over and over? Are words enough? Do they lose their power?” he asks. Additionally, while he started his research among teens, he’s interested in understanding parent apologies to younger children.

What Robichaud is sure of: All parents make mistakes. “The list of factors that can bring even the best of the best of parents to make a mistake goes into the hundreds. There are so many factors that have been identified as a risk factor that can impact the quality of parenting behaviors. There are too many factors at play for a parent to expect they can be perfect,” he says.

“Every parent has bad parenting moments,” says Robichaud, especially considering various cultural factors around parenting, common childhood struggles, and pressures outside the home, such as work-related stress. “They do have consequences, but that’s where parents have control. They will make mistakes—they can’t realty control that—but when they do, they can apologize. How parents respond to the mistake can determine whether the mistake will have a negative effect or a less negative effect.”