Child refuses to say sorry

[Sailorsgirl44]

My son is almost 9. He absolutely refuses to say sorry for anything. He just won't take any responsibility for his role in any wrongdoing.

Last week he was very bold and I said he could not use the computer until he apologised. Here we are...a full week later and he still can't use the computer. He would rather lose something he loves than apologise.

Today he hid his brothers toy... Refused to give it back. I found it a few hours later but he will not say sorry for this. I've said he won't get a treat tomorrow because of this but he doesn't seem to care.

His two siblings always apologise when they need to. I think being able to say sorry is such an important life skill... how do I get him to do it properly?

This is why some children including a large proportion of ND children inc ASD struggle with "sorry".

DS1 has very, very rarely actually said "sorry" because in his head, he's usually justified at the time even if he can recognise that he acted unwisely. At 7, before his diagnosis he ended up in a tit for tat argument when another child commented on his hair in a derogatory way, and DS (equally factually in his head) retorted back that the child was fat. The social nuance of a hierachy of personal observations was lost on him. He ended up in more trouble for not being able to say sorry than the comment.

The problem with "sorry" is that it can often be used as a cheap, meaningless token to please the "injured" party and nothing learned. The irony of the hair/fat incident is that the child who started it and appeased the adults with a quick "sorry" had far less opportunity to learn. DS1 has learned that there are levels of observation that are acceptable and not acceptable. He has not repeated the behaviour years later.

I've learned never to push DS1 into an appology, it's just causing a row, but we always talk about the behaviour, its effects and better ways of doing things. DS2 is much more free with his appologies, and it's still worth a brief discussion about the whys and lessons. Neither child gets into trouble frequently and they both have a good rate of learning from incidents (other than on-going sibling bickering...)

I place more value on learning from the behaviour than the word. This is partly after years in the classroom with constant non-"sorry" where nothing is ever learned and it's a quick pacifier.

Wowser, talk about missing the point of what someone was saying.

You really haven't got reasonable grounds to criticise other people's carefully explained approaches to parenting.

Your use of the word 'cunt' in this context is embarrassing. But you do you.

Lots of good answers and ideas here.
I wish I hadn't pushed the "say you're sorry" ideal so much when my DD's were little. Often it meant little except to appease my idea of being a good mum.
Yes of course it's important over some incidents but a lot I should have let go.
If you imagine every little spat with siblings or rude word made into a big "sorry" fight.
With the kicking in the car if it's not based on any unfair positioning like who gets to sit in the front or anything I would just say pack it in no kicking in the car and move on with your day. Does that make me lazy? Maybe.
with the toy hiding I would probably explain how mean that was and unkind and that I don't want to see it happen again.
Definitely use consequences without the need for a sorry, so for big things loose a treat or screen time or whatever works.
My eldest DD often came to me to say sorry at a later point but not until she got much older.
I would expect a sorry if the issue included other people or any damage or hurt, part of the explaining why it needs to happen is the hard part, your DS may nit be particularly empathic yet. Sometimes a note can be written but hand delivered.

Thanks for all the messages.. Today I used the 'how do we fix this' line when he lost his temper and kicked his brother over where they were sitting in car. He didn't really have an answer..just said it was his brothers fault. Which it was not. I didn't feel things were resolved satisfactorily at all.

This is a new skill for both of you though. Don’t expect he will be able to switch automatically from saying it was someone else fault (which I suspect was his default position in the first place) to suddenly finding ideas on how to make things right.
He’ll need to be taught what could be a good way to solve the issue. Some solutions could be nit doing it again, telling his dbro to stop (aka using words…) etc…
In this case, what do you think would have been a good way to make things better/fix things? From the pov of the child who has been kicked, hearing a half hearted ‘I’m sorry’ probably would have meaningless…

Fwiw there is one thing I’ve learnt from my dcs when they were little is that it was extremely unusual that just one of them was at fault . Yes it might be that one had kicked the other. But the other child might well have wound him up/not being careful about not encroaching in his space/whatever other issue. It could be that the kicking was actually following another argument when the other sibling didn’t behave well and the first child exploded etc…
So I’d be very careful about saying you know the child who was kicked was automatically not at fault.

I tried to do that with my dcs but I have found it quite useless at changing their behaviour on its own.
Better for us was to add a lot of learning around what else could be done, why it matters not do X and Y etc….

I think in this situation you need to go back to basics a bit.

he kicks brother
step 1. admit the action.
Did you kick your brother? yes
Thank you for owning up to your action.
step 2. understand the effect of action
Do you understand that you hurt your brother? yes
step 3. fix it.
Well, as he is hurting and you kicked him, what could we do to fix this?
You may only be able to go one step at a time.

So in the process he will try and deflect - it's not my fault he was being annoying.
When this happens I use the tactic - yes I know that he was being annoying, and that you were frustrated, but that wasn't the question. The question is - did you kick him? That is not an acceptable response to him being annoying.

Then at some point explore the other options. When he is being annoying, you can
use your voice to tell him
move away from him
tell an adult and ask them to intervene
chose to ignore him if you can't move away.
you can't
kick/hit etc

I had to drum it home with one of mine. No matter how much of a pain your sibling is you may never ever under any circumstances use violence against them.
It took repeating again and again for months.

This is a new skill for both of you though. Don’t expect he will be able to switch automatically from saying it was someone else fault (which I suspect was his default position in the first place) to suddenly finding ideas on how to make things right.

Yes. It's not abracadabra! It won't immediately erase the feeling of winning and losing.

My eldest has adhd and autism (undiagnosed till 13 despite us trying to get him help he needed) and he was similar when young and couldn’t understand what he had done wrong in situations. He had trouble processing the events that led up to him getting in trouble so couldn’t make the leap to apologise. Empathy is difficult for spectrum children. I’m not saying this is the same and hope you just have a strong willed child on you hands or there is another explanation, but would consider looking into different ways of helping him understand before asking for an apology.
My boy is now almost 22, I wish I could say it gets easier, some aspects he is better with and has learnt to express his empathy but there will always be challenges for him in life.
Sending big hugs your way whatever happens