I spent the past two summers working as a camp counselor at a local YMCA outdoors-but-day-camp. I should say right now that I am a poor counselor at best. Some people seem born with an innate ability to herd a pack of eight-year-olds tamely from one activity to the next, without any arguments, skinned knees, or whining at all. I am not one of those people.
With no idea on how adults ought to act around kids, I decided to try and treat them the way I had always wished to be treated as a kid. Like I said, I wasn’t too great at it, and often resorted to saying the same sort of things my mother always said to me. But still, I quickly realized that not all the kids wanted changes in how they were treated. They wanted what they were used to, and often would run up against The Norm, these invisible rules and standards that the kids were accustomed to and would get confused and angry anytime I trespassed them.
The Norms cover a whole range of topics. One of the most visible was my appearance itself. I often got asked whether I was a boy or girl, mostly by the little ones, and several times I was privy to enlightening dicussions on why I was sitting / smiling / acting like a boy, which would start out with the kid instructing me to do something in either a “girl way” or a “boy way”, and then getting more and more frustrated and loud as I did it wrong. (Did you know that girls smile with their teeth but boys smile with closed mouths? It’s one of those things I knew when I was five, along with the fact that girls have eyelashes but boys don’t, but then later forgot.) Kids don’t like people who aren’t easily categorizable. I needed to chose a label — Boy or Girl — and since my body and swimsuit obviously betrayed me as Girl, I needed to adopt all the social expectations along with it. Since I didn’t, I was constantly told off by midgits to sit right, grow my hair out, and shave.
One Norm that really bothered me that I unfortunately never did have sufficient time to battle against was the practice of apologizing. When you’re an adult, you say “I’m sorry” for accidents. Whoops, I didn’t mean to bump into you. Oh, I thought I was brushing your hair softly, I didn’t know it would hurt you. Hey, I know I said I’d do this one thing but I forgot. Sorry. When you’re a kid, apparently, you only say “I’m sorry” for things you did purposefully, out of spite. Personally, I always resented being made to apologize for something I wasn’t sorry for, and I tried to remember not to make my kids do that either. Ideally, I thought, they’d just get pre-decided and agreed-upon punishments, like five minutes sitting out from the next activity.
One time I got called out by a girl who was taunted by another, who tearfully scolded, “Aren’t you going to make her apologize?” That caught me off guard. “Are you sorry?” I asked the taunter, who emphatically said she wasn’t, resulting in more tears. Both of them had been getting more and more annoyed by the other’s company throughout the day, and even though I wanted nothing more than to get them apart so they could cool off, and then hopefully talk to the taunter, I still had to waste five minutes convincing the sniffling girl that look, the other was getting punished, so get over it. Another incident left me even more flabbergasted when a boy ran up to me to say that another boy had hit him. The accused boy was right behind him, obviously feeling bad and trying to make sure he was alright. The first one said that he hadn’t done it on purpose (kid, why are you tattling to me then?) but when I asked the second boy to apologize, he looked shocked. “Why?! I didn’t do it on purpose!” I tried to explain that that’s why he ought to apologize, but he didn’t really understand. I think I sent them back to play without pressing my point.
Which got me to thinking: why is it a practice to make kids apologize to each other when they hurt each other? I even know families where that’s the rule, and the kids are so well-trained that they even forgive and forget and start playing again once the other apologizes. (I’ve since learned that it isn’t common in Europe.) More to the point, why did I hate it so much?
For one, I always resented being made to apologize. No one likes being forced to do something, simply because the other person is bigger and stronger. I used to yell at my mom: “Why should I apoogize for hitting my brother? I’m not sorry; I wanted to! He was being mean!” It generally only got me more punishments. But then I realized that apart from among children, where this is apparently acceptable behaviour, being forced to apologize is only something you do to your betters — either someone incredibly wealthy, or someone far up the social ladder. A queen you would apologize to. A white person you would have had to apologize to if you were black and this were 100 years ago. Being humiliated like that and forced to apologize makes you into the servant, into someone not worth as much as the person you’re apologizing to. Not really something I want to be teaching the youth of our nation.
I’m kind of glad I tried to rebel against it as a kid then, even if it didn’t get me anywhere.
Posted by grassideas 
