Making kids say sorry?

[playfelt]

I do not make the kids say sorry to each other. They do not fully understand the meaning of empathy at the toddler stage. Truth is they are not sorry.

I don't put them in time out for most incidents either because they are just learning what is right and wrong and timeout tends to just makes them angrier. I will make them go play somewhere else but that is as far as it goes. The idea being if we can't play nicely then we have to go play by ourselves till we can.

I also think it is a bad idea to make the children revisit an incident because there attention span is so short the kids can be fighting one minute and sharing a game the next.

That doesn't mean we don't talk about being nice to our friends and taking turns and all the things that make us a nice friend but not in the heat of the moment.