“I'm going to tell you why I don't tell my daughter to say sorry. I don’t tell her to say sorry because I actually want her to be sorry. There’s a part of the child's brain called the prefrontal cortex that controls emotions and impulses and is responsible for calm decision-making. This is underdeveloped until they are in their mid-twenties. When you have a 2-year-old that is freaking out emotionally and impulsively hitting or screaming or kicking or biting, it actually boils down to brain development. They will learn empathy best by seeing it modeled. This actually happened for us the other day. Daughter is waking up from a nap, her daddy, who likes to tease her and mess with her a lot, started to crawl across the bed to give her a kiss. She thought he was going to mess with her but she thought he would mess with her so she hit him. He walked out super frustrated but instead of saying ‘Peyton, that was not nice, you should not hit your daddy. You need to go tell him sorry,’ I said ‘did you see that Daddy got sad? Did you see his face? his heart was hurt because you slapped him. He wasn't going to tease you, he was trying to come give you a kiss. Should we go give him a kiss?’ And she said ‘Yeah!’” [watch the video here]