You Don’t Need to Apologise for Your Child

Parents often enter a room managing other people’s reactions before anything has even happened.

You can see it in the apologetic smile. The repeated shushing. Holding a child more tightly than necessary. Trying to stop them moving, making noise, touching something or drawing too much attention to themselves.

Sometimes the explanation arrives before the child has even taken their coat off.

“Sorry, they get a bit excited.”

“Sorry, they don’t always sit still.”

“Sorry, they might not join in.”

It is not necessarily because the parent believes their child is doing something wrong. More often, experience has taught them to anticipate the looks, comments and quiet judgement that can come when their child behaves differently from what other people expect.

By the time they arrive, they are carrying far more than the child’s coat, bag and belongings. They are carrying everyone else’s comfort too.

I remember one SEND session where, before we had even started, some of the parents were practically squashing their children in an attempt to keep them still.

I looked around the room and laughed.

“Please don’t squash your children.”

Everyone laughed, partly because they knew exactly what I meant.

Then I reminded them, “We are at a SEND session. This is probably the one place where your child should be able to be exactly who they are. You do not have to protect me from them, and you do not need to apologise.”

Something changed in the room after that.

Some of the children who had struggled to settle at the beginning later lay quietly and enjoyed Story Massage. Others listened while moving, stayed close to their parent or joined in their own way.

The point was not that every child eventually became still. Stillness was never the measure of whether the session had worked.

The difference was that nobody was trying to force it.

Once the parents realised they did not have to spend the session controlling every movement or preventing every sound, they began to settle too. The pressure in the room reduced, and the children were given space to find their own way into the activity.

That moment stayed with me because it showed how much parents can carry into supposedly welcoming spaces.

Many parents of SEND children become used to scanning rooms before their child has had a chance to experience them. They look for what might be touched, what could go wrong, who is watching and whether they may need to explain or defend something.

They are often managing the environment, their child’s needs and everybody else’s response at the same time.

That is exhausting.

Creating an inclusive space does not mean there are no boundaries or that safety no longer matters. It means movement, noise, hesitation and difference are not automatically treated as problems simply because they make other people uncomfortable.

A child should not have to perform calmness to prove that they belong.

We spend a great deal of time helping children fit into the world. We teach them how to sit, wait, listen, transition, regulate and tolerate environments that were rarely designed with them in mind.

Sometimes the world needs to do some adjusting too.

Children need spaces where they are not constantly being corrected into acceptability. Parents need spaces where they can put down the explanations, stop watching everyone else’s face and allow themselves to be present with their child.

A genuinely welcoming space does not simply say that SEND children are included. It makes room for them to arrive as they are.

And it does not require their parents to arrive with an apology already prepared.