You promised your six-year-old that you’d take them to the park after school. They talked about it all morning, picked out their favorite outdoor clothes, and counted down the hours. But then work exploded with an urgent deadline, traffic was worse than expected, and by the time you picked them up, you were already running late for another commitment. “Maybe tomorrow, sweetheart,” you say, watching their face crumble. “I know I promised, but something came up.”
The disappointment in their eyes is immediately replaced by something worse—confusion and hurt. You can see them processing this moment, learning something about whether your words can be trusted, whether their excitement and anticipation matter, whether you’ll be there for them when you say you will.
Or maybe it’s your teenager who you promised could borrow the car for a friend’s birthday party. They’ve been responsible, met all your conditions, and reminded you about it multiple times. But now that the day has arrived, you’re uncomfortable with the weather conditions or you’re just too tired to deal with the anxiety of them driving. “I changed my mind. It’s not happening,” you announce. The betrayal on their face cuts deep as they retreat to their room, and you’re left wondering if you just damaged something fundamental in your relationship.
Breaking promises to our children is one of the most painful experiences of parenthood. It strikes at the core of our identity as trustworthy caregivers and protectors. We see ourselves as people who keep our word, who show up for our kids, who create security and reliability in their lives. When circumstances force us to break a promise—or worse, when our own poor planning or changing preferences lead to broken commitments—we face not just our child’s disappointment but our own shame and fear about what this means for our relationship.
The guilt can be overwhelming. You lie awake replaying the moment, imagining how this single broken promise might echo through their future relationships, wondering if you’ve damaged their ability to trust others. You think about your own childhood disappointments with adult reliability and worry you’re repeating patterns you swore you’d never perpetuate.
But here’s what research tells us: while breaking promises does impact children, what matters even more is what happens next. Children whose parents were able to repair the relationship had better emotional and behavioral outcomes later on, with less likelihood of behavior problems and better self-regulation skills. The process of rupture and repair—how we handle the inevitable moments when we disappoint our children—actually teaches crucial lessons about relationships, accountability, and resilience.
The Profound Impact of Broken Promises on Children
Before we explore how to rebuild trust, it’s essential to understand why broken promises matter so much to children’s development and why your instinct to take this seriously is absolutely correct.
Infants are born equipped with a range of innate behaviors to maximize their survival, and attachment behavior allows the infant to draw others towards them at moments of need or distress. From the earliest moments of life, children are biologically wired to depend on caregivers’ reliability and consistency. When caregivers consistently respond to their needs and keep their commitments, children develop what attachment theorists call a “secure base”—a fundamental trust that the world is safe and that the people who love them can be counted on.
Research indicates that young children are more likely to trust adults who demonstrate consistent, positive behaviors and intentions, such as being truthful and well-intended. Ensuring that professionals keep promises, whether it is as simple as bringing a requested book to the next meeting, significantly affects children’s willingness to trust and engage. This finding applies even more powerfully to parent-child relationships, where trust forms the foundation for all future emotional development.
The stakes are particularly high because children grow and thrive in the context of close and dependable relationships that provide love and nurturance, security, responsive interaction, and encouragement for exploration. When these relationships prove undependable, children’s entire developmental trajectory can be affected. They may become more anxious about relationships, more vigilant about potential disappointments, or more reluctant to trust others’ commitments.
Attachment theory explains positive maternal-infant attachment as a dyadic relationship between the infant and mother that provides the infant with a secure base from which to explore the world. With respect to cognitive, social, and behavioral domains, securely attached infants tend to have better outcomes across multiple areas of development. Broken promises can undermine this secure attachment, teaching children that even their primary caregivers cannot be fully trusted to follow through on commitments.
However, here’s the critical insight that should give every parent hope: Rupture and repair are key ingredients to connection. When ruptures in relationships occur, which they will, it is important to revisit the situation to work on restoring safety, regulation, attunement, and understanding. Through engaging in this process and providing consistent secure base support, parents can actually strengthen relationships even after breaking promises.
The neuroscience supports this as well. Research on older children and adults confirms that we suffer when our relationships are torn. Being rejected, excluded, or ostracized can activate the same neural pathways as physical pain, only social pain may be worse because it is relived, over and over, in a person’s mind. This explains why broken promises can feel so devastating to children—their brains are literally processing the experience as a form of pain. But this also means that repair processes can help heal that pain and prevent it from becoming a recurring source of suffering.
Understanding Why Promises Get Broken
Before diving into repair strategies, it’s helpful to understand the various reasons promises get broken. This isn’t about excusing the behavior, but rather about developing self-awareness that can help prevent future breaks and inform how you approach repair.
Circumstances genuinely beyond your control do happen. Medical emergencies, car breakdowns, unexpected work crises, or other legitimate unforeseen events can make it impossible to keep a commitment. These situations still require repair, but they also offer opportunities to teach children about flexibility and resilience in the face of life’s unpredictability.
Poor planning or overcommitment is more common than we’d like to admit. We make promises with good intentions but without fully considering our schedules, energy levels, or realistic capabilities. We say yes to everything because we want to be the parent who can do it all, but then reality crashes in and something has to give.
Changing priorities or convenience can lead to broken promises in ways that are particularly damaging to trust. You promised to take your child somewhere, but now you’re tired or something more appealing came up for you. You committed to letting them do something, but now that the moment has arrived, it feels inconvenient or anxiety-provoking for you.
Underestimating what matters to children is another common factor. Adults sometimes make casual promises about things that feel minor to them but are enormously significant to children. You might not remember saying you’d play a game after dinner, but your child has been anticipating that moment all day.
Parental stress and overwhelm can erode our follow-through capacity. When we’re depleted, managing multiple demands, or dealing with mental health challenges, our ability to track and honor commitments naturally diminishes. This doesn’t make broken promises acceptable, but it does contextualize them within the reality of human limitations.
Understanding why promises get broken helps you assess patterns in your own behavior and make changes that reduce future ruptures. It also informs how you explain the situation to your child during the repair process.
The Seven Essential Steps to Rebuilding Trust
1. Acknowledge the Broken Promise Quickly and Directly
The first and most crucial step in rebuilding trust is acknowledging what happened without minimizing, excusing, or deflecting. To repair a rupture, a parent may validate their child’s feelings, say they’re sorry, or reestablish physical connection through a hug. This process must begin with clear acknowledgment that you broke your word.
Children have an innate sense of fairness and honesty. When adults try to minimize or deny what happened, children pick up on the dishonesty and their trust erodes further. Conversely, when parents directly name what happened, children feel seen and validated in their experience.
Name the specific promise you broke: “I promised you we would go to the park after school today, and we didn’t go.” Don’t rely on vague language like “things didn’t work out” or “we had a change of plans.” Be concrete about what you committed to and what actually happened.
Take full ownership without making excuses in this initial acknowledgment. There will be time to explain circumstances later, but your first priority is validating your child’s experience and taking responsibility. “I broke my promise to you” is more powerful than “Things came up and I couldn’t make it work.”
Do this as soon as possible after the broken promise. The longer you wait to address it, the more your silence communicates that the commitment—and their feelings about it—didn’t really matter. Even if you’re stressed and would prefer to avoid the conversation, prioritize this acknowledgment.
Make sure your child knows you understand that this was a big deal. Don’t downplay the significance: “I know you were really looking forward to this. You had been excited about it all day, and I let you down.”
2. Offer a Genuine, Unconditional Apology
After acknowledging what happened, the next step is a sincere apology that doesn’t include justifications or conditional language. Research on relationship repair consistently shows that the quality of an apology significantly affects whether trust can be restored.
The repair of difficult parent-child interactions is a marker of healthy functioning in infancy, but less is known about repair processes during early childhood. We used dynamic systems methods to investigate dyadic repair in mothers and their children, and findings suggest that the repair process itself—not just the absence of rupture—predicts positive developmental outcomes.
Use clear “I’m sorry” language rather than “I apologize if” or other hedging phrases. “I’m sorry I broke my promise to you” is direct and unambiguous. “I’m sorry if you feel disappointed” shifts responsibility to their reaction rather than your action.
Avoid the word “but” in your apology. “I’m sorry, but I had to work late” is not an apology—it’s an excuse. The explanation for what happened can come later, but it shouldn’t be embedded in the apology itself. “I’m sorry I broke my promise” stands alone as a complete statement.
Make sure your apology addresses the specific impact on your child, not just the abstract fact of the broken promise. “I’m sorry I disappointed you and made you feel like your excitement didn’t matter to me” acknowledges the emotional reality they experienced.
Be prepared for your child to not immediately accept your apology. Trust is earned through patterns over time, and one apology doesn’t instantly restore what was broken. Let them process their feelings without pressuring them to forgive or “get over it” quickly.
Model that apologizing is a strength, not a weakness. When children see their parents take full responsibility for mistakes without defensiveness, they learn that strong, confident people can admit when they’re wrong. This teaches crucial life skills about accountability and humility in relationships.
3. Listen to Their Feelings Without Defending Yourself
After apologizing, create space for your child to express how they feel about the broken promise. When parents respond consistently and sensitively to their children’s needs, it promotes positive emotional and cognitive development. This includes being responsive to their feelings about parental mistakes.
Children need to know that their disappointment, anger, or hurt feelings are acceptable and won’t be punished or dismissed. When you make space for these emotions without becoming defensive, you communicate that their feelings matter more than your comfort or self-image as a “perfect parent.”
Resist the urge to explain circumstances or justify your actions during this listening phase. Even if you had legitimate reasons for breaking the promise, this moment is about hearing their experience, not managing your own discomfort with their feelings.
Use reflective listening to show you truly hear them: “You sound really hurt that I didn’t keep my promise. You had been planning for this all week, and then it didn’t happen.” Reflecting their words back demonstrates that you’re genuinely trying to understand rather than just waiting for them to finish so you can explain yourself.
By specifying some of the mechanisms through which the child’s attachment develops and changes, learning theory can enhance attachment based approaches to therapy. Specifically, interventions building on operant and classical learning can be used to stimulate new learning that increases the child’s security and confidence in their relationships. In the context of broken promises, this means teaching children through experience that expressing feelings about disappointments leads to being heard and understood rather than dismissed or invalidated.
Validate their feelings even if they seem disproportionate to you. What might seem like a minor disappointment from an adult perspective can feel catastrophic to a child who was deeply invested in the promised activity or event. “I can see this really matters to you” honors their emotional reality without requiring you to agree with their assessment.
Be comfortable with silence and emotion. If your child needs to cry, express anger, or sit with their feelings, resist the urge to immediately soothe or distract. Sometimes the most powerful form of support is simply being present with someone’s pain without trying to fix it.
4. Explain What Happened (Honestly but Age-Appropriately)
Once you’ve acknowledged the broken promise, apologized, and listened to their feelings, it’s appropriate to explain what happened—but only if you can do so without making excuses or shifting blame.
When parents consistently follow through on their promises and demonstrate reliability, children learn that they can rely on their parents and trust is strengthened. Additionally, showing respect and empathy towards each other builds trust. When parents listen to their children’s perspectives and explain their own honestly, it creates mutual understanding even in difficult situations.
Tailor your explanation to your child’s developmental level. A five-year-old needs simpler, more concrete information than a twelve-year-old. “I had an emergency meeting at work that I couldn’t change” is sufficient for younger children, while older children might benefit from more detailed explanation about work obligations and why they sometimes conflict with personal commitments.
Distinguish between explanations and excuses. An explanation provides information that helps your child understand what happened: “There was a car accident on the highway that made me two hours late getting home.” An excuse tries to avoid responsibility: “It’s not my fault—everyone was late because of traffic.”
Be honest about the category of broken promise. If circumstances truly were beyond your control, say that clearly. But if the truth is that you overcommitted, forgot, or changed your mind, own that reality. Children can handle honesty, and they desperately need it to learn how to be trustworthy themselves.
For promises broken due to your own limitations or poor planning, name that explicitly: “I made a promise without checking my calendar carefully. That was my mistake, and I should have been more thoughtful before committing to something.” This models the kind of self-awareness and accountability you want your child to develop.
If you broke a promise because your priorities shifted or you simply didn’t follow through, explain that too—while taking full responsibility: “I know I promised to play that board game with you tonight. I didn’t manage my time well today, and by the time evening came, I was too tired to follow through. That was wrong of me, because your time and our commitments to each other should be priorities I plan for carefully.”
5. Make a Concrete Plan to Make It Right
Apologies and explanations are important, but they’re insufficient without action that demonstrates your commitment to repairing the harm and preventing future breaks. Trust is earned. It is not static: it can be damaged and can be repaired and re-built through consistent follow-through on commitments.
Whenever possible, reschedule the promised activity or commitment rather than just letting it disappear. “Let’s look at the calendar right now and pick a specific day next week when we’ll go to the park. I’m going to write it down, and I’m going to make sure nothing gets scheduled during that time.”
Be realistic about what you can commit to. Don’t overpromise in your attempt to make up for the broken promise. It’s better to commit to something smaller that you can definitely deliver than to make an elaborate promise that might get broken again.
Let your child have input into the plan when appropriate. “Would you rather go to the park this Saturday morning, or would you prefer Sunday afternoon when we have more time?” This gives them some control and shows you’re prioritizing their preferences, not just checking a box to assuage your guilt.
Follow through on this make-up commitment with absolute priority. Put it in your calendar, set reminders, arrange backup plans if needed, and communicate with anyone else whose cooperation you need. This new commitment is not optional—it’s your opportunity to demonstrate that your word can be trusted.
If the original promised activity is no longer possible (perhaps the event has passed or circumstances have permanently changed), find an equivalent way to honor your commitment. “I know I promised you could have a friend sleep over last Friday, and that didn’t happen. Let’s pick a date in the next two weeks when we can definitely make that happen.”
Be clear about what you’re going to do differently to prevent similar breaks in the future: “From now on, before I make promises about after-school activities, I’m going to check my work calendar and talk to your dad to make sure we have no conflicts. I’m also going to build in buffer time so that unexpected delays don’t prevent me from keeping my word.”
6. Demonstrate Reliability in Small Ways
While making up for the specific broken promise is important, rebuilding trust also requires demonstrating increased reliability in everyday commitments. When caregivers react sensitively, children with secure attachments are more likely to develop emotional intelligence, good social skills and robust mental health. This sensitivity includes being consistently reliable in daily interactions.
Pay attention to the small promises and commitments you make throughout each day. “I’ll be there in five minutes,” “We’ll read stories before bed,” “I’ll look at your artwork after I finish this email”—these micro-commitments either build or erode trust depending on whether you follow through.
If you say you’re going to do something, do it. If you realize you can’t, immediately acknowledge it and renegotiate: “I said I’d be there in five minutes, but this is taking longer than I expected. I need another ten minutes. I’m sorry for not being accurate.”
Be especially consistent about routines and daily commitments while rebuilding trust. Your child’s nervous system needs to relearn that you’re reliable, and this happens through repeated small experiences of you doing what you say you’ll do.
Notice when you do keep commitments and let your child know you’re working on this: “I know it’s been hard when I’ve broken promises. I want you to know that tonight when I promised we’d have game time, I made sure I finished work early so we could do that. Keeping my word to you matters to me.”
This isn’t about seeking praise or recognition—it’s about making your increased reliability visible so your child can consciously register the change. Trust rebuilds through pattern recognition, and you’re helping them notice the new pattern.
7. Have Patience with the Rebuilding Process
Trust takes time to rebuild, and the timeline depends on factors including your child’s age, temperament, the severity of the broken promise, and whether this was an isolated incident or part of a pattern. Research on relationship repair emphasizes that restoration of trust is a process, not an event.
Rupture and repair refers to the breaking and restoring of connection with one another. Since humans are wired for connection, and connection is what researchers say brings most happiness, rupture and repair is a critical concept to learn about for wellbeing. This process cannot be rushed, even when the discomfort of damaged trust feels unbearable.
Your child may be more cautious about believing your promises for a while. They might check in repeatedly about whether you’re still planning to follow through, or express skepticism when you make new commitments. This is healthy self-protection, not manipulation or vindictiveness.
Don’t become defensive or hurt when your child questions your reliability. “I know I’ve given you reason not to automatically trust my promises. I’m going to keep working to show you through my actions that you can count on me” communicates understanding rather than defensiveness.
Younger children may “test” your commitment by asking repeatedly if the promised activity is really going to happen, or by having emotional reactions that seem disproportionate to minor schedule changes. This is their way of assessing whether the relationship is truly safe and reliable again.
Older children and teenagers might verbally express their lack of trust: “Yeah, you say that now, but you probably won’t actually do it.” Instead of being hurt by this, recognize it as their honest expression of where the relationship stands. “You’re right that I need to prove through my actions that you can trust me again. I understand why you’re skeptical.”
Consistency over time is what rebuilds trust, not any single conversation or grand gesture. Each time you keep a commitment—especially small, everyday commitments—you’re making a deposit in the trust account. Over weeks and months of reliable follow-through, you’ll notice your child becoming more secure again.
When Broken Promises Are Part of a Larger Pattern
If breaking promises has become a pattern in your family rather than an isolated incident, more comprehensive changes may be necessary. Repeated broken promises can create insecure attachment patterns and contribute to anxiety, trust issues, and relationship difficulties that persist into adulthood.
Take honest inventory of how often you break commitments to your children. Are there patterns around particular types of promises (time together, attention, special activities)? Are certain circumstances more likely to lead to broken promises (work stress, overwhelm, competing priorities)?
Consider whether underlying issues are contributing to your difficulty keeping commitments. Depression, ADHD, chronic stress, poor time management skills, or people-pleasing tendencies that lead to overcommitment can all make reliable follow-through challenging. Addressing these root causes may require professional support.
They share an emphasis on enhancing caregivers’ appreciation of the complexity of the emotional development of young children, the power caregivers have to affect their children, and the kinds of factors within and around the caregiver that may interfere with providing what young children need. If you find yourself repeatedly unable to keep promises despite best intentions, consider working with a therapist who can help you identify obstacles and develop strategies for more consistent reliability.
Examine whether your relationship with promises and commitments needs restructuring. Perhaps you need to make fewer promises overall, be more cautious about what you commit to, build in more buffer time, or develop better systems for tracking commitments. The goal isn’t perfection, but rather being realistic about what you can reliably deliver.
Have an honest conversation with your child about the pattern if they’re old enough to engage meaningfully. “I’ve noticed that I’ve broken promises to you more often than I should have, and I want you to know I’m taking this seriously. I’m working on being more careful about what I commit to and making sure I follow through.” This acknowledges the pattern without overwhelming them with adult problems or making them responsible for your growth.
Consider whether family counseling might be beneficial, especially if broken promises have significantly damaged trust or if the pattern has been longstanding. A skilled family therapist can help facilitate conversations, teach repair skills, and provide accountability for behavior change.
Teaching Your Child About Promises and Reliability
The way you handle broken promises becomes a powerful teaching opportunity for your child about relationships, accountability, and integrity. Children learn more from what you do than what you say, and the repair process teaches crucial lessons.
Model taking responsibility without excessive self-blame. Show your child that people can make mistakes, own them fully, and work to make things right without spiraling into shame or self-hatred. This balanced approach teaches both accountability and self-compassion.
Help them understand that trustworthiness is built through patterns over time, not single actions. One broken promise doesn’t make someone untrustworthy, but a pattern of unreliability does. Conversely, one kept promise after a history of breaks doesn’t instantly restore trust—reliability must be demonstrated consistently.
Talk explicitly about why promises matter: “When we make promises to people, we’re asking them to trust us and plan around what we said. When we break promises, we’re asking them to give up something they were counting on. That’s why we need to be very careful about what we commit to and then follow through when we do make promises.”
Teach them to evaluate whether adults in their lives are trustworthy based on patterns of behavior. While you want them to trust you, you also want them to develop discernment about which people’s words they can rely on and which people have proven to be unreliable. This skill will serve them throughout life.
Help them develop their own commitment-keeping skills by modeling how to think through commitments before making them: “Before I promise this, I need to check my calendar and make sure I can really do it. I don’t want to promise something and then break my word.”
Moving Forward with Hope and Intention
Breaking a promise to your child is painful, but it doesn’t have to be permanently damaging. The research is clear that what matters most is not whether ruptures occur—they inevitably will in all relationships—but whether we engage in effective repair processes afterward.
Your willingness to take broken promises seriously, to engage in thorough repair, and to work on preventing future breaks demonstrates the kind of parent your child needs. Perfect reliability isn’t possible, but genuine accountability and consistent effort to do better absolutely is.
Remember that children are remarkably resilient when they feel genuinely loved and when they experience repair after disappointments. The process of rupture and repair can actually strengthen your relationship by teaching your child that mistakes can be overcome, that relationships can survive disappointments, and that the people who love them will work to make things right when they’ve caused harm.
Trust yourself to learn from this experience. Notice what led to the broken promise, make changes to prevent similar situations, and use this as motivation to be more thoughtful about commitments going forward. Your child doesn’t need you to be perfect—they need you to be honest, accountable, and consistently working to be trustworthy.
The broken promise has already happened. What happens next—how you repair the rupture, what you learn, and how you demonstrate increased reliability moving forward—is entirely within your control. Choose repair. Choose accountability. Choose to be the parent who makes mistakes but always works to make them right.
Have you navigated the process of rebuilding trust after breaking a promise to your child? What strategies helped repair the relationship and restore confidence in your reliability? Share your experiences in the comments—your insights might help another parent who’s struggling with guilt and uncertainty about how to make things right.