Columnist Susannah Jowitt wrote that she used to call her children "awful, boring and stupid" in what she described as jokes, and that those remarks have since been raised by her children as adults, leaving her feeling ashamed.
Jowitt recounted a particular episode in her Daily Mail Femail column in which a long car journey from London to Scotland brought sibling fighting to a peak. She described losing her temper and shouting, "SHUT UP! BOTH OF YOU! I’VE HAD IT WITH YOUR FIGHTING!" She said she immediately felt remorse, thinking "parenting shouldn’t be done at a yell."
In the column, Jowitt recalled looking in her rear-view mirror to see her young son and daughter apparently unmoved by the outburst. She described regaining a cold calm and threatening to tell their grandmother that they would not be allowed fizzy drinks on holiday. When she imagined explaining the punishment, she said she planned to tell Nana, "it's because both of you are just stupid, attention-seeking..." Jowitt wrote that the words were intended as a flippant reprimand in the heat of the moment.
She said that, decades later, her children have told her how those offhand insults affected them. The admissions from her now-adult children prompted Jowitt to write that she feels "so ashamed," and to reflect on the lasting impact of remarks made in anger or jest. She wrote that what had at the time felt like a quick, exasperated joke came to be remembered and felt differently by the recipients.
Jowitt's account framed the episode as an example of a common parental experience: losing patience in stressful situations and later confronting the consequences of words said in frustration. She described a personal journey from reflexive anger toward an awareness that flippant put-downs, even when framed as joking, can leave lasting emotional effects.
Writing in the column, Jowitt examined the tension between the immediacy of parental frustration and the longer-term emotional record kept by children. She also described the dissonance between her own memory of the incidents as passing, corrective measures and her children's memories of being belittled.
Her piece did not offer prescriptive guidance but laid out a candid personal reckoning. Jowitt said she is now more mindful of language and the possible harm of ridiculing remarks, even when uttered without malice. She concluded the column by expressing regret for the distress her words caused and by acknowledging the difficulty of parenting under stress while stressing the importance of reflection when past behavior is revealed to have had unintended consequences.