Helping your child to cope with disappointment

iMoo expert David Coleman on teaching your child coping mechanisms for life's little disappointments

It is generally a good thing when children have standards and expectations of themselves and what they should be able to achieve or how they should behave. The only problem occurs when children set themselves unrealistic goals or unachievable standards. Firstly, we can see the positives: it is wonderful that a child is passionate and committed about a hobby or endeavour and it is also good that he or she hasn’t fully hardened his heart against the real feelings that come when things don’t go our way. It is better that he feels disappointed than feels nothing at all.

The Importance of Empathy:

What's important in helping your child to process disappointment is talking it through with them and using empathy. It is ok to let him know that you understand how disappointed or frustrated he feels when he doesn’t win. You may also suggest to him that he hold that feeling until he is in a more private place before really letting it loose.

Perfection is unattainable

Problems arise when children have designs on being perfect! Alas perfection is never attainable for us humans and so your child needs to learn how to cope with not always getting what he expects (especially what he expects from himself). Without being cruel to him, create other situations where he can experience minor and less public disappointments and help him to learn how to cope with those. For example, play board games at home and engineer it so that he loses some of the time. Make sure also that sometimes you lose and role-model for him ways of coping with that disappointment.

From Role Models ...

If you can, find some role-models from the sporting world or from closer to home whom you know have not always “won” and let him see how they react to the disappointment of not getting what they expected or badly desired. As he gains some skill at dealing with disappointment you can also then help him to recalibrate his expectations of himself and what he “should” be able to achieve.

... to Role Play

You could try talking to him about what constitutes success and failure at different activities from his perspective. Get him to problem solve how likely it is that he will achieve what he expects. Challenge his beliefs if you think they are unrealistic. Maybe you can get him to plan ahead for what might happen and how he will react if he succeeds and also, critically, how he can react if he feels he fails. Sometimes it is worth playing out these imagined situations as if they were really happening. When you role-play like this with children you can give them great feedback about things like their facial expressions, their posture and their rationality or otherwise. Then they have concrete and observed information that they can use in the real-life situations