Helping Kids Learn to Deal with Disappointment

We have gotten the opportunity to practice this a bit this year!  Including a few things not mentioned here. :)

A couple of years ago, I was totally surprised when my son had a whole string of spelling bee success, including winning his school bee and making it all the way to the top ten in our county, which included kids up to eighth grade, when he was just in 4th.  And this year, I could tell my daughter was really excited about being eligible.  She would sneak into our study and practice, as early as the summer before the bee.

For both of them, after a whole year's worth of talking about it, sporadic practicing, and hoping, both of my kids lost at various early stages of the school bee.  I felt so badly for both of them-- they were both so disappointed.  But I was encouraged that my son, for the first time in his three years of spelling bees, actually turned the blame for his loss on himself, rather than on a pronouncer or something else.  Even though I was heartbroken for them (and felt a share of the guilt, for not helping practice more or for maybe getting their hopes a little too high?), I felt that this was an important step in a maturing young person-- accepting responsibility and deciding internally to try harder or practice more next year.

While it is definitely worse to watch my children hurt over something than it would be to go through myself, I realized that we were given a priceless growth opportunity.  I remembered some of my growing-up failures and disappointments and all the ways they made me better.

As some of you know, I used to play competitive sports.  Sometimes this could be a very roller coaster experience on many levels.   Lets just say the types of catty behaviors for which teen girls are notorious are also sometimes displayed within a sports setting.  Another way is, well, the competitive nature of competitive sports!  I remember multiple times, after putting it all on the field at a try-out, going hopefully with a friend to look at a team roster, only to feel that sinking devastating feeling when my friend found her name and mine was heart-stoppingly absent.  (One specific friend who I had this experience with a few times, clear into college, was so sweet and empathetic, and brought me a bag of candy with a note a couple of different times)  In retrospect, it's just a game!  But when I was young it was (embarrassing to say it now) my life.  In high school and college track, I would watch a very talented individual here and there who could win without much effort at all, while I had to work my guts out.  At some point I realized that I was a winner for working hard and doing my best, and that I was the lucky one for having to work at it and learn to set goals and cope with failure.

Or the time I thought I had no friends that shared my lunch in high school, only to go outside for something near the end of a semester I had often sat alone, to watch them speeding away in a car, smiling and laughing.  Ouch.  It hurt.  But I also realized that maybe I was with the wrong friends.  I found a much better group of friends after a painful but enlightening period of alone-ness that, in the end, made me a stronger, better, more happy-with-myself person than I was before.

So, with my own kids, do I want to protect them from stuff like this?  You bet.  Do I want to watch them get hurt, be disappointed, fail?   Of course not.  Yet in other ways, these types of experiences are what refine us and make us better and stronger.

There was a quote on a white piece of poster board high on the wall in my kindergarten classroom.  It read:  "We all make mistakes.  That's the way we learn."   Isn't it funny that I remember that?  When so much of early life can be such a blur?  So maybe learning from the important people in our children's lives at a young age, that we accept and love you no matter what, that we are all making mistakes, and learning from them, all  the time-- and that is okay.  It's the trying that counts.

So, after another long-winded post, here are some ideas I've brainstormed as well as gleaned from a beautiful article I read about teaching kids resilience, just this morning.

1.  Help them learn to accept responsibility for their preparation.

2.  Help them look around and empathize with competitors.  To be happy for kids when they win, and to sympathize with a friend who does not.

3.  Help them see the end goal of anything competitive-- to better themselves and be a good sport.

4.  I know not everyone out there will relate to this one, but in case you do: pray with them before hand.  This seems to do a lot to help my kiddos feel calm, as well as helping him/her to see the big picture. (a great thing to do if they are sad afterward, too!)

5.  Help them recognize that failure and mistakes are learning opportunities.

6.  Help them take responsibility for outcomes that were less than ideal, even if a loss wasn't completely his/her fault.

7.  Teach that hard work, effort, and good sportsmanship make them winners no matter the outcome.

8.  Sit down in the dirt and cry with them.  Be supportive and empathetic as they work through what they could have done differently, without blame or I-told-you-so's (I have tried to step back a little and let my kids take responsibility for assignments and things and sometimes this is hard, when you try to encourage them to prepare a little more, but then leave consequences to them).  Love and support them and empathize with them no matter what, but don't join in if they try to shift blame elsewhere.

9.  Then show support for renewed efforts.  Or not.  Part of childhood is trying new things, feeling safe in trying those new things, and deciding when, how, or what to do next.

10.  Give examples in your own life of disappointments and how they made you a better person.

11.  Praise effort.  This encourages them more effectively than praising results.

12.  The end goal of competition should be that I become a better person, in the broad definition of the term.  And part of that includes using any expanded talents and skills grown in the process to benefit/bless others.

When my son experienced this most recent loss, a fellow spelling bee parent and neighbor showed up on our doorstep with a package of Oreos.  He said he had felt so bad when K had lost, as he knew how important it was to him.  Never mind that his son had gotten out too.  That act of kindness touched me so much.

How do you cope with loss and disappointment?  What are your tips or experiences on overcoming failure?