Helping kids deal with disappointment

The last few years have forced us all to deal with disappointment more than any of us would have liked or anticipated. How many events, special occasions or even normal expectations have been cancelled or changed since 2020? The list is too long to worry about.

While the specific let downs of life, and particularly growing up, will vary from child to child, child development experts agree that the basic tools for managing disappointments are largely the same across age groups.

1. Listen and Validate

As parents, our first impulse is often to try to fix problems for our children. But often there’s no way to fix our current reality. What you can do is listen to and acknowledge children’s frustration and disappointment, says Carey Werley, LCSW, a clinical social worker at the Child Mind Institute. Werley points out that drilling down on the specifics of what your child is most disappointed about is helpful.

It’s also important to avoid judging their reactions. Invalidating the pain that our children are feeling (by telling them it’s not a big deal, for example) will only make them feel more isolated. What’s more, focusing on one issue might be a way for your child to process bigger feelings — like fear and sadness — that they can’t quite confront yet.

Instead, emphasize that you hear your child and express your support for how they’re handling this.

2. Provide Perspective

Kids, especially younger ones, don’t have the perspective adults have as a result of having lived through our share of disappointments. Instead, children may see things in black and white.

Again, validating this fear is a good place to start, and work to avoid false reassurances — you don’t want to give your child unrealistic ideas about what the future will hold.

This is your chance to appropriately share your own past experiences of change and uncertainty, including how you dealt with those challenges and what the results were.

3. Seek Solutions

Whatever the disappointment, be it a missed birthday part or poorer than anticipated results at school or in sport, work towards finding ways to compensate for these losses. We can’t always get everything we want, but we can get creative in the way we think about and act in the future.

You can also encourage your child to talk about what they’re going through with their friends — bonding with peers over their shared disappointment can help kids put things in perspective and maybe even strengthen friendships.

4. Give Them a Sense of Control

Often our disapointments coincide with feeling like we don’t have, or have lost, control of a situation. Working with your child to plan out their days is one way to give them a sense of control over what’s happening. How do they want to spend their free time? What projects might they enjoy digging into? Many kids will even get excited about giving input into meal planning or household chores.

5. Have Faith in Them

Remind your kids of things they’ve tolerated before, whether it was not being cast in the school play, getting a lower-than-expected grade, or losing a big game. Let them know that even though this situation is different, they can use some of the same skills to get through it.

In essence, the message we send our child is, ‘I have faith in you. I can see this is hard, but I know that you’ve got it.’