✕
☰

Building strong, resilient kids

Life isn’t fair, and learning to accept that is an important skill

by

Lee’s Summit mom Cari Chretien recently had to help her 10-year-old son accept the fact he didn’t make a specific baseball team after playing for that team for a couple years. Instead of letting him focus on the fact he didn’t make the team, they discussed his strengths, talents and everything he had to contribute to another team he made after trying out. After framing it in this manner, he said himself he was glad he was able to help out and play on the other team.

“Not everybody is cut out to do everything, so not everyone can make the team,” Chretien says. It’s all in the way we look at things as parents, she says, and the truth is her son wasn’t meant to be on the other team.

Processing rejection and building resilience are experiences children need when they are young in order to become strong adults in a difficult world.

 “The simple fact is life is not fair,” says Celeste Lundergan, a Lee’s Summit-based counselor with Cornerstone Counseling. “If children do not learn to deal with disappointment, stress and difficulties in relationships…you set them up to believe they have to be perfect or other people have to treat them perfectly.”

Lundergan says one of the most important things parents can do to help their children deal with rejection is to allow them to fail. She says the urge to jump in and protect children is strong. Yet if a parent is always trying to rescue a child, they are teaching him failure is unacceptable and everyone else’s life is perfect—which of course isn’t true.

“There are times when we need to let our children struggle,” Lundergan says. “That’s really hard and really painful, but they can struggle, succeed and overcome.”

Along these lines, she says another thing parents can do is avoid intervening every time the child comes home complaining she has been treated unfairly by a friend, teacher or other adult. Parents’ doing this teaches kids you always will fix their problems. 

Instead of always intervening, parents should talk through the situation with the child, hearing his perspective and discussing the rules of the class, team or situation to evaluate whether the child was treated unfairly, Lundergan recommends. If parents decide the child was treated unfairly, they should analyze the scenario to see whether something is so unfair it requires action, or whether the situation is one the child is going to face again and again in life. In that case, parents can help youngsters learn to just let go of the negativity the circumstances stir up. She says talking through this sort of analysis with children helps them build critical thinking skills to use in the future.

Kids also need to learn that dwelling on being mistreated by certain individuals allows those people to have power over them. Lundergan recommends starting discussions about this at a very young age by simply telling the child something like, “You are letting your friend ruin your day, and he isn’t even here.”

Jennifer Brault, a Lee’s Summit mom, sees board games as an opportunity to teach her 5-year-old daughter she will not always win everything. At first when they would play games together, her daughter would get very upset when she lost, and losing was difficult for her to accept. Eventually, Brault told her if she couldn’t lose nicely, they couldn’t play games together at all. Over time, her daughter decided playing was her priority and became less upset when she lost. Brault also uses this opportunity to teach her to win graciously.

Five aspects of helping your child face rejection and build resilience

The following tips are from Celeste Lundergan with Cornerstone Counseling:

 

Allison Gibeson is a stay-at-home mom and freelance writer from Lee’s Summit.

 

 

Back to topbutton