You know that life isn’t perfect. You can’t get everything you want all of the time. You know this because you have experienced disappointments in your life that have made you stronger and helped you improve. You children, on the other hand, do not know this. To them, it is the end of the world when they don’t make the football team or get a role in the school play. It is your job to teach them how to turn disappointments into opportunities.
Don’t look at obstacles as problems. Look at them as challenges to be met on the way to reaching your goal. If your son doesn’t make the football team, help him practice for the next tryouts coming up. Working through these challenges is what helps your children personally mature and develop.
This thought can even be applied to things they don’t like doing in everyday life. Instead of looking at homework as a burden, help them see it as an opportunity to learn. It might help if you talk about the millions of people in the world for whom education will always be out of reach. Talk about the opportunities they will have in life because they received an education. Whether they want to be an astronaut, a professional athlete, or a rock star when they grow up, education will play an integral part in their success.
Sometimes you have to deal with disappointment to get something you want. For example, I’m sure your kids want to grow up to be big, strong adults. If they ate ice cream and candy all day and sat around playing video games, they couldn’t mature into healthy grownups. Next time your child is crying because you won’t let him get ice cream from the truck before dinner, or won’t let him buy his favorite candy while you’re at the store, remind him how important it is for him to be big and strong.
Some bigger disappointments are harder to handle, but with the right attitude you can help your child turn disappointment into success. If your child is sad because he didn’t make the football team, maybe that’s an opportunity for him to try another sport or activity that he never considered before. He might end up liking soccer or drawing way more than he ever would have liked football. That disappointment that seemed huge at the time could lead to something even better than what he originally wanted.
By helping your child cope with small disappointments now, you are conditioning them to deal with larger disappointments later in life. If your child is used to getting his way all the time, if you as a parent bend to his will because you want to see him happy, it is only hurting him in the long run. A child who gets what he wants whenever he wants it won’t know how to handle the disappointment of getting rejected by his dream college, not getting the job he wants, or getting his heart broken. A child that doesn’t know how to handle disappointment will grow into an adult who is ill-equipped to deal with the challenges of adult life.
Because we want our children to be happy and give them everything in life, it is sometimes hard to tell them no or watch them deal with disappointment. By looking for the opportunities each disappointment presents instead of wallowing in negative feels about what he feels he lost, your child will grow to understand that life is full of lemons, but it’s up to him to make the lemonade.
Contribute by Solomon Brenner author of black belt parenting and Master instructor of Action Karate. For more information comment here, call 1-888-99-SHARK(74275), or email us actionkarate@comcast.net
