When They Don’t Make The Team

WRITTEN BY FLORA MCCORMICK, LCPC

Many parents worry that faced with disappointment, their child will be crushed by rejection and either never try again or feel like they are fundamentally not worthy. These worries are totally normal and very common. After all, this is our precious human who we’ve nurtured and encouraged since birth. You may have even been alongside them for days and hours of struggle and challenge as they set out to accomplish this big goal. You are proud and optimistic, and therefore when your child comes home crushed with disappointment, it’s easy to step into being a “fixer” or trying to rescue your kid from their feelings.

Unfortunately, this response can often be counterproductive and can cause your child to shut down or even be angry at you for “not getting it.” If your goal is to be encouraging and supportive of your child and this moment, be supportive, absolutely! But I recommend you focus on THIS KEY principle: Your job is to SUPPORT, not fix or rescue.

Here’s what that looks like.

1. Name their feeling: “You seem really (feeling word). Tell me about that.” We name feelings in moments like this because first off, when you name it, you may often tame it. Sometimes just hearing our feeling named out loud brings so much relief.

Secondly, we name feelings because these are key moments that are ripe for teaching emotional intelligence. When our child is having a feeling, and we give them a clear name for that feeling, it helps them be more likely to use that feeling name in the future, which is a key component of being emotionally intelligent. Bonus: It may help them to name that feeling when they see it come up for their friends. Again, major win for team emotional intelligence.

2. Then listen. No, like really listen. Consider that your job is to spend 80% of the next few minutes listening and validating. Then 20% of your time will be spent on solutions. This is often a flip-flop of the usual patterns where we may be tempted to just spend 20% of the time validating/listening and 80% of the time trying to solve the problem.

» A. The first option for how to really listen is to use validation responses like, “Ugh! Darn. Hmmmm.” If you’re wondering, “Why wouldn’t I try to help them feel better and cheer them up?!” The shift is this: We don’t want to rob our children of their own chance to work through their emotions, and come out the other side with their own path forward. We are following the concept from How to Talk so Kids Will Listen, and Listen so Kids Will Talk:

“By lending an attentive ear and firmly squeezing your lips together, or letting out a sympathetic grunt, we can help our children find their own way through their feelings. The gift we can give them is to not get in the way of their process by jumping in with our reactions, advice, questions, corrections.”

» B. Another option in the listening phase is to demonstrate you are hearing them by saying back exactly what you hear.

If the child says, “It’s just not fair! Jason made it and I’m better than him!” You can say, “It just doesn’t even seem fair, because Jason made it and you feel like you’re better than him.” It may seem trite or overly simplistic, but these phrases are often received as wonderful demonstrations that you are listening.

This process may go back and forth between steps one and two for 3 to 15 minutes, depending on the intensity of your child’s feelings about not making the team. Let that be OK. Picture their heart like a treasure chest that is full of some big, hard feelings. You are listening and using these phrases to help those feelings get aired out so there is room for new emotions and solutions.

» 3. Ask a problem-solving question. Resist the temptation to give a moral platitude like: “Well, everything happens for a reason,” or “There’s always next time.”

Instead, ask a question that guides the child to think through how they want to move forward:

» “I wonder what you might want to do about that?”

» “How can I best support you in this?”

» “What would you like to do next?”

Again, this may seem overly simplistic, but the gem here is that we are allowing the child to decide how they want to move forward, and that will likely be received as the BEST support your child was really craving.

Flora McCormick, LCPC is a parenting coach at Sustainable Parenting, and just launched a *new* podcast, with strategies that fill the gap between overly-gentle parenting and harsh discipline. When she isn’t writing or running online parenting groups with moms and couples, you can find her curled up with a vanilla latte, camping, gardening or mushing play dough with her two kids.