5 Ways to Prepare Your Child to Deal With Rejection

5 Ways to Prepare Your Child to Deal With Rejection

It’s perfectly natural that we want to protect our children from some of the harsher realities of life, particularly when it comes to anything to do with failure, rejection or getting their heart broken. The need to protect our children is, of course, an almost primal one, so deeply ingrained in parents it might as well be in our DNA.

But if this impulse isn’t checked every now and again, it can lead to our children being smothered and overprotected from the adversities which they will have to tackle in adult life, whether parents like it or not. Understanding and dealing with rejection is an essential life skill if your child is to live a happy, successful personal and professional life. It can be a fine line between introducing them to the adversities of adult life, versus unnecessarily dampening or crushing their hopes and dreams. Realism needs to go hand in hand with compassion if your child’s mental health is to be protected.

So, with this in mind, here are five useful strategies for preparing your child for rejection.

Strategy 1: Tie your child’s self-worth to their character, not their achievements

One of the most important things you can do for your child is to ensure that their sense of self-worth is not tied to their achievements, be that the number of trophies won for a particular sport, or their grades at the end of a school term. This is especially true if your child starts getting involved in a high-pressure, high skill activity from a young age. Whether it’s playing a musical instrument, ballet, or a team sport, you need to ensure your child’s success is tied to their efforts, their character, their morals and, when it comes to competitive activities, a sense of fair play.

This will stop your child from buying into a winner’s culture, which is much better for their sense of self-esteem, and stop them being cowed by failure.

Strategy 2:  Empathise with their failure

One of the best things you can do is empathise with your child’s sense of failure; don’t attempt to belittle it, or dismiss it. Failure can feel very raw in the immediate aftermath, especially if your child has put a lot of effort into a particular endeavour. Telling them to “move on,” or “get over it”, will not ultimately help them. Of course they need to move on from the setback eventually, but in the mean-time, they will benefit greatly from knowing that you, their parent and role model, knows exactly how they feel and can relate to their current emotional state. After all, you were young once too.

Strategy 3: Make failing a part of the learning process

This is a vital strategy if you’re going to instil a positive attitude to rejection in your son and daughter. It’s important that failure is understood to be a key component of our learning process, and not the end of a particular process or journey. It’s important that your son and daughter understands that failure does not mean that they are intrinsically bad at something, but rather a step on the road to further improvement.

This means that you should be teaching your child that failure is totally acceptable and normal; it’s also vital that they are equipped with strategies for analysing failure and then working out how they can learn from it.

Strategy 4: Encourage them to take ownership of their failures

Taking accountability for failure is one of the most important skills your son or daughter will need in the world of work. Trying to off-load responsibility for your short-comings onto someone else isn’t likely to win them many friends in their personal and professional lives. Taking ownership of a failure is intrinsic to learning from it and means that responsibility becomes a core strategy in coping with rejection.

Strategy 5: Be objective

This might sound like utterly nonsensical advice, especially because you are a parent – and being objective about your own son or daughter is very difficult. But learning to take a step back and allowing your child to fail on their own terms is essential for their personal and professional development. They won’t thank you for interfering in their lives when their older.

The four strategies above will ultimately only work if they all feed into the fifth strategy; you can’t let your own feelings and emotions get in the way when trying to help your children to deal with theirs. If you want your children to understand that failure is an objective lesson, rather than a personal flaw, then objectivity needs to be at the core of trying to teach your child about the difficulties of rejection.


About the Author:  Ann Heathcote

Ann HeathcoteAnn Heathcote opened The Worsley Centre for Psychotherapy and Counselling in 2001, as a centre for the provision of professional psychotherapeutic services.
 
The Worsley Centre is a warm and welcoming environment for people wishing to undertake counselling and psychotherapy. The practitioners at the Centre care deeply about each individual’s mental health and well-being. They all share a passion for providing high quality therapeutic services.

One Comment

Christa W

Thank you, this was very helpful. My granddaughter is currently having anxiety problems because she is battling to cope in school, so this advice will come in handy.

Christa W

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I’ve loved working with @sccrcentre over the last 10 years. They do profoundly important work with families - keeping connections, reducing clinflict, building relationships - and they do it so incredibly well. @sccrcentre thank you for everything you do, and for letting me be a part of it. I love what you do and what you stand for. Your work over the last decade has been life-changing for so many. I know the next decade will be even more so.♥️

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Posted @withregram • @sccrcentre Over the next fortnight, as we prepare to mark our 10th anniversary (28 March), we want to re-share the great partners we’ve worked with over the past decade. We start today with Karen Young of Hey Sigmund.

Back in 2021, when we were still struggling with covid and lockdowns, Karen spoke as part of our online conference on ‘Strengthening the relationship between you & your teen’. It was a great talk and I’m delighted that you can still listen to it via the link in the bio.

Karen also blogged about our work for the Hey Sigmund website in 2018. ‘How to Strengthen Your Relationship With Your Children and Teens by Understanding Their Unique Brain Chemistry (by SCCR)’, which is still available to read - see link in bio.

#conflictresolution #conflict #families #family #mediation #earlyintervention #decade #anniversary #digital #scotland #scottish #cyrenians #psychology #relationships #children #teens #brain #brainchemistry #neuroscience
I often go into schools to talk to kids and teens about anxiety and big feelings. 

I always ask, ‘Who’s tried breathing through big feels and thinks it’s a load of rubbish?’ Most of them put their hand up. I put my hand up too, ‘Me too,’ I tell them, ‘I used to think the same as you. But now I know why it didn’t work, and what I needed to do to give me this powerful tool (and it’s so powerful!) that can calm anxiety, anger - all big feelings.’

The thing is though, all powertools need a little instruction and practice to use them well. Breathing is no different. Even though we’ve been breathing since we were born, we haven’t been strong breathing through big feelings. 

When the ‘feeling brain’ is upset, it drives short shallow breathing. This is instinctive. In the same ways we have to teach our bodies how to walk, ride a bike, talk, we also have to teach our brains how to breathe during big feelings. We do this by practising slow, strong breathing when we’re calm. 

We also have to make the ‘why’ clear. I talk about the ‘why’ for strong breathing in Hey Warrior, Dear You Love From Your Brain, and Ups and Downs. Our kids are hungry for the science, and they deserve the information that will make this all make sense. Breathing is like a lullaby for the amygdala - but only when it’s practised lots during calm.♥️
When it’s time to do brave, we can’t always be beside them, and we don’t need to be. What we can do is see them and help them feel us holding on, even in absence, while we also believe in their brave.♥️
Honestly isn’t this the way it is for all of us though?♥️

#childanxiety #parenting #separationanxiety
Big feelings can be so beautiful. And so tricky. 

We want our kids to know that all feelings are okay, and we also want to support them to handle those feelings in positive ways. This is going to take time. We were all born with feelings, but none of us were born able to regulate those feelings. That will come with time and lots (lots!) of experience. 

In the meantime, the way we respond to their big feelings and the not-so-adorable behaviour it can drive, can be key in nurturing their social and emotional growth. So let’s talk about how.

Proactive Parents is a community event hosted by @mindfullaus . I’ll be providing parents, caregivers and educators with the skills and tools to better understand big feelings and the behaviour it fuels.

Understanding how to respond when young people are overwhelmed can drive calm and connection over conflict. Ultimately, our responses have enormous potential to build important neural pathways that will strengthen them for life.

This presentation will explore the powerful ways parents and carers can, quite literally, influence the strengthening of the brain in ways that will build self-control, emotional regulation, and resilience in their children for life.♥️

When: Sunday 25 Feb 2024, 10am-2pm
Where: West Gippsland Arts Centre, Vic
Buy Tickets here: https://sales.wgac.com.au/event/379:2410/379:3923/
(Or Google: karen young young people and their big feelings west gippsland)

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