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“One night, my 3-year-old asked me if she could sleep in my bed. I told her no. She said, “That’s not fair! Why does Daddy get to sleep in your bed?” READ MORE
Early Years (2-6)
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Learning through disappointments and setbacks My son and I are playing Candyland, taking turns, drawing cards, moving our tokens down the multi-colored, checkerboard path. I’ve been lucky, landing on the shortcuts of Rainbow Trail and Gumdrop Pass. On the other hand, my 5-year-old keeps getting lost in the Lollipop Woods and stuck in the Molasses Swamp. Soon, I am closing in on the ice cream turrets of the Candy Castle. I am clearly winning. The only question is whether my son will let me. As he sees what is about to happen, the corners of his mouth draw down severely. His frown rivals Emmett Kelly’s sad-sack clown face, but on him, it is tragic and heartbreaking. He looks at me and his eyes fill. “I want to win,” he says, and I can’t help but hear the insistence and expectation in his elocution. Of course, he assumed that he would win. Playing this benign board game meant winning. Isn’t that what it’s all about? Suddenly it’s not a game anymore. It’s something much, much bigger and he is lost in a darker emotional wood, going down in a swamp of messy, gooey emotional gumdrops. Experts suggest that children may view losing as a sign of inadequacy, a lack of competence. No surprise there. The desire to feel powerful is strong, especially for a little person in a world dominated by big people, not to mention a world, a nation, of passionate boosters and fans and rooters and celebrators of winners. Our culture’s emphasis on victory makes loss problematic by definition. Losing is a problem, and trying to parent through it challenges perhaps our own expectations of a successful, winning, above-average student, athlete, musician or Candyland player. We want winners. We so love it when our children win and we shower them, correctly, mental-healthily, with praise and adulation and encouragement. And we summon up our wisdom and perspective and humor, and dole it out for the silver and bronze and the kid who finishes last. We love our kids unconditionally, win or lose, as we should. But children might wonder where exactly that love goes when they lose. A young child, still developing emotionally, may very well feel his or her value threatened by the ever-present “go for the gold” standard of performance and success. It should be easy to show a child what failure looks and feels like, and how a reasonably well-functioning, happy person deals with it after a lifetime of modest successes, and big, little and in-between flops, setbacks, regrets, misplaced goals and pared-down ambitions. Finally, loss is normal, inevitable, even valuable. Cold comfort, perhaps, like that droll bumper sticker I keep on my office door at school: “Oh, no, not another learning experience.” But consider the power of the role model, the parent who can joke about, cry about and eventually transcend these losses. Even as we share our own successes with our children, we should take some careful moments to highlight those times we have lost. Instead of complaining or downplaying or denying, parents should take the opportunity to honestly explore and explain our failures with children, giving them the chance to see how we handle disappointments and setbacks. The experts echo the wisdom in that self-deprecating sticker. Learning resilience, they say, makes for emotionally strong people. In a Zen-like equation, loss often creates gain. Recognizing effort, not results, shows that humans can improve, develop skills and take another try at bat tomorrow. And then there’s luck. Not every victory is rooted in skill – chance also plays a role. My own victory in Candyland depended only on cards I blindly selected – not skills or strengths. I could perhaps beat Boris Spassky or Steven Hawkins on a lucky Candyland day. Throughout their childhoods, our children will lose much more than on the game board of Candyland. They will not get what they want in family matters. They will lose to siblings and friends in competitions. They will lose friends. They will lose precious belongings. Sometimes the loss will be a result of weakness or lousy luck or the fact that life brings us changes that can’t be resisted: A friend moves away. A team places last. An old toy breaks. A tooth falls out. But, luckily, they might also lose the sketchy, wrong-headed side of playing, living, being: the childish and unrealistic expectation of always winning. Regular contributor Lisa Alvarez is an English professor at Irvine Valley College. |
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