Note: Sheri Glucoft Wong has written such an accessible parenting book that grandparents, especially those who provide regular childcare for their grandchildren, can benefit from reading it as well. Sheri is the co-author of Raising Kids: Your Essential Guide to Everyday Parenting and will be our September 10, 2023 speaker. This post is a summary of a chapter titled: “Exercising the Disappointment Muscle and Other Ways to Build Resilience.”
Saying “no” to our grandchildren is one of the hardest words to utter and yet, we’re doing them and their parents a disservice when we avoid it.
We can’t control what difficulties our grandchildren have to face, but we can help them make the best of routine disappointments. By helping our grandchildren learn to manage and bounce back from everyday letdowns, we help them gain the capacity and confidence to deal with the bigger setbacks and losses that life can bring.
How to Strengthen the Disappointment Muscle
In her book, Raising Kids: Your Essential Guide to Everyday Parenting, family therapist Sheri Glucoft Wong states that “all children are born with the disappointment muscle.” But it needs to be exercised so they develop the strength to handle setbacks and discouragements. This can be challenging for us grandparents who instinctively want to help our grandchildren avoid disappointments.
When we maneuver to spare them from disappointment, it’s because we dread the sulking, defiance, and tantrums that tend to follow when they don’t get what they want. When we hesitate to say “no” or say “we’ll see,” our grandchildren can misinterpret our behavior and think that saying “no” is terrible.
Instead, we need to convey we understand they’re disappointed and we’re just going to make the best of it. This is going to be incredibly hard for many grandparents — maybe even harder than it is for their grandchild. Remind yourself that the more experience kids have with managing disappointment, the stronger their disappointment muscles will grow and the easier the next disappointment will be for them — and you.
As counterintuitive as it may seem when things don’t go their way, it’s healthy to allow our grandchildren to feel sad, left out, and let down. We can offer our compassion and then help them move on to whatever is next.
Friendships begin and end, games are lost, toys are misplaced, and hearts are broken. All of these disappointments will go so much better when children have some inner strength to flex as they inevitably will.
The process of learning how to handle letdowns is essential to becoming a resilient, confident, and happy person. If we can help contribute to teaching resilience, our grandchildren and their parents will benefit.
What Grandparents Can Do and Say
When your grandchild is disappointed or struggling, tap into your empathy while letting them have their feeling. Here are four ways you can help your grandchild manage their upsets:
- Learn to handle your own feelings about their situation. That includes managing your own disappointment as well as your heartache about their disappointment. Your sturdiness will inspire theirs.
- Learn to handle their feelings. When you see your grandchild struggling with disappointment, remember that kids learn over time how to get through difficulties with more grace and less drama. Accept their temporary unhappiness and unease and ride it out with confidence that you’ll all get through it. Stay kind and firm.
- Support your grandchild’s resilience. Help them find the “oh, well” — the understanding that if they can do something about their predicament, they should. If they can’t, then “oh, well,” it’s time to move on. You’ve learned over time that you win some and you lose some. Losing some is a letdown but rarely a tragedy. Remembering this will help you get out of the way of your grandchild’s opportunity to be disappointed and allow them to build resilience.
- Model how to overcome disappointment when you experience it. If you can demonstrate that being disappointed gives you a sad feeling that you experience with some grace and then move beyond, you will show your grandchild how resilience works, and it will help them, eventually, to catch on.
Our grandchildren need these kinds of support from us as they navigate life’s disappointments and heartbreak. We can stand by, wipe their tears, and commiserate. Most importantly, we can give them the gift of our confidence in their capacity for resilience.
