When your daughter doesn’t make the cut
I think we, as parents, are deluding ourselves when we register our kids in sports and other programs and expect them to excel at everything. As much as we tout our kids to be bright, talented and athletic, the reality is that most of them are just ordinary kids. And parents’ expectation notwithstanding, doesn’t help when their kid didn’t make the cut for a team sport. My daughter desperately wanted to play basketball and tried out for the school’s Girls Team. There were after school practices and tryouts for over 2 weeks. When the list was posted, she didn’t see her name on it. She was very disappointed and poured her heart out.
I could have marched right up to the coach’s office in a ‘daddy will fix this attitude’ and demanded that he re-evaluate his decision and instantly give my daughter a victim-mentality. I could also have minimized the disappointment and said that she’s already good at something else and that she shouldn’t get upset over something unimportant which risks further deflecting and diminishing her aspirations. The best thing to do is to acknowledge the elephant in the room and deal with it in exactly the way Sadness dealt with Bing Bong’s disappointment when the construction workers threw away his song-powered rocket ship in the movie Inside Out (2015). Sadness lets Bing Bong cry it out and even spoke some truthful words, “I’m sorry they took your rocket. They took something that you loved. It’s gone. Forever.” This got Bing Bong to talk through it and cried even more. Sadness acknowledged, validated and empathized with Bing Bong’s feelings and allowed him an opportunity to pour out his emotions on her shoulders. They shared a moment of compassion and it allowed Bing Bong to move forward very quickly.
The psychological reaction to an outcome that does not match with expectation does actually cause a very real physiological response. Not dealing with this properly will cause her to idealizing about a ‘what-if’ all the while rejecting the ‘what-is’.
It’s important for children to learn important life skills like dealing with disappointment. In fact, the psychological reaction to an outcome that does not match with expectation does actually cause a very real physiological response. It is this response that makes your child feel absolutely rotten. Minimizing the emotional response by expressing anger, denial, blame or even downplaying the original objective could place the child further away from accepting reality. Such reactions will linger and manifest as she continues to idealizing about a ‘what-if’ all the while rejecting the ‘what-is’.
Through disappointment, your child has an excellent opportunity to learn life lessons. It teaches them that they can’t have everything they want. Sometimes, her not achieving something may have nothing to do with her at all; in other words, her desires, actions and investments are, in fact, irrelevant! That’s why it’s not useful to internalize the disappointment by iterating what she did or didn’t do. It’s also equally important that she is encouraged to try again. This attitude is essential in all worthwhile pursuits and is especially invaluable when she enters the work force: nobody does anything perfectly the first time!
A few weeks after the team was formed at her school, my daughter passed by the school gym at a time the Girls Team was practicing. She looked in and noticed that they were all tall girls. She learned that all the players were from Grades 5 and 6; she was only in Grade 4. She came home to tell me this news and I instantly said that makes sense. Her joining a team of Grade 5 and 6 would be like asking a Grade 2 to join the Grade 4 team: the younglings would be trampled! The school wanted senior girls so they have a strong team to play intramural basketball. That’s why she didn’t make the cut. It had nothing to do with her ability or gusto. Heck, even 19 year-old Canadian Bianca Andreescu who won the US Open didn’t even make it to the finals the year before! She thought for a second, offered a tenacious smirk and said, “I’m going to try out again next year.”