Dealing With Disappointment

I've been thinking a lot about disappointment and disillusionment lately - there's probably some irony that I'm writing this just after posting about the kids' Read-a-Thon triumphs. I haven't been pondering it due to any specific disappointment on my part or on the part of my kids, but more along the lines of how we should prepare our kids to handle it. Because it will happen. It was brought to the forefront of my thoughts yesterday when I attended a Cub Scout Pinewood Derby with N and the rest of the kids in his pack. It was a fun day. N's car ("Montoya") did decently enough for a block of wood with a little paint thrown on it, and in all the round-robin heats N took joy in his occasional win and rode through the various losses with a "that's life" demeanor. I was grateful that N won a few, and thankful for the grace with which he handled the defeats. It is, in my opinion, a healthy attitude, though I can't say what anyone did to develop that within him. By unfortunate contrast there was one boy there, however, who had a really rough time of it. His car was really cute and you could tell he put a lot of time into it. But it just didn't do well. He lost each race. Every one. As far as the environment, it was text-book perfect. All the other kids were cheering each other on, including this one boy. The races were run as carefully as possible to keep things fair, and the various scout leaders were all very encouraging and compassionate. But the boy was devastated and inconsolable. It broke my heart too, because he's a very sweet kid.

I wondered what makes one kid roll with the punches and another crumble? I don't know that N wouldn't have reacted the same way, but I tend to think not. Maybe he would if it was something he wanted badly enough. But what is it that makes this kind of thing so hard on some? Like I said, it wasn't the other scouts, they were cheering for him loudly - unless that brought more attention to the loss. It wasn't the leaders or the race track. It wasn't the parents, who were encouraging him and trying to keep his spirits up. So what was it?

I have my suspicions. I think the self-esteem culture we've embraced and nourished in this country over the last decade or two, while having some clear benefits, has had its share of tragedies. I think the "Every Child Is a Winner" mantra has some dangerous repercussions. It is happy and positive. It is easy on the teachers and leaders when it is embraced in curriculum and events. Everyone is pleased and everyone is affirmed. What's not to love? But it isn't realistic. It lies to kids; it tells all kids (good kids, successful kids, struggling kids and flat out incompetent kids) that things always come out great. Every smarmy Saturday morning cartoon drips with this stuff now. The plots are all singular: The sensitive kid struggles with something. He fails and is discouraged. An enlightened adult descends from the clouds to lecture all those around on the need to hug and encourage. The heartless crowd is converted. Now the scene is repeated, but this time all the crowd cheers on the struggler. And he WINS!!! All it took was encouragement and positive thoughts! And everyone is happy and enlightened ever after.

We cheered on this kid. We tried to be sensitive to his pain (and were). But his car still lost. And his heart was still crushed.

Don't get me wrong. I'm not blaming the kid. He's six or seven and his sorrows were real and painful. If there was an element of selfishness in it all, it was nothing that isn't common to them all. The kid wasn't wrong. The kid was unprepared. He'd been told in school, in church, on television, in after-school activities, that he will succeed if he tries. If you live your dream, your dream will come true. He tried - you could tell he tried a lot. And lost every race.

In my line of work we design our products to be "fail-safe." There's a big difference between that and "fail-proof." We KNOW something's gonna fail sooner or later, somewhere. While we try to minimize them, we know we can't prevent each and every failure. So we design in graceful degradation. If something breaks, there are other resources available to deal with it. We are redundant. We might suffer a little and not operate at 100%, but we don't keel over and die. We can't afford that. We need to build our kids to be fail-safe. We need to have kids that operate though a design disappointment.

How do we do that? I don't have the luxury of having a redundant N to pick up where life left off when the primary N was crushed by adversity. N has to be internally fail-safe. He has to be resilient. And unlike electrical circuits, kids get resilient with wear and tear. Kids have to fail from time to time. Kids have to have things work out really poorly in spite of good prep. And it needs to be something they experience from day one, not when they are six or seven for the first time. Or worse, when they are 16 or 17 in the dramatic throes of high school, or 21 when they are finally working for someone who isn't going to be particularly sensitive to their self-esteem issues. N needs life-long resiliency training, so that self-esteem and overall satisfaction comes from honest self-inspection and assessment and not an "objective," external, fully congratulatory score card. He will fail some big tests in life. I don't want the first to be his last.

Javert on the trail.

I'm reading Les Misérables right now. This morning I happened to finish the chapter on Javert's suicide. (One of the most powerfully written pieces of literature I've ever read, by the way. Victor Hugo is phenomenal.) It dove-tailed so much with my thoughts from earlier in the day. Javert was a gifted and brilliant inspector, merciless and exacting, free of any expectation of the need or place for compassion or mercy. And he was unquestionably successful. His world and world-view were never challenged. His character and abilities had never been put into any question. And then suddenly he experiences grace at the hands of Jean Valjean that cracks open that impenetrable self-confidence, that forces him to question if he was truly successful, if he might not have been wrong, or at least, incomplete. And he has no tools to deal with it. His monolithic view of duty and authority cannot tolerate the slightest true crack, and Javert is destroyed.

I don't want to raise Javert. I don't want a kid who's convinced he has been unflinchingly successful and who is stunned when he doesn't  reap the just rewards, or worse, realizes for the first time that he really doesn't deserve them - that he really is a failure at things. I want a kid who can exhibit graceful degradation.  I want to crack my kid now, so that grace and mercy and peace have a toehold to grow into.