As an author, I've dealt with rejection and failure more times than I can count -- agent rejections, publisher rejections, readers telling me they didn't like my novel -- and I've gotten used to it, mostly. Now when a rejection comes, I feel maybe a tiny sting, and then I move on. In the beginning, though, it was rough.
One of the most important things we can teach our children is how to deal with rejection and failure in their lives, and this means that we must let them be rejected or fail. As parents, this is extremely difficult. We can't stand to see our kids suffer, and since so many of us view our children as extensions of ourselves, their rejections or failures can sting as though we are personally experiencing them.
A few years ago, when my daughter was in middle school, a mother came up to me, infuriated. Her son had not made the middle school soccer team. "Imagine how he feels," she fumed, "when he has to walk by all of these kids who are not as good as he is, who got on the team, and he didn't make it." What I read from that was that she was embarrassed that her son hadn't made the team, and she couldn't bear to think he wasn't as good as she thought he was.
My daughter had a recent failure. She came home, crying, and I felt awful for her. It was one of those embarrassing things she would have to live with. But I'm convinced that it will help her in the long run to be a better person, to make good decisions, and to work hard. So many parents seem bewildered by their children's failures or rejections. A child doesn't make a sports team, and it can't be because the child wasn't as good as another child, or didn't behave well, or whatever the case, it has to be because there was some strange force conspiring against the child. (And there may have been, but then again, it's a lesson to be learned.) Or the child doesn't get invited into a prestigious group, the advisers must be manipulating the system. By the time the child is ready for the college admissions process, he or she and his or her parents may have no real idea about rejection and failure, how and why it happens, and how to cope with it.
Two years ago, my daughter was beginning her senior year of high school. I remarked to a friend that I was going to spend the entire year locked in my house, because I knew how dramatic some of the parents were going to get over the college admissions process. I was right. Parents whose children had never, in theory, been rejected from anything, could not cope with their children not getting into the more rigorous schools on their lists. And the kids were horrified because they had never been rejected by anything before. And, sure enough, the parents insisted, these rejections had nothing to do with the child; they were sure to be about anything but the child.
College admissions rejection is the first really big rejection for many kids. But it is bound not to be the last -- not getting the job, being passed over for the promotion, being broken up with by a serious girl or boyfriend.....there are times we are all rejected, and childhood is as good as anytime to learn to cope with it; in fact, I think it's the best time. So parents, when your child is rejected, don't cover it up as someone else's mistake. Teach your children to accept that no one is perfect, including them, and that rejection, while not fair, happens. Being rejected is not the problem, it's learning to deal with it.
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