How to help your child learn to accept being humbled: Tips for parents and teachers
Last Friday, I stood against the middle school gym wall holding a crumpled bag of goldfish crackers, watching my 10-year-old son Liam walk off the talent show stage. He’d practiced his card trick for three weeks, dug out my old prom top hat from the back of the hallway closet, and even made his own printed cue cards to remember the order of moves. When he finished, the applause was polite, but when the host read the names of the top three acts moving on to the district showcase, Liam’s name wasn’t there. He walked straight past me to the water fountain, wouldn’t meet my eye, and when we got to the car he slammed the door so hard the rearview mirror slipped out of place.
I almost opened my mouth with the lines I’d said a hundred times before: It’s just a silly show, you were amazing, those judges don’t know anything. But I stopped. I remembered three weeks earlier, when I’d messed up a big work presentation for a room full of new clients, came home and ate an entire pint of mint chocolate chip while moping that I should just quit doing presentations altogether. When my mom called and said “You were great, those people don’t know what they’re talking about,” it didn’t make me feel better. It just made me feel like my embarrassment wasn’t allowed to exist.
So I sat in the driver’s seat, adjusted the mirror, and didn’t say anything until we pulled into the driveway. When Liam dragged himself out of the car and flopped on the living room couch, staring at his scuffed top hat at his feet, I sat down next to him and said, “Working that hard for something and still not getting what you wanted sucks. It feels really humiliating to mess up in front of everyone, right?”
He nodded, and then he started crying—something he rarely does anymore now that he’s in double digits. He said everyone saw he dropped the ace of spades halfway through, that everyone was probably laughing at him for messing up. I didn’t tell him no one was watching, because I’d seen a few kids glance over when he fumbled. Instead, I told him about the time I burned an entire batch of chocolate chip cookies for the school bake sale, ran to the grocery store at 8 p.m. to buy pre-made ones, and hid them in my own tupperware because I was too embarrassed to tell anyone I’d messed up. I told him I still think about that sometimes, how awkward it felt, and it’s okay to feel that way now.
That’s the thing no one tells you about helping kids accept being humbled: most of the time, you don’t need to fix the problem, you just need to let them feel the awkward, stinging feeling without making it mean something bigger about who they are. A lot of us jump in to soften the blow immediately, either by saying the competition was rigged or that our kid is actually the best, but that just teaches them that being humbled is so terrible we have to lie about it to make it okay.
My sister, a 4th grade teacher, told me she uses the same approach in her classroom when a kid gets an answer wrong and the whole class laughs. Instead of drawing more attention to the kid by saying “that’s such a great try!” (which just makes them want to disappear faster), she’ll say “That’s such a common mistake, I mess that up every single time I teach this lesson. Let me show you why it trips everyone up,” and moves right into the explanation. No big fuss, no extra attention, just a normal mistake that happens to everyone. It takes all the power out of the humiliation in 10 seconds flat.
After Liam cried for a few minutes, we ordered his favorite pepperoni pizza, put on The Lego Movie, and didn’t talk about the talent show for the rest of the night. I didn’t push him to sign up for next year, or tell him he’d get it next time. We just sat and watched the movie and ate too much pizza.
A week later, he asked if he could do his card trick for my sister when she came over for dinner. Halfway through, he dropped a card again, and this time he just laughed, picked it up, and kept going. After dinner, he told me he wanted to go back to Lego club—he’d quit after losing a build contest two months earlier, when another kid brought a motorized Ferris wheel that outshone his space station. I didn’t tell him he’d definitely win next time, I just grabbed his club bag from the hall closet and said “I’ll drive you on Tuesday.”
It’s not perfect. Last week he came home upset because he didn’t make the starting lineup for his rec baseball team, and he slammed his bedroom door and wouldn’t talk for an hour. I didn’t knock and push him to talk, I just left a bag of his favorite gummy bears on the floor outside his door and went back to washing dishes. When he came out an hour later, we talked about it for 10 minutes, then played a round of Mario Kart like nothing happened.
I still catch myself wanting to smooth over every rough spot, to tell him he’s the best at everything just to avoid that hurt look on his face. But I’m learning that being humbled isn’t a problem to solve or a failure to avoid. It’s just a regular part of trying new things, of putting yourself out there. Some days we handle it well, some days we slam doors and eat too much junk food, and that’s enough for now. We’re all still practicing, one small awkward moment at a time.
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