“我不擅长踢足球，”你的孩子在一场特别沉闷的比赛后说。作为父母，你很可能会安慰你的孩子说，“不，亲爱的，你是一个伟大的足球运动员!”心理学家玛德琳·莱文说，支持孩子很重要，但父母也可以考虑更深思熟虑的回应。在回答之前，仔细听你的孩子在说什么。同样重要的是要树立榜样，让孩子知道事情并不总是顺利的，并向他们展示如何解决失望和失败。
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“首先，我们不能贸然行事。“哦，亲爱的，不，你真的很聪明，”或者“是啊，也许今天表现不好，但你是个很棒的足球运动员。”“也许他们不是一个伟大的足球运动员。也许它们反映了一个他们正在努力接受的现实;也许足球不是他们的菜。也许不管数学是什么，C -就意味着，数学不是他们的菜。也可能不会。也可能是偶然的。我认为你总是为了我们所说的“影响”而拉——在心理学上——你为了感觉而拉。“你对此有什么感觉?”“嗯，我觉得很难受。”“那么，你为什么觉得这么糟糕呢?”’ So you don’t talk at them — you talk with them. You’re trying to find out what their feeling is. And I always had this thing that a good dinner conversation was, when the parent — when I — talked about things that were tough for me. Because, remember, kids are little and you look omnipotent to them, like you can do everything right. And so I really made it a practice to talk to my kids about, ‘Oh, you know, I needed this suit.’ I mean little things, you know, ‘I needed this suit, and it wasn’t ready at the cleaner’ — how to handle it. The kinds of day-to-day frustrations and challenges that you run into is kind of like, let your kid know that this is part of life. And let them see the process by which you solve it, because that’s what they’re going to need to be able to do themselves.”
