Thoughts: Disappointment and trust
I expect readers have had a child or grandchild pout, whine, cry, or throw a tantrum in disappointment. If so, you like me, might have wondered what your response should be to child’s onslaught of feeling. Being a 21stcentury grandma, I looked up “the answer” online, and found a consensus of advice, which seems good as far as it goes (more on the advice specifics below). But woven through the advice was a kowtowing to “resilience” that didn’t ring true to me. I mean, is it really true that, “Disappointment on any level is a healthy and positive emotion that helps mold and shape a child’s emotional, intellectual and social development”? Or that “…kids actually benefit from feeling disappointed, especially when you teach them how to bounce back”? In good philosophical style, I think the impact of disappointment depends on the circumstances—most importantly on what or who caused the disappointing event.
The recent big disappointment in the life of one of our grandsons was putting on hold a long-planned trip to Chicago with us. He had been so excited—telling everyone about the trip, learning about SUE the T. Rex, the Griffin Museum motion simulators, and the possibility of nightly pizza. And then he got Covid.
We were able to reschedule. Still, such a let-down! And our grandson’s question—Why? Why? Why?—made sense. After all, he only had sniffles (and a positive Covid test). But of course the reason was to protect his grandpa and me, and through me his fragile great-grandmother. Not to mention protecting unsuspecting others he might have exposed. So the bottom-line reason for the postponement, he understood quickly, was “stupid Covid.”
In retrospect, I feel lucky about our grandson’s quick shift to blaming “stupid Covid” for two reasons—he was able to make the connection quickly, and he didn’t blame us.
The quick understanding is very difficult for children. Psychologists tell us that the enormity of disappointment to young folks (those tears and tantrums) is because they process the disappointing event with their emotional brain—specifically, the amygdala. A child’s prefrontal cortex, the rational part of the brain, is too immature to withstand the flood of stress hormones the disappointment releases. The young person feels disappointment more keenly than an older person, and has less access to cognitive understanding and problem-solving than an adult does.
Managing disappointments
Because kids simply can’t understand disappointments through the rational brain, or through the perspective of longer life with many ups and downs, online advice on managing kids’ disappointments is aimed at helping them manage the feelings as they gradually gain perspective.
The advice I found was pretty similar across five or six sites: In the moment, validate the child’s feeling, name the feeling “disappointment” to help them understand that up and down of anticipation and let-down; don’t rush, as it takes time for strong feelings to settle; share a similar experience, so the child can see that their feeling is normal; help the child come up with a plan, such as an alternative activity or timing, rather than rushing to solve the problem yourself. And over time, model your own mature responses to disappointments, help the child keep their expectations realistic, and help the child practice delayed gratification and self-calming skills.
Much of this advice is for parents, rather than grandparents, but it’s nice to have those ideas refreshed for the moment your grandchild’s ice cream lands on the sidewalk or their balloon floats away on the wind.
Again, this advice is good as far as it goes. Kids do need to learn to cope with the inevitable but unintentional disruptions in life, like “stupid Covid.” They also need to cope effectively with disappointments over which they have control or some control, like a poor grade on a test because of little studying, a team loss, or a friendship that cools because the child won’t play by the rules. Managing disappointments caused by unrealistic expectations of oneself is especially tricky, but is generally covered by the advice to help the child keep their expectations realistic. Elements of the advice can be also be helpful for helping children with thoughtless sources of disappointment caused by someone else—if, for example, we had accidentally messed up the Chicago trip by ordering tickets for the wrong dates. The advice can even help if someone intentionally does something that lets the child down—maybe a child’s friend breaks a promise.
Trust betrayed
But there’s a cause of disappointment not clearly covered by this advice, which is disappointing the child through your own choices. Let’s say that we postponed the Chicago trip because we decided that the planned week was better used for our own trip to New York. That would be disappointing the child through our own choice. By “choice” I don’t mean that the hypothethical grandparent specifically set out to disappoint the child (Not, “Ah-ha, I’m going to disappoint that kid on purpose!”) But it is all too common that a person will promise a child something they don’t deliver on. And here’s the crux for grandparents: If the person who disappoints the child through their own choices is someone in whom the child has invested trust—a likely scenario for parents and grandparents—there’s a risk that the immediate disappointment is the small result. The big result may well be that it undermines the trust.
Philosopher Annette Baier explains that trust makes us vulnerable, because trusting someone leaves them in a position to harm us. If I trust you to hold onto the end of the rope I’m dangling on and you let go…I’m harmed. Less dramatically, a grandchild who trusts your word when you say you’re going to Chicago on June 19th puts himself in position for disappointment. But the trust itself makes the cut of a failure to perform the promised action deeper, because not only is there no trip, but your grandparents have betrayed your trust. In Baier’s words, “The trusting [person] can be betrayed, or at least let down, and not just disappointed (p. 235).” And of course (this is me again, not Baier), trust betrayed is difficult to restore.
Thankfully, the blame for the postponed trip fell to “stupid Covid” and not to us, because betrayed trust is not a “positive emotion” or a “benefit," despite the online advice—it’s just a loss to both sides of the trusting relationship.