Your statement “And it takes knowing how to respond to disappointments” is crucial. If you respond to a disappointment with a negative attitude, you’re doomed - it’s a self-fulfilling prophecy. If you try to find something positive you always will, and it will lead you to something better than you imagined possible.

This is, of course, hard for a teenager to comprehend. I have two of my own and results are mixed at best.

What I do know is that dreams and hopes are a part of all of us, and we need them to survive. If you cannot dream you cannot hope. If you cannot hope you cannot go into action. If you don’t go into action your really cannot survive.

The one thing I have taught my girls is, don’t always use MY experiences as YOUR Blue Print for life.

We go through life hoping that it can always be positive, but truthfully, it cannot. What can be positive is the way we approach life.

I once worked through The Power of Positive Thinking for Teens, with my youngest daughter and highly recommended it to her best friends mother to work through with her daughter. The kids thought it was a drag, however, both us parents got to spend some quality with our girls and it opened doors to discussions that had been put off for too long. It may be something for you girls to look into.

Many people don’t want their children to know about all the bad things that go on in the world, and around them. They don’t want them to realize what a crazy world we do live in. If these children are denied the reality of things, what is going to happen to them when they are out on their own. Not only will they not realize that yes these things are going on, and do happen in real life, but they will not be prepared to deal with it.

It is our place to sit down with our children and let them talk about what is going on in the world, and around them, sometime we may be able to help them understand that the world isn’t the place we would like to see it be. I don’t think we should force the issue of discussion on every matter that comes up, but we need to let them know we are there if they need to talk about something, and that we will listen.

Just my opinion.

Paul

In other words, home runs don’t just happen. They player with the most home runs works at it. Works hard. That player has the most strikeouts because he or she keeps trying, keeps improving, keeps WORKING at being good enough to make another home run.

My husband just retired after 31 years of teaching high school. One of the hardest things he had to deal with was the trend of using constant praise in the elementary and middle schools, even for work that was poor, because praise was supposed to improve students’ self esteem. Well, that theory doesn’t work. Nobody gains when people grow up feeling entitled to praise for everything they do even when it is awful.

Successful teachers (whether at school or at home) know that it is necessary to praise HARD WORK and GOOD results, and to show children how to improve their initial efforts so that the next essay or lab experiment or test result is truly worthy of praise.

Fairy tales are useful for encouraging dreams, for building goals: the knight in shining armor, the Nobel prize in chemistry, the blockbuster novel, and living happily ever after. But we all — even children — need reality checks periodically to keep those dreams on track and to prepare us for a world that does its own thing, no matter how badly we want it to do or be something different.