Episode 10 - Guiding Your Child Through Rejection

When Your Child Faces Rejection: Knowing When to Step In—and When to Step Back

Every parent wants to protect their child from pain. But is it always our job to rescue them?

Rejection hurts. Whether it’s being left out, losing a friendship, not making the team, or hearing “no,” these moments are often the very tools God uses to shape character, deepen faith, and develop maturity. The challenge for parents is discerning when to intervene—and when to allow their child to walk through the trial with God’s help.

In this episode, we’ll explore the biblical role of a parent during seasons of rejection. We’ll discuss the difference between protecting our children and preparing them, how to avoid becoming the “fixer” of every problem, and why healthy independence is essential to spiritual growth. Most importantly, we’ll examine how God’s Word equips parents to point their children to Christ instead of becoming the source of every solution.

If you’ve ever wrestled with whether to step in, step back, or simply stand beside your child, this conversation will encourage you with biblical principles, practical wisdom, and the confidence to trust God’s work in your child’s life—even through rejection.

Transcript

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Hello and welcome to this episode of To Train Up a Child. This is Jake Mannon, and I'm excited to be here with you today. And I hope you enjoyed the sermon series that I just released over the last uh several weeks. And uh I thought it was a very helpful, uh, very encouraging um sermon series about each specific role in the home. And uh as I said during the series, I as I was developing that series, I was really kind of planning on kind of the man's responsibility, the woman's responsibility, and the child, but I really broke that out. Uh God has a lot to say about what he wants husbands to do. He also has a lot to say what he wants uh fathers to do, and those should be separated. And so we spent time going through each one of those, and I hope that was helpful to you. I hope that was encouraging, and I hope you took something from it, and uh not in a judgmental sort of way, but in a way that says uh I want to align my life to be what God wants me to be, and so I'm gonna use the Word of God to help me get there. So I hope that was a help to you. Uh today I'm gonna be coming at you with uh a different topic today, and um this is something that is uh I've faced in my own parenting journey. Every parent has faced this, and uh, how do you help your kids get through rejection? How do you help your kids uh process when somebody uh doesn't want to play with them, when somebody's not being kind? Um how do you help them with that? And um boy, I think there's some really um dangerous ways we can help them with that, and we'll talk about some of that. But um let's start as we do on this podcast with a word of prayer, and let's ask God to help us today as we look at this topic today of how do I help our kids uh deal with rejection. So let's pray together. Heavenly Father, thank you for the day that you've given, and God thank you so much for the opportunity that we have, Lord, to parent and uh to be parents, and what a blessing and an honor it is to be able to uh raise children for you, and we just thank you for it. And I pray that you would uh bless in this podcast today. I pray that you would just give us uh wisdom as we look at this very important topic, and I pray that you help us today in Jesus' name, amen. Often when our kids face rejection issues, our first response is to just fix it. And uh, you know, we we know how to fix it, and we know how to solve that problem, and uh so we just want to fix it. We want to protect our kids, we want to help our kids, but the problem is we're not strengthening our children to solve their own problems. Rather, what we're doing is we're creating a dependence that they will always need us to solve their problems, and they will be incapable of solving their own problems. I'll tell you, I believe one of the one of the greatest disservices we've done to our children is when it comes to conflict, when it comes to problems, is this phrase right here, get an adult. And I know that's what we teach our kids, and we hey, get an adult involved. Well, there's obviously a time when an adult needs to get involved, but there's also a time when getting an adult involved is actually detrimental to the child. The child needs to be able to learn conflict resolution, it's a life skill, and they need to be able to learn how to how to work through these problems and how to solve these problems. And so um, you say, well, you know, what does the Bible say? What does scripture say about helping our kids learn how to solve problems? Well, nothing directly. There's nothing in the Bible directly about that, but I want to give you a few things today that you can help your kids with, and then I'll give you a few practical things that you can do to help them uh interpret their situation and help them work with the situation. And so uh some steps that you can use to help your child without taking over and solving the problem for them. So the first thing when the child has a problem, has an issue, uh, whether it's with another child, whether it's with a sibling, uh, maybe they're um not sharing toys well, maybe they're not being kind, whatever it might be, listen carefully. Here's the first one. Listen carefully to their account. The Bible says in James 1.19, let every man be swift to hear, slow to speak, and slow to wrath. You know, when somebody hurts my kid as a parent, my first reaction is I want to go fix it, and I want to go deal with it, and and uh I'm gonna go and uh go talk to this child's parents and we're gonna deal with this right now. That's my first reaction. But you know, instead of just fixing it, what I need to be doing is I need to help them fix it. And so instead of saying something like, Well, let me go talk to them, or I'll call his parents right now. Maybe we need to ask some questions like, hold on, slow down. Tell me exactly what happened. Exactly this is important, exactly what happened. Now your child is gonna come by and say, Well, uh, he said this because he's uh he doesn't like me. No, no, no. I need to know the facts, tell me exactly what happened. Tell me the story. Why is it important that we do that? It's important because we need to separate facts from feelings. Um, feelings are important. Uh you need to ask them, you know, tell me exactly what happened. And then when they tell you, you ask them, well, how did that make you feel? The reason we want to ask those questions that way is because we want to separate facts from feelings. It's not to say feelings don't matter, but you can't solve anything with feelings. We need to address and acknowledge our kids' feelings, we need to help them process their feelings, but we also must work with facts to solve the problem. So we have to separate facts from feelings. And so when a child comes to you and is distraught about something, we need to be asking them, tell me exactly what happened. Give me the facts, and you need to help guide them because a child is going to take their facts and it's gonna be mixed with emotion because they're feeling it very heavily. We have to help them separate facts from feelings. Let's address the feelings, let's certainly acknowledge the feelings, and let's work through the feelings, but we can't solve anything in feelings, we can only solve in facts, and so we need to listen carefully and help them separate facts from feelings. Here's the second thing. Once we carefully understand exactly what they're going through, now it's our job to help them interpret the situation. Here's what I mean. A child may often conclude, well, nobody likes me. And they're dealing with a certain friend who has rejected in them in this moment, and they're gonna come out and say, Well, nobody likes me. Well, this is why we have to separate facts from feelings. The Bible says in Proverbs 23, 7, for as he thinketh in his heart, so is he. If you keep telling yourself that nobody likes you, you're gonna believe that nobody likes you. And you're gonna a child is gonna find his way into a dark corner somewhere and not want to play with anybody because nobody likes him. So what we have to do is we have to separate facts from feelings. Right now you feel like nobody likes you. But we need to look at the facts. Is it true that nobody likes you? And then you help your child understand. Uh, what about Jimmy? Jimmy plays with you and you don't have a problem with Jimmy. Well, you're just having a problem with this one over here. And in that moment, we can't even say that child doesn't like you. He just doesn't want to play this game, or he doesn't want to play with you. And so we have to help them to separate fact from feelings because we have to get away from that hyperbole that that comes from a child's emotion that says life is over, everything is ending, and I have no friends. No, let's take the facts. This particular friend doesn't want to play with you right now. Does that mean nobody likes you? No. Okay. So what we're doing there is we're reinforcing, quite frankly, we're reinforcing that the lies of the devil can't stick here. And we need to reinforce truth. And the truth is, while all of your friends may not be your best friend right now, they don't all dislike you. Okay? And then once we kind of separate fact from feeling, I believe it's very important that we get them to understand what is true based on what the Word of God teaches you. What do we know that is true about you from God's Word? And you can go through several things. You can talk about the fact that uh you're made in his image, you can talk about the fact that if the child is saved, he's God's child, that he's loved, and that Jesus died for you. And there's so many things you could talk about that we know is true based on the word of God. So reinforcing those things is bringing back to that central truth, which is the word of God. The word of God cannot lie, the word of God cannot be false. And so if the word of God teaches that you're loved, then you can't say nobody likes you. And you say, well, that's just uh a vernacular that the kids will use to deal with their emotion. Exactly. Which is why we need to help them to process that in a truthful way. Don't let them just stay in this feeling that, well, uh nobody likes me. Well, you know, you'll be alright. No, that's not helpful. What's helpful is let's dispel that lie of the devil that nobody likes them by using the word of God. What does the Bible teach about you? And what does the Bible tell you about you that is true? So, first of all, listen very carefully to their account, fully understand what they're going through and what's happening. Number two, help them interpret their situation. Number three, coach them, don't rescue them. Coach them, don't rescue them. God uses trials and tribulations to strengthen us. We read about that in his word over and over and over again. If we rescue our children all the time, all we're gonna get is frustration, and all the child is gonna get is the short end of the stick, because they're not gonna get that strengthening that God had intended for them. Um it's important in life that we understand that many painful situations in life often need to be faced, not ignored. And small struggles that we help our children deal with now can help prepare them for the big struggles later. I've seen many of young people, and I'm talking about teenagers and young adults, who don't know how to deal with conflict, don't know how to deal with disappointment, don't know how to deal with discouragement because they never had to as a child, because their parents rescued them every time something went wrong. We have to let our children experience disappointment. We have to let our children experience um uh pain sometimes. Now, let me be very careful in saying that serious problems such as bullying and abuse and threats and things of that nature, we can't ignore those under the guise of, well, I need to let my children work these things out themselves. Listen, we as parents are still called to protect our children. We just have to learn to be wise about when we step in and when we let them solve their own problems. If they're not in immediate danger and they're not at danger of physical harm, then we need to let them deal with it. We need to coach them through it, let them deal with the problem. We have to stop teaching our kids at every single disagreement that we have to get an adult involved. We need to get the adults involved when conflict resolution doesn't work. And as the adult, if if a child is getting you involved, don't just jump in and take over. Jump in and coach these kids. Help them to learn how to process these disagreements and how to process rejections. You know, sometimes I believe even children need to hear, need to be a little bit disappointed in their parents' direction. Uh, I don't know about you, but you know, with children, sometimes it can feel like a constant barrage of I want to do this, I want to do that, I want to do this, can we go here? Can we do that? Can we do this fun thing? Can you buy me this? Can we this? And sometimes they need to just hear, no, we're not doing that right now. And they need to learn how to process that disappointment. It's okay for them to be disappointed that they didn't get to do what they wanted to do. It doesn't mean you don't love them as a parent because you didn't give in to their every will. Sometimes our kids need to just hear, no, I can't do that right now. Now, let's not be lazy and let's not be disingenuous and lie and say we can't do something when we could. But if you're in the midst of something, it's okay to tell your child he or she has to wait. They'll not die. They'll be alright. And it's important for them, it's helpful for them. We as parents, uh, especially busy parents, uh, busy parents deal with a lot of guilt, and I know that because I am one, and we deal with a lot of guilt that you know we don't do as many things with our kids as we'd like to or whatever, and so when kids ask about something, you feel guilty and you want to just give in and do everything that they want to do, we have to be very careful to not enable them to then think that's what life is about. Uh just because I want something, it's gonna happen. Or even worse, just because I whine about something, it's gonna happen. If you tell a child no and they continue asking, that should not be acceptable. If I said no, it's because of a specific reason. And if you keep asking me and keep going on about it, now you're arguing with me, and I'm not gonna accept that. And so we need to understand that when our no's need to be no, the Bible teaches let your yay be yay and your nay be nay. And if I say no, there needs to be a reason for it. And that has to be accepted, period. And we might not like it, we might not agree with it, a child may be disappointed and may cry or may be upset. That's okay. They'll be alright. You don't have to back down to everything. We need to coach our children and not rescue them from their sadness. Sadness is helpful, sadness is necessary, and our kids need to learn how to deal with these things. Um, this is another topic for a different episode, but I want to just throw this out here because it's kind of along the same vein of what we're talking about of not giving in to everything. I want to be very careful and in uh encouraging parents, you are not your child's personal assistant, and you are not your child's personal entertainment. And that means that you do not have to be responsible for every every whim that the child has. Do you know one of the healthiest things for a child to do is to sit at home and be bored. When a child is bored, the creative juices flow, and you say, Well, that's not my child, my child isn't creative. Well, then you have to guide that a little bit. You have to help them with that. But it's okay for them to not be constantly doing something. We have fallen into, and this is even a whole nother episode, but we have fallen into an age and society where when our kids are bored, just pick up a tablet and go play it and go do something with it. I tell you, it is so dangerous to operate that way and to replace those those moments of creativity in your brain with a device that is actually killing their brains. And so that's another topic for another day. Here's the last one. The first one was listen carefully to their account. Secondly, help them interpret their situation properly. Thirdly, coach them, don't rescue them. And then lastly, ensure that your child knows that the rejection of others does not need to define them. Just because somebody rejected you doesn't mean that has to define who you are. And the bit the best place you can turn to that in the Bible is to Jesus. In Isaiah 53, verse 3, the Bible says he is despised and rejected of men. Jesus said in John 15, 18, if the world hate you, you know that it hated me before it hated you. Jesus was greatly rejected. And he experienced this rejection. It's important for your children to understand that being rejected doesn't mean you're worthless. Your identity shouldn't be found in your friends. It should be found in Christ. Paul said in Galatians 1 10, for do I now persuade men or God? Or do I seek to please men? For if I yet pleased men, I should not be the servant of Christ. My goal in life is not to please other people. My goal is to please the Lord, and I'm going to please him with my actions and my reactions and my attitudes. And so just because a person made a choice that doesn't involve you, and you respect that choice, that means you go respect that choice and you go share your value somewhere else. Your value, your identity is not found in a friend. It needs to be found in Christ. And so, as a parent, especially as if you're a Christian parent, you need to help them to understand your value is found in what Jesus did for you, not found in what your friends say about you. And so hopefully this has been a help. Just a few simple steps. There's a whole lot more we could talk about on this topic, but I wanted to just kind of give you some bullet points to consider. Be careful to listen carefully to your child. Sometimes we get, as parents, we get in the, I call it the mama bear mode when my child's hurt, I'm just going to go after who hurt my child and I'm going to solve this problem. You need to learn to temper yourself. And you need to learn to stop yourself and say, wait a minute, tell me exactly what happened. Because when you listen to the facts of the story, it might help you to help them solve that problem without you getting involved at all. And so listen carefully and then help them interpret. What do you think that means? Just because that child doesn't want to play that game with you, what do you think that means? Do you think maybe it might mean that that they just don't want to play that game and maybe they want to play something else? Is it is it possible that they were already playing a game when you showed up and and then you just suggest that we start playing this other game instead? I mean, help them interpret. They're children. We have to help them. And then coach them. After you get done interpreting, you're not going to go say, all right, now let me take care of this. No. You're going to say, okay, what are we going to do about it? What's the next step? How are we going to handle this? We got to help them to go right through it. And you know what? You might have to hold them by the hand and help them process that. That's okay. But they have to do it. They have to do it. And of course, there's an age-appropriate way, and of course, there's a there's a maturity appropriate time and all of those things. But you as a parent get to determine that. And I just want to encourage you to begin to prepare your children to be the young men and women of tomorrow. And you're going to begin to prepare them as young children as they begin to work on dealing with conflict resolution, critical thinking, processing situations, and coming up with solutions that is so, so important. And if we take that away from them by solving other problems for them, all we're doing is handicapping them in the future. So I hope this has been a help to you. I hope this is an encouragement. And I look forward to you when we talk next time. Have a great day.