No matter how hard you try to prevent it from happening, your child will have to deal with an embarrassment at some time in his or her life.

Treat the situation with the same seriousness

If your child is embarrassed because of something that happened at school, don’t laugh it off.

He might think you are laughing at him. He’ll feel even worse than he already does, and he’ll probably avoid discussing the difficulty altogether.

Reassurance isn’t always helpful, either. As much as you want to take away the pain of embarrassment by reassuring your child that everything will be okay, you are suggesting that the incident wasn’t as serious as he thought. That may be true, but it felt serious to him.

Validate that feeling because it’s his feeling.

Talk about it

Your child already feels embarrassed. Do you have to talk about it?

Yes, having a discussion can help your child figure out what didn’t work and how to do better next time. Avoid being accusatory during your talk. Instead, help your child explore his or her feelings and come up with alternative solutions.

Begin by validating their feelings. Say something like, “It’s understandable that you would feel embarrassed about breaking the plate.”

Then talk about the options the child has for handling it. Perhaps making an apology offering to repair or replace it would be acceptable solutions.

It could happen to anyone

Kids don’t always realize that others find themselves in the same embarrassing situations.

Everyone has bad hair days, passes gas, or messes up a play on a team. Recognizing that this is part of being human and not only could happen to everyone but does happen is part of growing up and developing self-confidence.

Teach your children to move past the experience.

Model the behavior

One of the best ways to teach how to handle embarrassment is to model the behavior yourself.

The next time you find yourself in an embarrassing situation, show that it’s possible to survive the ordeal. Avoid obsessing over what happened. If there’s an apology owed, make it and move on. If you spilled something, clean it up and move on. The point is to move past the embarrassment. Let it go, and your child will learn to do the same.

Dealing with embarrassment is something everyone has to do. By teaching your child how to deal with discomfort, you are helping him learn a life skill.