It goes without saying as a parent that our kids will disappoint us at some stage and that is OK. What matters is how we deal with it and get to the other side.

When I was a child, my dad made a point of never saying that he was disappointed in us. He would happily say, ‘I am angry at you’, or ‘I am sad because’, but never that we had disappointed him. He had learned the hard way from his own childhood that being told so really hurt and therefore he refused to use it. When I had kids myself, he told me not to use it either and it is somethin...