A child’s disappointment can be real even when the problem looks easy from your height.

Scale is not the same as seriousness. From where you stand, the broken toy or the changed plan is minor, solvable, and probably forgotten by Thursday. From where they stand, it is a large share of everything happening today, and saying otherwise does not shrink the feeling. It only teaches them that this is not something to bring to you, and that lesson outlasts the incident by years.

Meet the size of the feeling before you address the size of the problem. A sentence naming what happened is usually enough. Fix it afterward, if fixing is even wanted.