How To Build Confidence In Kids
How To Build Confidence In Kids
In the toddler and pre-school years, building confidence is a relatively easy task. You make a fuss over newly learnt skills or small personal achievements, your child feels a surge of pride, and their self-belief blossoms. But as kids start school and become more aware of how their skills and abilities stack up against their peers, building confidence becomes a slightly harder task.
So how do you build your child’s confidence once they’re old enough to understand the difference between average, better, and best?
Find Things Your Child’s Good At (And Loves to Do)
Achievement and winning aren’t great focusses to have, but there’s no getting around the fact that being good at things is a confidence booster, so help your child find activities they excel in. If your child picks up new skills easily, this’ll be a fairly easy task. If your child doesn’t take to new skills quite so well, don’t give up. Everyone has something they’re good at, no matter what their skillset. Keep trying different activities and interests until you find the right one.
And if you’re really struggling to find an activity your child’s good at, look at whether you’re trialling activities based on your child’s interests, or whether you’ve fallen into the trap of pushing activities you want your child to be interested in. Your son might want to dance or play chess, not join the local football team, and your daughter might be more interested in BMX than drama and hate ballet with a passion. Don’t try to force your child to be interested in the things you’re interested in or the activities you wish you’d been given the opportunity to get involved with when you were young. It’s not about you. Get to know your child’s interests and when it comes to activity selection, be guided by that.
Celebrate Failure
Failure isn’t something you should protect your child from, it’s something you should encourage. Because it’s not a sign of incompetence or weakness, it’s a sign of courage and strength, and of not being afraid to have a go.
So, when your child spends a lot of his basketball game benched because he’s not as good as his peers, don’t have a quiet word to the coach and demand he give your child more court time, acknowledge that basketball isn’t your child’s biggest strength – which is ok because no-one can be great at everything – help him to practise and improve where he can, celebrate any wins along the way – slightly more court time, better ball skills, etc. – and praise his perseverance and willingness to have a go. Likewise, if your daughter’s upset because she didn’t make the cut for the school debating team, don’t go into school and plead with them to include her, celebrate the fact that she had the courage to take a risk and go after something she really wanted, encourage her to ask for feedback about what she can work on ahead of next year’s tryouts, and help her to practise new skills.
Intervening to protect your child from failure – well intentioned as your intervention might be – will only serve to reinforce your child’s belief that failure is bad - why else would you go to such lengths to help your child avoid it otherwise? Teach your child to live courageously, to embrace failure, and to be proud that they didn’t fail to try. Encouraging failure won’t damage your child’s self-esteem, it’ll build their resilience and help to grow their confidence.
Help Your Child Set PB’s
If you can teach your child to focus on their own performance and improving that, and to worry less about outperforming others, it’ll go a long way towards building their confidence and protecting their self-esteem.
When it comes to setting goals, encourage your child to set Personal Best goals or PB’s, not comparative goals. If your child wants to be better at maths, help her to look at her current performance, and to set a goal that’s a slight improvement on that. Discourage goals like ‘I want to be in the top 10 of my class’ or ‘I want to do better than [classmate]’ because they’re comparison based. Likewise, if your child wants to be faster at running, discourage her from aiming for another child’s race time and encourage her to aim for a time that’s 1-2 seconds faster than her current time instead.
There will always be other kids who outperform your child - PB’s will help your child not get so distracted by that.
Listen When Your Child Talks
Kids talk non-stop, often about nothing. But even though a lot of what your child says is trivial and inconsequential to you, it’s important and meaningful to them. And so are you. You’re so important in fact, that when your child talks and you don’t listen, it threatens their confidence. Think about how you feel when you try to talk to your husband/wife about something important, and they can’t tear their eyes away from their phone screen long enough to listen to what you have to say. Not great.
When you actively listen, and give your child your full attention – not half your attention while you cook dinner/send an email/watch TV, your full attention – it makes them feel important and boosts their confidence. Not only that, but when you show interest in what your child says – by nodding, asking questions, or practicing empathy – your child feels heard, supported, and understood, and that bolsters their confidence as well. So, when your child comes to you with what you think is a trivial issue or yet another extraneous piece of information, resist the urge to tell them you’re busy and make time to listen instead. Yes, life is busy, and you can’t always stop what you’re doing to chat – especially if you’re in the middle of making dinner, an important phone call, or the mad morning rush – but if you dedicate your full attention to listening at other times – at the dinner table, in the car while you’re driving, at the end of the school day – and routinely make showing interest in what your child has to say a priority, it’ll be the boost your child needs. Don’t undervalue the power of listening. Show your child they’re worthwhile and important by being attentive to their chatter
Make Quality Time with Your Child a Priority
One of the best things you can do to help your child feel good about themselves is spend time with them. And before you dismiss this as a well-worn platitude or psychologist BS – think it through. How do you feel when your spouse prioritises work/other activities/time with other people over you? When it happens a lot, are you really not bothered, or does continually landing on the lower end of the priority list make you doubt yourself and your worth?
When you mark time with your child as a low priority – which is the end result when you make them compete with your iPhone for your attention, or bump them off your schedule for other tasks – it doesn’t go unnoticed. Your child gets your ‘you’re not important/interesting/likeable enough for me to want to spend time with you’ message loud and clear and it affects their confidence – hugely. It might not be the message you’re meaning to send, or the one you want your child to have, but it’s the one they hear all the same.
When you make quality time with your child a priority, it boosts their confidence. They feel loved and valued, and that makes them feel like a million bucks. Yes, you’re busy and you have a million things to do, but you don’t have to spend copious amounts of time with your child for it to have an impact. If you have time to do a special activity with your child each week – go for a milkshake or breakfast together at the weekend, pick them up from school one afternoon a week to go bike riding or to kick a ball at the park – great, but if you don’t, you can still show your child you think they’re awesome by giving them short but regular bursts of your undivided attention. Set aside 15-minutes each evening to sit and chat with your child about their day, spend 15-minutes reading together before bed, or help your child practise their ball skills in the yard for 10 minutes or so a couple of times each week.
Encourage Your Child’s Friendships
Having friends and a sense of belonging boosts not just your child’s confidence, but their resilience as well. And yes, school offers your child an opportunity to connect with friends, but spending time with friends outside school is equally important. After school and weekend playdates make friendships stronger, and that translates to your child feeling more secure and confident at school, but also in life in general.
Having extra kids in the house can be annoying and the level of organisation and coordination needed to schedule playdates around extracurricular activities even more so, but if confidence is something you’re worried about, the effort will be worth it.
Some kids develop confidence naturally and will need very little extra input from you to build their self-belief, others will need more input, and the strategies covered for you below are just the ticket. But keep this in mind – building confidence takes time. Unlike challenging behaviour, which, with the right strategies, is usually pretty quick to shift, building confidence is a slower process. Don’t be deterred by slow progress, because slow progress is normal. Stick with it, and with perseverance and repetition, you’ll see the progress you’re hoping for.
Our experienced clinicians can discuss your concerns - contact us to learn more.
