Children struggle with confidence, especially when they leave the comfort of the home and meet other people. This article contains twelve tried and tested ways on how to build confidence in a child.
Since they are still trying to find themselves, they may be unsure if they are good enough. This can either lead them to want to hide and shrink themselves or try to become like their peers.
As a parent, it is part of your duty to help them feel more confident in themselves. One age group that suffers from self-esteem issues and low confidence are mostly teenagers so I’ll be starting with them.
How To Build Confidence In A Teenage Daughter
As a mother, the first person your daughter will look up to for confidence is you. You may think you are not nearly prepared for this and most times, it is true.
However, most mothers have been here and have spoken of their struggles along the way. From their suggestions, we have some tips that can help you on how to build confidence in your teenage daughter.
1. Help her appreciate her looks.
2. Encourage her to have a positive body image.
3. Always compliment her looks. Teen girls are usually self-conscious.
4. Encourage her to find her interests and develop them.
5. Have mother-daughter time often.
6. Know her circle of friends personally, their hobbies, their parents, their interests. Host them occasionally.
7. Encourage her to find her unique self rather than copying others and be proud of who she is.
8. Do not criticize harshly, condemn or compare.
9. If you both are always having clashes, find ways to bridge the gap.
10. Be the first role model for your daughter, one she would look up to and emulate, so work on yourself.
11. Always have a heart-to-heart talk with your daughter.
12. Spend more time with her this time to establish a relationship with your daughter.
How To Build Confidence In Your Teenage Son
Children, especially boys, are always drawn to someone who can guide them and be their hero. You need to be there for your son but do not be all over him.
As a parent, you will need to nurture and build his character in a world where people will want to project their ideas on to him.
The world will try to make him mask up his weaknesses and project false strength even when he’s breaking down. So, now more than ever, boys need to be raised to have confidence and love every bit of themselves.
Some tips on how to build confidence in a child, especially sons are:
1. Be a good role model.
2. Create experiences he can learn from.
3. Introduce him to things he could enjoy to develop his natural talents and get a hobby.
4. Let them join you repair things. It helps spur creativity.
5. Give him tasks regularly.
6. Foster a closer relationship with your son from the beginning.
7. Always ask about his welfare.
8. Listen to him when he opens up to talk to you.
9. Be a constant source of encouragement. Many teenagers are facing a lot of self-esteem issues.
10. Allow him to try new things even if he fails; encourage him to keep trying.
11. Encourage him to accept his self-image for what it is, to be proud of it and encourage grooming.
12. Encourage goal setting.
13. Teach him to focus on effort, not on perfection.
14. Try positive self-talk.
15. Watch his circle of Friends.
How To Raise A Confident Daughter
As a mother, you most likely love having a daughter, if for nothing else, to form an intimate connection with another woman in the house. You often want the best for her and will do anything to make it happen.
However, it does not always go as planned. Sometimes, you may have the most beautiful and talented young lady and she would have low confidence.
This is heartbreaking for mothers so I will drop some pointers on how to build confidence in your daughters.
1. Be her role model.
2. Act the part: take on challenges, solve problems, be responsible. All these will build her character subconsciously.
3. From early on, have a relationship with your daughter.
4. Be her cheerleader and greatest encourager.
5. Help her discover her talents and encourage her to develop them.
6. Let her play and encourage her hobbies. She will learn a lot this way.
7. Teach her the value of hard work by giving her responsibilities.
8. Compliment her and make her understand that life is beautiful.
9. Encourage her little effort and keep believing in her.
How To Build Confidence In A Child
The best time to build any trait in your child is at the formative years when they’re still kids. You do not want to miss the opportunity to instill confidence in them at a young age.
Let’s take a look at some of the ways to build confidence in kids
1. Goal Setting
For every ambition and dream your child has, help them set goals instead of just making wishes. When they set well-structured goals, they will have better chances of achieving these goals.
This also provides a learning opportunity for them to understand planning and decision making. And it would help them trust capability, and this will build their self-confidence.
For instance, if your child of 8 years has difficulty with simple addition and subtraction, it is making him lose his self-confidence. You can tell him to set it as a goal, and you both can brainstorm ideas to help him achieve the goal.
For example, he could learn the multiplication table google up ideas to make addition and subtraction easier, ask his teacher or mates for assistance.
With appropriate follow-up and encouragement, he will see marked progress. In no time, he will be able to add and subtract much easier.
While setting goals for kids, ensure they are age-appropriate. Do not go overboard setting goals like “finish your science textbook in one week” because you want to see quick progress in the child.
Remember that children learn at different paces. You may end up over-pushing your child, doing more harm than good.
While in the goal-setting process, ensure your child learns that goals are not necessarily for competition; instead, they should learn to work well with others to achieve goals.
Also, make sure you encourage your kids to keep fighting for their dreams because they can easily give up and slip back into a state of no confidence in their ability.
To stimulate them to achieve goals, you should constantly encourage them despite their mistakes, keep up with them with a progress report regularly, and set time limits that are reasonable to achieve their goals.
2. Create Opportunities For Them To Try New Things
This is one tip on how to build confidence in a child because they learn invaluable lessons from their experiences; it broadens their horizon and ability to think, which boosts confidence.
Create an enabling environment for your kids to learn through camping or hiking, going to the auto mechanic shop, visiting the zoo, library, etc.
These things expose them to new ideas and help them learn and children who are exposed from an early age generally have more confidence.
So instead of restricting them, allow your kids to join in a sports team at school, encourage them to volunteer in school or church or around the neighborhood.
Suggest new things that they could try out, like typing with a computer, shopping, etc. For example, you could say, kids, we will learn how to make presentations with a computer today.
If your kid is shy, try not to put undue pressure on them, forcing the kid to interact at all costs. Instead, keep encouraging that child. Find out the child’s particular area of interest and utilize it to build the child’s confidence.
While you encourage your child to build trust through learning experiences, remember that it should be structured. Ask the child relevant questions after every learning experience.
After a camping trip or a visit with grandma and you both should discuss how it went. Focus the child’s attention on the behavior you want the child to get from each learning experience.
If the child is scared after an incident, learn why and find ways to solve it. Let your child know you are proud of him for engaging in the learning process.
3. Make Your Child Handle Responsibilities
Making your child handle responsibilities is a great way to build confidence in a child. Because when a child is responsible, it will make him feel capable, develop trust in his abilities, and develop his self-confidence.
From an early age, when the kids are mature enough to handle chores, plan out schedules for them and include time for tasks.
The younger kids can pick up after themselves around the home, and older kids can help out with household chores. Try to make chores fun and interesting, else it will seem not very interesting, and the kids would find it more challenging to do them.
To make chores fun, you shouldn’t make them cumbersome. Instead, make it short and easy, giving intervals for breaks. Discuss and engage the kids as they carry out their chores.
You can provide an incentive for carrying out their chores well to encourage efficiency in the kids. When your kids can regularly handle duties, they will be willing to take on tasks and be confident in their abilities.
4. Encourage Them To Develop Problem-Solving Skills
It may seem like you are a good parent when you are always there to fight for them when other people challenge them, help them do their assignments, tie their shoelaces, dress them up, solve each of their problems.
Well, this way, you are not helping your child to learn and develop their abilities. If your child encounters a problem rather than solving the problem for them, guide them to think of ways to solve the problem.
For example, if Lily has to build a castle with Lego blocks, but she has been trying for minutes, and it’s not working. Do not help her because she is frustrated.
Instead, help her calm down and encourage her to take a break before continuing. You may suggest clues. You can ask her about the castle she has in mind to build. Encourage her to draw it out so she can see what she’s supposed to work on. This will serve as a guide to her.
Encourage her to read the instruction handbook or manual, teach her to research the internet for tutorials. These clues would help her find it easier to make a castle with the Lego.
Do not forget to praise your child for every little effort. This is an invaluable tip on how to build confidence in a child.
5. Avoid Shortcuts
Learning confidence depends on many factors like hard work, encouragement, goal setting, discipline, consistency, etc. To make your child confident, you must be ready to allow your child to pass through the process.
It will enable them to pass through the good times, tough times, hard times, sad times, happy times, difficult times. The important thing is that you are there to support them through it all.
Do not boycott the learning process for your child; allow your child to pass through every situation he finds himself in and let him learn.
It will help you to build confidence in your child to one day become an adult who will be able to handle life challenges, confident in his ability, and confident around other people.
You can do this by not encouraging favoritism or special treatments. If your child fails to do a school project, he should bear the brunt at school.
Do not vie for attention for your kids or curry favors with teachers to hand things over to your kids. For example, do not ask the teacher to put your child in the lead role for a play when he did not do the audition.
Do not pay people to write exams for your child, let the child learn to apply for college himself you can guide him through. If you do all these, you will raise a child that will always need daddy or mummy to bail him out of any challenging situation.
6. Avoid Comparison
Comparison is one of the powerful destroyers of self-esteem, and it leads to low confidence or overconfidence. If you constantly compare your kids with others, they may end up having low self-esteem or an overinflated self-ego.
If you always tell your child that they have the highest IQ in their class, it may make him look down on his classmate and treat them with disrespect.
On the other hand, if you tell your child harsh words like, “You never make me proud”, “Don’t you see your classmates always doing well?” Your child may lose the zeal to keep trying because he feels he can never amount to anything, so quit comparison.
Sometimes a child’s performance can indeed be frustrating. You may just want to yell at the child, so avoid correcting your child when you are tensed up.
Instead of always talking about others, talk about what you both can do to improve the child’s performance.
For example, if your child scored below 50 as the overall performance in math, instead of saying despite all the efforts, we put you still failed.
Try saying this “we need to spend more time studying math this holiday. If you can be open about the areas where you have difficulties, we can work on it together”.
Also, let your child understand that productivity in school or at home is essential to him and those around him. Sometimes making the child see that his behavior has a positive or negative impact can do the magic.
7. Help Your Child Deal With Failure
Failure can crush a child’s self-confidence and make them think that they can’t achieve anything. That’s why a useful tip to raising confident children is to let them learn to deal with failure.
Instead of the child seeing failure as something wrong, let them see it as an opportunity to learn and do better. This doesn’t mean that you should praise your child every time he fails, no.
Instead, make the child understand that failure is part of life, but the most important thing is learning lessons from the mistakes that caused the failure and making plans and strategies to avoid failures by identifying the errors.
When your kid fails, first calm him down. Then, together you both should reflect on what happened and what caused the failure and plan with your child to overcome it next time.
8. Do Not Invalidate A Child’s Feelings
Another way to raise a confident child is to allow them display their emotions. No one should have to pretend they don’t feel the way they do.
Most parents are culprits to this particular method. And shutting down your child’s display of negative emotions can severely affect their self-esteem.
Sometimes we shun our kids when they display emotions like fear, sadness, anger and assume they act immaturely.
Since you won’t complain when a child feels happy or is excited probably after winning a prize, you should also not complain or criticize the child when he shows sad feelings.
Yes, they are negative feelings, but like happiness and excitement, they are genuine feelings. Instead, acknowledge your kid’s feelings and help them find ways to manage them.
So if your son is sad and angry after his team loses a football game at school. You should realize that these feelings are genuine. He had put so much time and effort into the game and wanted so much to win.
Rather than yelling or dismissing his feelings, you can acknowledge it and help him out with processing these feelings. Encourage your kids to always share their feelings with you, and while they do so be all ears.
Do not interrupt them when they talk about it, instead calm your child down and encourage him to deal with it. Draw out the positives and the negatives from their experiences and you teach them ways to flip the negatives into positives in the future.
Invalidating a child feelings will only make the child feel guilty about them and he may no longer be bold enough to express how he feels.
9. Be Your Child’s Model
Do you know the fastest way to build confidence in your child? It is by letting your child see confidence radiating from you. If you are scared of handling responsibilities, always magnifying your failures, and have a low self-esteem, there are chances that your kids will take the same path.
Sometimes parents want their kids to develop those traits they wished they had from childhood, so they go at any length and force their kids to become that without realizing that they cannot give what they do not have.
You have to look deep down and analyze your feelings. This could be because your parents did nothing to improve your self-image, and constantly criticized you while you were young.
Now you need to heal from the past, forgive your parents, and trust that you can raise your kids differently. Find ways to boost your self-confidence. Try talking to a therapist, a friend, or a support group etc.
Develop a positive self-image. Feel good about yourself. Talk about your every minor or outstanding achievement before your kids. It will make them see you as a hero.
Try not to put other people down, do not be a people pleaser but show compassion and empathy. Do not badmouth or criticize another person’s point of view even if you do not accept it.
Be content and appreciate what you have, and set boundaries. Your kids will watch your attitude and how much importance you put on yourself and others. It will play a role to determine how confident they will be.
10. Avoid Destructive Criticism
There is no better way to kill a child’s confidence than criticizing the child too harshly. It has a lot of negative impact on the child; it makes him lose his self-esteem.
They become scared to fail and will not want to try again because they feel they will never be able to please you. It also makes the child think that others are better than him.
Yes, dealing with kids can be overwhelming for parents, carers, and teachers. Sometimes you may just want to lash out at them to make them feel how frustrating their attitude is.
If you were raised to use harsh and awful words on people and yell, work on your attitude. Try to remain calm whenever you are around a child.
This may mean that sometimes you have to take a break to calm your nerves before dealing with a situation.
11. Teach Them What You Know
An easy way to build confidence in a child is by teaching them how to do things you are good at. When they see how easy it was for you to do it, it can spur them to feel confident in themselves to do it too.
So if you know how to fix a flat tire, how about you call all the kids to help you out. They will be so thrilled to see mom fixing a tire.
Of course, they want to try out; please do not hinder them. It would be a great learning experience and it will make them believe in themselves.
As you teach your kids confidence, let them act the part. The gait, how to walk confidently, smile, act, and any other thing that would make them successful and build their confidence. This is how to build confidence in a child.
12. Show Unreserved Love
Let your kids see and feel that you love them. It is a vital tip on how to build confidence in a child. An environment where there is love will help the kid believe in himself and make him feel confident.
But an environment full of criticism, comparison, sarcasm, and devaluation, yelling and cursing will negatively affect your child’s confidence. So, try as much as possible to eliminate all these from your parenting game.
Instead, show unreserved love to your kids and other kids around. Tickle them unexpectedly, give hugs, high fives, and fist bumps. Be their greatest encourager. Be ready to roll on the floor and act all goofy with your kids.
It builds their confidence when you make them feel you are on a level playing ground with them. It gives this sense of maturity to them since they are friends with an adult.
Conclusion
Connect with your kids to learn about their likes and dislikes and their unique personalities and be patient with them. Show love to other kids around. Give surprises, give them special treats, encourage their dreams, and believe them.
These are invaluable tips on how to build confidence in a child. I believe these tips are a step in the right direction. Now let’s practice them and up our parenting game.
If you’ll like more tips on important things needed to raise a confident child, you can check out this easy guide here.
Save this for later!
