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Building Confidence in Children: Nurturing Self-Assurance and Resilience


Building confidence in children is vital for their overall development and success in life. As parents, we play a crucial role in fostering their self-assurance and resilience. Confidence empowers children to face challenges, make positive choices, and believe in their abilities. Here are some effective strategies to help your child build confidence:

Encourage and Celebrate Efforts:
One of the key ways to build confidence is to acknowledge and appreciate your child’s efforts, regardless of the outcome. Focus on their hard work, determination, and progress rather than solely on results. Celebrate their achievements, big or small, to reinforce their self-belief and motivate them to keep trying.

Provide a Safe and Supportive Environment:
Create a nurturing environment where your child feels safe to express themselves without fear of judgment or criticism. Encourage open communication, active listening, and empathy. Show unconditional love and support, allowing them to explore their interests and passions with confidence.

Set Realistic Goals:
Help your child set realistic and achievable goals. Break larger goals into smaller, manageable steps. This approach allows them to experience success along the way, boosting their confidence. Guide them in creating a plan and provide guidance and encouragement as they work towards their objectives.

Encourage Problem-Solving:
Foster problem-solving skills by allowing your child to face challenges independently. Avoid immediately providing solutions. Instead, encourage them to brainstorm ideas and think critically. When they find their own solutions, they gain confidence in their abilities to tackle difficult situations.

Support Healthy Risk-Taking:
Encourage your child to step out of their comfort zone and try new things. Support them in taking age-appropriate risks, whether it’s trying a new sport, pursuing a hobby, or participating in a school activity. Even if they encounter setbacks or failures, emphasize the value of learning from these experiences and trying again.

Teach Positive Self-Talk:
Help your child develop a positive inner voice by teaching them to replace negative self-talk with positive affirmations. Encourage them to focus on their strengths, acknowledge their efforts, and believe in their capabilities. This practice cultivates resilience and self-confidence.

Foster Independence:
Allow your child to take on age-appropriate responsibilities and make decisions. This fosters a sense of competence and independence. Encourage them to handle tasks on their own, such as organizing their belongings, completing homework, or managing a personal project. Provide guidance and support, but allow them the freedom to learn and grow.

Promote Social Skills:
Building healthy relationships is crucial for confidence. Encourage your child to interact with peers, join group activities, and participate in team projects. Engaging in social situations helps develop interpersonal skills, empathy, and self-assurance. Provide opportunities for them to practice communication, collaboration, and conflict resolution.

Model Confidence:
Children often learn by observing their parents and caregivers. Model confidence in your own actions and behaviors. Demonstrate resilience when facing challenges, pursue your own interests, and embrace self-improvement. Be a positive role model, showing them that confidence is built through continuous effort and self-belief.

Cultivate a Growth Mindset:
Encourage a growth mindset in your child by emphasizing that abilities can be developed through effort and practice. Teach them to view failures as learning opportunities and to persevere in the face of obstacles. Emphasize the importance of effort, learning, and personal growth over fixed outcomes.

Building confidence in children is a lifelong journey that requires patience, support, and encouragement. By implementing these strategies, parents can help their children develop a strong sense of self-assurance, resilience, and belief in their abilities. Remember, every child is unique, so tailor these approaches to suit their individual needs, interests, and strengths. Together, let’s empower our children to become confident individuals who can face life’s challenges with determination and resilience.

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How to be a Positive Parent

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What is Positive Parenting?

Wouldn’t it be nice if children came with an instruction manual? The ways in which we are expected to parent our children today is often different from the way we were parented. Social attitudes have dramatically changed parenting expectations about work and family life, about discipline, about communication, about sibling rivalry, about homework and more. Without sufficient guidelines to help modern-day parents, they are left feeling helpless and frustrated.

To cope with these changes, parents need to adopt more positive parenting techniques. A positive parent provides children with structure and security, with love and limits,and with self-control and self-respect. Raised in this atmosphere, children will develop healthy attitudes about relationships, and they will be more responsible and have a healthier sense of self.

Positive Discipline

Because many parents were raised with punishment, they have a misunderstanding about how to get cooperation and teach respect without yelling, spanking or using time out. Positive parents understand the difference between discipline and punishment. Discipline engages children’s thinking brains and helps children make important choices about what is right and wrong. Punishment uses aggression, isolation and shame to coerce right behavior. Discipline models self-control and respect. Punishment creates fear.

‘Positive discipline’ parents encourage children to find their own solutions to problems while acting as a coach or emotional tutor. These parents act as a model of what they want their own children to be. They avoid “do it because I told you so” or “do what I say, not what I do,” because they know that children who hear this will behave when parents are around but do what they want when they’re alone or with peers.

Positive Parenting Tips

One of the simplest ways to be a positive parent is to offer children choices: “Do you want milk or juice with breakfast?” Two choices are enough! If your child says she wants soda, repeat the choices again. After going a couple of rounds without a choice, step in and make the decision for her. Don’t back down at this point; stand your ground and offer firm limits. Your child will be more ready to make a choice about drinks tomorrow. You can offer a lot of choices to your child throughout the day, so that making decisions becomes natural. After a while, your child will feel empowered about her ability to choose, so that the need for a power struggle decreases. This will help you as a parent to feel more competent about your skills as well.

Another positive parenting tip is to show lots of empathy for a problem your child brings up, such as a teacher who gave him a low test score. Quizzing your child about why he got such a low grade or pointing out that he didn’t study like he had been told to can turn into a fight rather than the chance to problem solve together. Instead, you can say, “You’re very upset about this score. You felt you should have gotten a better one.” Follow this empathetic response up with a positive brainstorming comment such as, “What could you do next time to get a better score?” At first children who hear these responses will defend themselves, but over time they will offer some ideas about the need to study more, prepare better, or perhaps get a tutor. Engaging in problem-solving conversations can help a child learn how to do better in school and life.

Making these positive parenting changes is not easy. Parents will fall back into old, negative patterns. That is just one more opportunity to model change. Be honest about the mistakes. Talk about how you will correct them next time, and let your child witness your transformation.

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5 Steps to Freeing Your Child (and Yourself) from Negative Thinking

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Following is the master plan to helping your child resist negative thinking that Dr. Tamar Chansky presents in her book “Freeing Your Child from Negative Thinking.” However, her strategies are just as effective for adults.

Used by permission of Da Capo Lifelong, a member of the Perseus Books Group.

Step One: Empathize with Your Children’s (or your own) Experience

As much as the end result of the master plan is to help your child embrace a different point of view on his situation, your first goal is not to lose your audience by coming on too strong with the agenda of change. Instead, start from where he is: Wheat emotion is he expression? Reflect that with your words or a hug, a gesture. Squatting may be all it takes. Thoroughly accepting how he feels doesn’t mean that you agree with him or see the situation the same way, but it does release him from having to show you how bad he feels. So when your child says, “I feel like I’m in jail,” resist the urge to say in so many words, “Are you crazy?” Don’t try to steer him off his course. Go in the direction of his swerve, and you will be able to direct him back to himself. The key is to normalize his experience without minimizing it. If you’re too cheerful, he has no choice but to be grumpy to get his point across. As the popular bumper sticker says, “If you are not outraged, you are not paying attention.” Introduce the idea of choice: “Your thoughts are making you feel really bad. I wonder if there is something different we could do.” You don’t want to oppressively correct your child or go in with the right answer. Your child will feel bad for feeling the wrong answer so deeply.

Step Two: Relabel

If only our automatic negative thoughts came with a disclaimer–”The message you are about to hear is notoriously unreliable, distorted, and out of proportion”–what anguish we could prevent. Instead of being led down a thorny patch lined with terrible impossibilities, accusations, and more, we might steel ourselves, get some distance, or get ready to take our thoughts with a grain of salt. Relabeling is about noticing the familiar “ring” to children’s thoughts and distress: the everything, always ring tone, or the ding-dong of doom and gloom. Children can learn to recognize it immediately, and just as we prepare ourselves when we look at our phone’s caller ID, when children know that it is Mr. Negative calling, or you suggest it to them, they know where that conversation is going, and they can come into the conversation prepared rather than being taken off guard. Interestingly, even thought hearing a litany of negative thoughts could make anyone feel bad, over time, when we hear that same old story, like a broken recover, and can predict, “Yep, I knew my negative thinking was going to jump to that conclusion,” we can decide not to listen, and that decision leaves us free to choose other interpretations.

Step Three: Specify What Went Wrong

Don’t be tempted to try to solve the huge problem that your child initially presents you with: “I hate my life, everything is terrible, I can’t do anything right.” The target is actually much smaller, so teach your child to shrink it by narrowing it down from its global form to the specific offending thought or situation that needs to be addressed. With young children you can frame this approach as doing “detective work” to locate the source of the problem; with older children, you can explain that it’s usually a triggering event that makes us feel really bad–a straw that broke the camel’s back. It holds the key to helping us know that to do to feel better.

Step Four: Optimize and Rewire

Optimizing a system means making modifications or trying different settings to make it run more efficiently, use resources more wisely, and conserve energy. When a child is in negative-thinking mode, her thinking is stalled, her strengths and resources are locked up, and her energy , motivation, and hopefulness are being drained. The optimizing step is about trying different settings or perspectives on the specific problem that your child has identified–”I’m not going to have any friends at camp”–and choosing the version or interpretation that works best for your child, the one that is the least damaging, is the most accurate, and gets her system moving in a new direction. Like a teacher who needs to “call on other kids” when one persnickety child is dominating the class, children can be encouraged to step into their rightful place of authority and tell Permanent-Marker Man or Disaster Guy to give it a rest and let other voices be heard.

Step Five: Mobilize or Be the Change You Want to See

There is a certain point where you can’t think your way out of your mood anymore, but you can move yourself out of it. What we know about brain rewiring is that actions can speak louder than words. If you sit still dwelling on a situation, it is harder to shake it off than if you get up and do something active. Like picking up the needle on a skipping record and putting it down elsewhere, doing something active helps your brain get engaged in something enjoyable and pass the time until your nervous system recovers from what felt like a near miss. It’s not that you necessarily need to forget about what you were thinking before, but you may be like a windup toy that spins its wheels when it gets wedged against a wall: No matter how much it spins, it can’t get moving. It needs to be picked up and headed in a new direction.

It is important to note that picking up is entirely different distracting oneself from negative thoughts. Distracting yourself is like playing a game of hide-and-seek with your negativity. Even if you pretend it’s not there for a while by doing something else, eventually it will find you. The master plan is about dismantling the power of the bully first, correctly and devaluing the ideas, and then getting busy with the things that matter to you more. You’re not distracting; you’re either accepting or dismissing the thoughts, but either way, you’ve established who’s the boss, you’ve made it clear in your mind that these thoughts have only the power you give them, and you are ready to either let them float on by or to amend, correct, or replace them.

via blog.beliefnet.com