How To Help Your Child Build Self-Confidence

Author Bio:Ryan Howard runs SmartParentAdvice, a site that provides parenting advice for moms and dads. Ryan writes about all of the different ups and downs of parenting, provides solutions to common challenges, and reviews products that parents need to purchase for babies and toddlers.

Having a strong sense of self-confidence can have a big impact on someone’s life. People with a high level of self-confidence often have more fun socializing, making decisions, and also spend less time worrying about small things that really don’t matter. For that reason, it’s natural for parents to want to help their kids build self-confidence.

If this is something that interests you, then you are in luck. We have a few tips below to help your child build self-confidence.

Give Them Input When Making Decisions

If you want your child to feel confident, you should let them practice making decisions. Instead of deciding everything that your family is going to do on your own, let them weigh in. Now, young children often have a tough time with completely open ended questions. So, at first you might just present them with a few options.

For example, you might ask if they want to play with their activity table or go outside for a tricycle ride. Or, let’s say that you have plans to go to the zoo one day. You might ask them if they want to walk or sit in a stroller.

You can extend this to all sorts of things. What to wear in the morning, what to eat for dinner, you name it. The more opportunities they have to make decisions, the more their confidence will blossom.

A Little Bit Of Praise Here And There

It’s natural to praise your kids when they do something well, and I strongly believe that praising them is hugely beneficial. Having said that, it’s important not to overdo it for a couple of reasons. First, if you praise every little thing, your kids might get used to it, and start discounting it. Second, if you heap on the praise with every success, they might really notice the lack of praise when they fail at something.

For example, imagine you are tossing a ball with them. They catch the first ball you throw, and you give them a round of applause. Then, they catch the next one, and they get cheers. But then, they drop the third ball, and it’s crickets. This can be really noticeable for a child and might make them feel a little down.

Shrug Off Your Mistakes And Theirs

No one is perfect, and the sooner your child realizes it, the better. One of the biggest ways to drive this message home is to draw attention to your own mistakes and show them that they are really no big deal.

For example, let’s say that you’re pouring some milk, and you accidentally knock the cup onto the ground. Instead of getting upset over the spilt milk, you can just smile and say whoops, it looks like I accidentally spilled the milk. By maintaining a positive attitude and shrugging off your mistake, you’re showing them that this is a part of life and nothing to worry about. Or, you can get a home cleaning service to help you with the extra cleaning.

The same thing applies when your child makes a mistake. Kids are learning new things every day, so they are bound to make lots and lots of mistakes. Just shrug them off and your child will follow your lead.

Let Them Pitch In

When your kids are really young, you will have to do everything for them. After all, there aren’t many ways for an infant to help out. As your little one hits toddlerdom and early childhood though, it’s a good idea to let them help out. That might mean picking up toys when you’re cleaning up or it might mean throwing out a few napkins after dinner. Slowly but surely, they will be able to take on more and more, and it will provide a sense of accomplishment and self-confidence.

Comments

  1. mumkid says:

    Great tips! My kid has no self-confidence at all. I’ve tried to include them in my decisions but still not working. I’ll try the other tips and I hope they will work for him.

Comments are closed.