Confidence Switch: How to Ensure It Stays ON for Your Child.

Essential Tools To Maintain Your Child's Belief In Themselves.

Photo by Samrat Khadka on Unsplash

Confidence is fickle. It comes and goes like the wind.

You may experience days when you feel like you can conquer the world, and there are also times when you don’t want to leave the couch.

Children are no different to adults.

Their confidence levels can fluctuate due to their abilities, the opinions of influential individuals, the nature of the task, and their past experiences of success and difficulty.

“I can’t do this” can become the mindset for many young children. This makes the notion of a growth mindset such a powerful idea for parents. More about this is below.

Confidence is situation-specific.

It’s common for a child to feel confident on a sporting field but less confident approaching a math problem at school. Or confident at reading but not so confident in social situations.

Confidence levels rise and fall in different situations and when facing different tasks.

However, a child’s confidence can transfer from one situation to another.

For instance, a child who shines at sports may suddenly find that they approach all tasks with the same positive approach they take to the sports field.

It’s as if someone flicked their Confidence switch's ON button. And it’s stayed on.

It’s like magic. Not exactly.

Like an iceberg whose mass is mainly underwater, the work of flicking a child’s Confidence switch can go unseen. It can be done with the right tools, strategies and mindset.

Here’s how to flick that switch on so that it stays ON:

1. Develop a healthy attitude to mistakes.

Many kids, and almost all firstborns, will benchmark their confidence levels according to their parent’s reactions to their stuff ups.

A broken plate. “Oh Well. Thanks for cleaning the table away.”

Underwear put on back to front: “Not too worry. It’s hard to tell the back from the front sometimes.”

Misspelt words (again). “Keep at it. It’ll all come together soon.”

Meet full-hearted attempts at anything that hasn’t worked out to plan with “Oh Well”, not “Oh No!”

US psychologist Martine Seligman’s seminal work on Optimism found that children tended to copy the explanatory style—the way they view success and failure—of their primary parent by the age of eight.

They are watching and listening—your response matters. Make it positive, or at least neutral, when they make mistakes.

2. Go heavy on encouragement, light on praise.

Encouragement and praise are different. Both serve valuable purposes, but to maximise their effectiveness, it helps to know the difference and when to use them.

Encouragement focuses on the processes of what kids do. Praise focuses on the results of their action.

Encourage for:

Effort - “Phew, you are trying so hard!”

Contribution – “You helped your team out today.”

Improvement – “Your reading has picked up this term. Good for you.”

Show your confidence – “You got this! You’ve done it before.”

Praise for:

Doing something genuinely well – “That is a terrific piece of art.”

Milestones - “Fabulous stuff! That’s your first half-century.”

Australian research into the encouragement/praise dilemma is revealing.

Children under five love praise and want lots of it from their parents. Children around ten respond better to encouragement from parents, presumably because it comes with no strings attached. That is, they want to be able to approach challenging situations with their parents, focusing on the end results, not the results. That way, there’s less pressure to perform.

The message is clear for parents. The higher up the education scale your child reaches, the more they want to hear encouragement rather than praise.

3. Expand their time in environments where they feel confident.

Have you ever noticed a child who shines at an activity they love suddenly blooming in all parts of their life? Their social life, school life, and leisure activities suddenly sync.

Their self-confidence abounds.

It’s a fantastic phenomenon where a child’s confidence is transferrable from one situation to another.  

• The key is to allow kids, particularly when they find life challenging, to spend more time doing activities in which they excel. Let their confidence grow so that it can impact other areas.

Also, kids gradually learn that confidence is a behaviour. If they stand a little taller and act as if they are competent, suddenly, they feel more self-assured, and the results invariably show.

4. Help them identify their strengths.

Every child has unique capacities, innate interests, learning styles and coping patterns. They are all “built” differently and “built” for different things.

Help your child identify their strengths as they move further toward adolescence. 

Three elements combine to form a strength:

• Performance: What activities do your child excel at or show above-average success in? Where does success repeat itself?

• Energy: What activities energise and excite your child?

• High Use: What activities does your child do in their spare time? What do they love doing?

When children know their strengths and preferences, their overall self-belief is significantly boosted.

Energy, self-belief, and motivation soar when kids work from their strengths.

5. Adopt a growth mindset

US academic Carol Dweck’s work on mindset was a revelation for anyone who raises or teaches kids. Dweck’s work revealed that we can approach any activity with two mindsets—a fixed or a growth mindset.

The former is based on innate ability, and we can either be good at, say, math or we’re not. The latter says we may have inherent potential for math, but we can learn it if we put our minds to it.

When we adopt a growth mindset, we believe most things within reason if we apply ourselves. A fixed mindset says, “I can’t do it.” A growth mindset says, “I can’t do it yet.”

Parents need to employ a growth mindset when interacting with children to influence them and build a positive sense of self-confidence.

6. Help kids acquire the skills they need to succeed.

Confidence and self-belief are the bedrock of competency.

You can tell a child all you like that they are a fabulous reader/sportsperson/dancer, but if all the evidence points to the contrary, you aren’t doing them any favours. At some point, it will dawn on them that someone is pulling the wool over their eyes.

Stop the deception and help kids gain the skills, knowledge, and experiences they need to do well in whatever they value.

Cue encouragement. Many kids need their parents to show faith in their ability to improve with consistent effort, persistence, and application (cue growth mindset), which is tremendously confidence-building itself.

Finally……

It’s easy to feel discouraged as a parent when your child struggles with self-confidence. You may wonder where you are going wrong. Be kind to yourself.

Despite your best efforts, there’s a lot you can’t control, including your child’s state of mind, the attitude of other children in your child’s life, and the hardships that life can throw their way.

But your attitude toward your child and the faith you show in their ability to thrive and overcome hurdles is vital to them flicking the Confidence switch On.

Time and again, it’s been shown that the power of one stubborn, robust and supportive adult who conveys to a child that they can do this (whatever this is) is astounding.

Be that person.

Parenting Toolbox Words of Wisdom

“If you want a child to develop any skill or attitude, then you, as a parent, need to go first. If you want them to be resilient, confident or lifelong learners, you need to become resilient, confident or a lifelong learner. Children copy what they see from the adults in their lives that they admire and love.”

Michael Grose, Parenting Toolbox

So, there we have it—another Parenting Toolbox. I hope you enjoyed it and found it valuable.

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