How Can I Help My Child Feel Confident?
We love our children fiercely and want them to experience confidence. It is so hard to see them struggle to trust themselves and their abilities. I recently supported a family whose child is creative and intelligent and also paralyzed by fear and self-doubt. Does this sound familiar?
The mother took the brave first step of reaching out for support. She shared that her daughter struggles to express herself and is so afraid of saying the wrong thing or getting the wrong answer that she often says what she thinks someone wants her to say rather than her own ideas. These challenges with confidence and self-trust are impacting the daughter’s school learning and the whole family dynamic. How could they help build their daughter’s confidence?
Confidence comes from two important life skills: openness to vulnerability and tolerance for discomfort. I shared with the mother three specific strategies to support these life skills and build confidence including normalizing mistakes, reflecting on resilience, and encouraging effort.
Normalizing mistakes: Mistakes are part of the learning process. For those who struggle with confidence, mistakes can feel like personal failures. It is important for children to know that everyone makes mistakes, learns from them, and keeps on growing. I invited the family to normalize mistakes by talking about them openly. For example, “I got lost on the way to the store! I know how to get there. My mind must have been focused on something else. I took a few deep breaths to feel calm, turned around, and got what I needed at the store.”
Reflecting on resilience: Resilience gives us perspective. When we create narratives of resilience, ones in which challenges were faced, lessons learned, and life went on, we build self-trust. I encouraged the family to try a “rose meditation” around the dinner table. Each person can share their petals (successes), thorns (challenges), and the stems (potential for growth). For example, “Today my petals were reading my favorite new book and talking with my friends. My thorns were feeling really overwhelmed and getting nothing done. My stem was making a list of all the things and then making a plan for what I would do each day and what help I could ask for if I need it.”
Encouraging effort: Effort is more important than success. We will try far more times than we succeed, and we cannot succeed unless we try. Encouraging effort reframes challenges from the need to produce success to the opportunity to learn from a process. When our children struggle, we struggle, too. We want them to feel successful, and sometimes our own intolerance for discomfort inadvertently undermines our children’s openness to vulnerability. Encouraging effort validates our children’s feelings and openness to vulnerability and also gives perspective on how to tolerate discomfort. For example, first validating “You are really overwhelmed. This is a challenge, and you are trying different strategies” and then reflecting “Last week you had a similar challenge. What helped you get through it?” can encourage effort and offer empowering perspective.
At the end of our conversation, the mother told me “I’m so grateful for your guidance. I feel secure in my ability to help her.” What an honor to help a mother build confidence in her ability to support confidence in her daughter!
Rachel Simmons empowering book “Enough As She Is”
In addition to these three confidence-building strategies, I also shared resources to keep on learning:
Claire Lerner, a licensed clinical social worker, wrote a brilliant blog post about how to help children who are perfectionists: https://www.lernerchilddevelopment.com/mainblog/2020/9/5/how-to-help-children-who-are-perfectionists
Rachel Simmons wrote “Enough As She Is,” a powerful book about how to empower our daughters with life skills and experiences that help them experience confidence, resilience, and self-worth: https://www.rachelsimmons.com/books/enough-as-she-is/
The New York Times published a piece, “The Stories that Bind Us,” about creating family narratives of resilience: https://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/17/fashion/the-family-stories-that-bind-us-this-life.html
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