4 Simple Yet Effective Ways to Boost Your Child’s Confidence
If you’ve ever wondered how to boost your child’s confidence, you’re not alone. Confidence is critical to a person’s long-term success. Without confidence, we lack the motivation to step outside our comfort zone. Lacking confidence makes it harder to make friends. For children, building up confidence is especially important during their formative years.
But as a parent, you may not know what to do. Children are often guarded growing up. They may find it difficult to open up. Sharing their feelings may be especially hard. And for a child’s cognitive development, feeling criticized or unsupported by those around them can easily lead to low confidence.
Fortunately, there are steps both parents and teachers can take.
I’m School Assembly Expert Joe Romano. For over 30 years, I have delivered impactful, exciting, and interactive school assemblies on topics such as Math, Science, Character Education, and Reading. I love working with kids. Each month I write an article just like this one to help busy parents and teachers.
There is a litany of ways to help boost a child’s confidence. In this article, I have picked four of my favorites.
Let’s get started.
Boost My Child’s Self-Confidence Tip #1: Praise the Effort
One development in child psychology I’ve noticed in recent years is praising the effort, not just the result. This is important. By praising your child’s efforts, you’re teaching them that hard work and trying are worthy of praise. And it’s a reason to feel good about yourself.
Maybe you’re a parent who has praised accomplishments in the past. That’s fine, but by only celebrating the accomplishments, we may accidentally teach children that only results matter. Since part of childhood is failing and trying again when learning, the effort must count for something.
Praise your child when they put in the work.
Boost My Child’s Self-Confidence Tip #2: Avoid Being Overly Critical
Some parents critique every part of their children’s efforts. The cliché is the overbearing parent haranguing the child as they practice a sport, learn a musical instrument, or their grades overall in school. There is a fine line between letting your child know their mistakes and coming down too hard.
Creating unrealistic expectations can shatter a child’s confidence. They begin to feel like no matter their effort and their achievements, nothing is enough. But how do you know if you’re overly critical?
Self-reflection is difficult. Start with an honest look at your behavior toward everyone, not just your child. Are you quick to criticize everyone around you? Do you find fault with everything? This may be hard to face, but an easy-to-spot indicator is how you treat…yourself. If you harshly criticize yourself, you likely overly criticize your child, too.
Boost My Child’s Self-Confidence Tip #3: Become a Role Model
Become a role model and you’ll help your child increase their confidence. Remember that children, especially very young kids, model the authority figures in their lives. If you grew up with confidence issues, don’t feel bad.
Many of us do. And even the most well-intentioned parents sometimes send the wrong messages to their children.
By working on your own confidence, you’ll be providing your child with a role model to strive toward. And you’ll feel better about yourself, too. A big win-win!
Boost My Child’s Self-Confidence Tip #4: Get Involved
A big cause of low self-confidence? Neglect. Kids want and need to know they are supported and loved. If you’re not involved in your child’s life, it’s time to change that. Talk to your child about their day. Show interest in the things they enjoy.
Volunteer for your child’s school’s PTA/PTO. You’ll find yourself able to socialize with other parents. You may find tips and techniques for confidence building you haven’t thought of. And more school involvement means you’ll have a finger on the pulse of your child’s day.
Because many kids are reluctant to share every aspect of their lives with their parents, joining the PTA/PTO gives you an insider’s look into school. You may discover how a new school policy or other change from the norm is affecting kids in school.
A School Assembly to Boost Your School’s Confidence?
Want a fun and effective way to give all of your school’s students some confidence-building tips? My “The Magic in You” character-building assembly program is loaded with important messages designed to serve as a ‘road map’ to becoming a confident, happy person.
And it’s a fun assembly program, filled with magic, kid-friendly humor, music, and join-in fun. To find out more about this exceptional program, contact me today.
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