Building Confidence for Children

I will narrate this experience of my son growing up. This is from his very young age. He was an introvert and a timid child. Until the age of 3 he was not talking, he was saying some words but not sentences. I had no issues with that, he was picking it up very slowly. We used to encourage his vocabulary at home but never pushed it. I wanted to make him comfortable and progress. Then he was enrolled in the School in Nursery class, since he had already reached that age.

For the first few days it was going fine, but gradually I observed that he would make a lot of fuss to go to school. The vocabulary that he had already developed, he stopped speaking and used very few words. He was withdrawing and would get scared of very small things, as it is he was an introvert and a timid child and it was getting bad by the day. In the beginning I was not able to understand what was happening. This was all in just 15 days of joining the school. I went to his School and spoke to the teacher. The Teacher did not tell me anything, she gave me a sugar-coated talk and said he is perfectly fine in school.

Around 2 months went by and I was getting restless. At home we were doing everything to give him comfort and assure him that it's ok if he picks up his learning slowly. I would go to his school and everything looked normal there.
I was going mad thinking what was happening to him. Even a little raise of voice and he would start crying. I could not take it anymore so I requested the Principal of his school to spend some time outside his class without his Teacher's awareness. And there was an utter disbelief for me, I would see that the Teacher would continuously pick up on him and in a harsh tone say rude things. He was made to sit on the last bench of his class. Immediately I could understand why he was behaving in the manner he did. I visited the Principal office and without any second thought informed her that I have taken the decision to withdraw my Son from their School.

Source

I knew it would be a challenge for me to get him admission in another School at that part of the year. Anyways in Mumbai, Schools are a big-time business. But then for me at that point of time getting him out of that fear and building his confidence was the most important thing to do.

Then I met a very kind lady who used to homeschool for Children till the age of 5 to 6 and I asked her if she could consider him. She agreed and we worked together building up on his confidence and getting him back to normal. In 6 months' time he started talking and doing fine.

This whole incident made me very sensitive towards him and I started keeping a close eye on his every behavior and activity. It took him some years to start behaving normally. To think of it, if I had not withdrawn him from the school, I may have ended up in serious trouble for him.

Not all Children are the same, everyone has different capabilities and it is important for parents to understand their children and accept their shortcomings and work towards them. These days I see, Children are constantly put in a competition environment, not all of them are capable of running first in the competition and the result is that they start getting inferiority complex.

Parents expect their Children to learn coding at the age of 6 and 7, and the same is being promoted by the institutes for whom this is a lucrative business. This just keeps raising the bar for them. Imagine, what was first learned at the age of 15 to 16 is now put up for the age 6 to 7, what kind of pressure and when some are not able to manage their pressure, their whole confidence level comes down.

Some Children are slow and parents should not feel ashamed of that. They just need to be their support system and help them grow. The way we behave with our Children becomes their inner-voice. In their growing up, the parents and teachers are their strong pillars, their base is set from here, and if these pillars are weak, it is directly going to impact their confidence level as well.

Confidence does not come to all Children by itself. Yes, some Children are very smart and they have it in them, but there are many children who lack it and when it is not handled sensitively it can very deeply impact the child.

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