How To Build A Child's Confidence

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Building a Child’s Confidence

Having confidence is of utmost importance to a child’s future. A person can accomplish great things if he or she have the necessary confidence to do so. Therefore, parents should do everything they could to help their children build their confidence. But how do we go in doing this? There are many ways to build a child’s confidence but in this article, I’ll be focusing on the simple tips that anyone could employ. We just have to make sure that to do it right.

1. Do Not Be Stingy with Your Praises

• Being praise can make anyone feel good about themselves, what more for children? If they get good grades at school, praise them. They did simple house chores? Praise them! They’ve ate their veggies? What are you waiting for? Praise them!
• When a child did something good or right, make sure to praise them for it. A parent or a teacher’s approval can go a long way in building a child’s confidence.

2. Encourage Them When They Fail at Something

• Failure is part of growing up, and everyone, even the most successful people in the world have experienced failures countless times. So being harsh on them whenever they failed at something is counter-productive if you are trying to raise their confidence.
• Do not ignore your children if you see them looking down. It is a tell-tale sign that they have failed at something, and as parents, we should talk and encourage them. Not only will this make you closer to your children, it’ll even develop their personality and confidence.

3. Lower Your Expectations and Do Not Give Them Too Much Pressure

• Sometimes, parents will have some expectations for their children. This is normal as our children are sources of our pride. But, having a little too much expectation can backfire as it will also give them too much pressure.
• Once a child did not perform as expected, we tend to be disappointed, and our children can easily feel this disappointment --- lowering their confidence in the process as they’ll start to think that they are not good enough. So do yourself and your child a favor and have a more realistic expectation of them.

4. Spend More Time with Them

• As parents, we must always have time for our children. How are we supposed to help them build their confidence if we are often absent? Our presence alone is a great confidence booster for our children.
• Absence will often lead to parents and children becoming cold with one another so no matter how busy we are with our career; we must always try to find a way to spend more time with our children.

Confidence vs Overconfidence

Though having confidence is important, one must be careful as to not let it transform into overconfidence. Like everything else, having too much of something can do more harm than good. Therefore, as parents and/or teachers, we must make sure that the confidence we are trying to build do not turn into overconfidence.

I might have said that we must not be stingy with our praises but it doesn’t mean that we should just blindly praise them. Give praise only if our children do good things. And reprimand them if they did bad things. We must also make sure that they are aware of their mistakes so that they would avoid doing them in the future.

• Teach our children that overconfidence is never good.
• Reprimand them when they become overconfident.
• Do not be afraid to scold them if they make mistakes as long as it is within reasons.
• Physically scolding them or yelling at them is never a good idea.
• Be very patient when teaching your children. Explain to them why they should never be overconfident.

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Recklessness is Not Confidence

Sometimes, recklessness can be mistaken as confidence. But they two different things altogether. Confidence will give people courage to do something great even if it leads to failure but sometimes, confidence can easily turn to overconfidence, and overconfident people tends to be reckless most of the time.

Being reckless can be a very bad thing as not only will it lead to failure but more importantly, it can be very dangerous. Unfortunately, being reckless is part of our nature and it can be difficult to control our impulses to do reckless things. Nonetheless it is still possible to stop this urges as long as we are fully aware of the danger involve. That’s why, we must make sure that our children are aware of the difference between the two and it is our duty as parents (or teachers) educate them of the fact.

Conclusion

Helping build our children’s confidence is neither complicated nor difficult but it does require careful attention and time. Though some of us might not have the time (nor the patience) to help our children build their confidence, we must still do it as its importance cannot be stated by words alone. Remember, confidence will allow our children to go very far in life, and as parents, it is our duty to ensure that our children will have a bright future.