How To Build Confidence In Children? | Handling Low Self-Esteem

1 in every 1,00,000 children aged between 10 and 14 die by suicide each year. Moreover, one out of every five students is being bullied by their colleagues.

With such statistics, it is imperative to raise confident kids. This is because as parents, we do not want our children to face depression or attempt suicide even when they fail.

However, the biggest challenge before parents of our generation is How to Improve the Confidence Level of a Child. More so, it is even more difficult to explain confidence to young kids.

Therefore, we bring to you this ultimate confidence development guide for every stage of parenting.

If you start searching for a proper definition of confidence over the internet, you might land up with hundreds of search results.

Nevertheless, even if you read each of those articles, you will not be able to get that perfect definition that your small kid can understand.

Ultimately, confidence is a feeling that cannot be explained to a small child with a definition.

A toddler gets his self-confidence from the confidence of his parents in his skills. You know your six-month-old baby cannot come down from his bed without getting hurt. Hence, if he attempts to do so, you are going to catch him immediately.

However, you will encourage the same child to explore his way down from the bed when he turns 14 months old.

Thus, your six months old baby is not going to try again to come down from his bed again unless he forgets the incident after some time.

Only your confidence in his abilities will make him confident enough to try to explore his methods and skills.

Therefore, your positive reactions, encouragement, motivation, and love for your child are the only ways to explain to your small kid about confidence.

How To Build Confidence In Children:

Discouragement and fear are the biggest enemies of confidence. If your toddler or child gets a lot of them in the early years of his life, it would be difficult for him to be confident in the later years.

Below are some tips that can guide you while raising a confident child.

Appreciate the efforts

Growing up is all about the journey and never about the destination. Losing that inter-school cricket match does not hold any importance but your child’s brilliant bowling efforts do.

Scoring less in the annual exam is not as significant as his efforts in studying all his subjects.

Explain to your child that the match can be won the next time. He can even score better than his competence in the next exam. However, his efforts in both situations are worth a celebration.

Had he not put down his efforts in both things, then it would have been a defeat. If he keeps on putting in efforts in all his endeavors, success will surely come down his way one day.

Similarly, appreciate your toddler’s efforts in trying to ride a tricycle. Even if he fails this time, he at least knows one way through which he won’t be able to ride it. Let him explore his ways and you just do your job – encourage and appreciate.

Do not spoon-feed

Parents of our age unknowingly try to remove obstacles in the path of our children. If he is learning to walk, let him fall sometimes, if he is learning to ride a cycle, it is fine to get some bruised knees.

Prepare your child for these falls and support them when they want to get up and try again. However, never remove that stone from your child’s path that can make him trip over.

Parents are not going to be with the kids forever. They will have to face successes as well as failures alone. Prepare your kids for the real world.

Celebrate his victories and support him in his failures. Tell them that both are a part and parcel of this life.

Manage your expectations

Expecting your kids to be as perfect as you are in carrying out daily chores is futile. Let your kids act their age.

Do not expect them to do things as well as you or your partner do them. Your unrealistic expectations might discourage your kid’s efforts and hence can harm the budding confidence in them gradually.

With time, your kids start living with the fact that they do not know how to do certain things and might even give up trying new things.

Cater to their inquisitiveness

Answering bundles of questions, especially from toddlers, is surely a tiresome job. However, a study shows that kids from households that encourage curiosity perform better at school as compared to kids whose questions remained unanswered.

When kids put up questions, it is a sign of intelligence. They make use of their observation skills to comprehend that there is something that is beyond their understanding capability.

Also, they acknowledge the fact that their parent’s know-it-all all and would have answers to all of their queries.

When children get answers from their parents, four things happen.

  • Firstly, their inquisitiveness gets encouraged. Hence, they won’t accept to live with doubts in life. Their inner curiosity will always guide them to search for answers. This will make them confident in life.
  • Secondly, they build trust and confidence in their parents and their intelligence.
  • Thirdly, correct information gets registered in their brains as the information is coming out from the best source of the world – their parents.
  • Fourthly, their fragile minds get trained to gather, process, and learn information from the outside world.

Sometimes, you might not know the answer to your child’s strange questions. In such cases, it is better to buy some time from your child rather than dismissing him and his questions.

Try to get the best possible answer for his age and explain it to him whenever possible. This will discourage your child from searching for answers from untrustworthy sources.

Don’t compare your kid with the other kids

Comparing your kid with his friend’s performance in a cricket match or in an exam is the biggest discouragement in adverse times.

When your child needs your appreciation for his efforts or your support, he should get that. Instead, if he gets criticism and comparison, he gets even more disheartened.

When your kid is facing difficult situations or failures, try to guide him and encourage him to do better the next time.

The comparison will only make him feel worse not only from his parent’s side but also from the friend he is getting compared to. 

Treat mistakes as a ladder to learning

Let your kids learn from mistakes. Analyze small failures of his life and discuss how he can do better the next time by not repeating the mistakes.

Tell them that mistakes are building blocks for learning. No one is perfect and everyone makes mistakes before accomplishing something.

Mistakes and failures come to everyone in life and he who can learn from them is the true winner.

Set a good example

Parents are a child’s heroes, at least until they are teenagers. Therefore, you need to set a good example in front of your kid.

Try not to show your worries, tensions, insecurities, etc. to him. While you might be dealing with some major issues in life, you are a hero for your child.

He doesn’t understand your concerns. However, if he sees you break down, he gets discouraged. 

Introduce Sports

Sports or any other physically challenging task, such as dance, help you gain confidence in your very existence.

Through sports, your kid will get a stronger physique that will help him increase his self-esteem. Moreover, accomplishments achieved in sports help your kid feel proud of himself.

Toddlers, especially, are transformers of physical energy. If you divert this energy towards a constructive task, like some sports, you can see wonders in your toddlers.

Furthermore, your kid starts questioning limiting presumptions that he might have picked in his life.

Children who get indulged in sports in the younger years of their lives know how to push limits and constantly increase their physical, mental, and emotional potential.

To work on How to Improve Confidence Level of Child in sports, you can –

  • Tell them that it is imperative to play freely. Pull out the fear of getting hurt from their minds. Tell them physical wounds will heal within due course of time.
  • Facilitate your child to get properly trained in whichever sports he likes. Training and practicing are important because only an appropriately trained sports person can play instinctively.
  • Tell your child to compete with self instead of others, because only he is going to be with himself forever. No other competitor is going to last with him forever. Hence, your kid’s complete focus should be on his own performance, in conjugation with his team.
  • Tell them that being perfect should not be their goal. Instead, they should try and do their best. We are humans and humans are meant to make mistakes. However, learning from those mistakes for the next time and doing our best should be the ultimate aim to perform in sports.

We, as parents, are ready to go places for raising confident kids. We want our kids to face life with full zeal and enthusiasm. However, there are still certain instances when we do feel helpless for them.

We know exactly how our kids feel but do not know how to pull them out to light. Read on to know how you can help your child become fearless and fierce.

How to Improve Confidence Level of a Teenage Girl

Model body acceptance

A mother makes a huge impact on her daughter, especially on her daughter’s “body image”. If a mother is too concerned about her appearance, body, color, etc., it is going to affect her daughter a lot.

During her teenage, a girl gets the most insecure about her appearance and if she doesn’t have that socially-acceptable perfect body in terms of shape and color, it is going to affect her confidence forever.

Nonetheless, only her mother can help her in such complex times.

Do not worry much about your appearance or body. Tell her that both slim, as well as fat, are body types and none of them is better than the other. Both fair and dark are skin tones and it is okay to have any color of skin.

Avoid asking your teenage daughter if you are looking fat in a particular dress. Accept your own body wholeheartedly and love yourself as you are. Only then would you be able to raise a daughter who has the confidence to accept her body as it is.

She is more than how she looks

Due to the hormonal changes that a girl encounters during her teenage, her concern and insecurity towards her appearance are genuine. However, try to shift her focus from just her appearance.

You can do that by engaging her in confidence-building activities for kids and teenagers.

Moreover, you should also be cautious while praising her. Try to divert your appreciation from her appearance to who she is and what she does in the world.

Let her have her say

In a normal household in India, daughters rarely had their say, until a few years ago, in the decisions of the family. Times have changed but we still rarely consider the opinions of teenagers in our families while taking decisions.

As parents, you need to trust your upbringing and the choices of your kids. If not in major things, you can at least consider the opinions of your teenage daughters on things like where to take your next trip to or which place you should plan to celebrate an important family event.

Such situations help create opportunities for your grown-up daughter to use her voice and support her choice.

These opportunities make her capable of standing by her choices and having a say will make her feel more confident in taking major decisions in life at later stages.

Don’t make her a “pleaser”

Indian women, for ages, are taught to become pleasers.

They are mostly there to take care of everyone’s happiness and comfort. But, it is time you tell your daughter that she is a human too and she has a life and identity of her own.

Apart from being a daughter, a sister, a friend, a wife, a mother, she is a woman too who has her own aspirations.

Also, tell them that it is okay if their choices might not please everyone around them. Their life has a purpose of their own, rather than just pleasing everyone in their lives.

Dads, do not overprotect your daughter

As soon as the daughter reaches puberty, her relationship with her dad changes a lot. From her friend and partner in crime, her dad becomes just her protector.

This comes naturally to most fathers and daughters.

However, what your daughter needs is the same bond and relationship with her and this can come only from your end.

Do not over-protect her. Do not consider her to be fragile or damsel in distress. She is still the same little girl.

You should, instead, empower her with tools and confidence so that she can fight for herself, use her voice, and speak up for herself.

How to Make Your Shy Child Confident

Time and again we come across parents who have shy kids. These kids do not want to open up in front of anyone but their immediate family members.

Below are some quick tips on how to improve the confidence level of a shy child.

  • Let your kid take his own time to open up in front of a group of new classmates or cousins. Do not intervene and introduce your child to the group, else, he would always look up to you to break the ice.
  • Before you relocate to a new place, discuss it with your kid. .Tell him that he is going to be in a new home and will be studying in a new school. Assure him that there will be people who he can be friends with and that good people are everywhere in the world. Be with him while he understands the whole concept of change.
  • Do not force things on your child or push things for him. Remember that he is trying to adjust to a new school and a different playground. Do not expect him to make friends within a day or two. Give him time and make him comfortable with the overall environment gradually.

Parting Words

Raising a confident child is as difficult as it is important. However, we surely do not want to leave any stone unturned to raise the self-esteem of our kids. Hence, today we also have the option to send our kids to some child confidence classes.

These classes involve attendees in various confidence-building activities for kids.

Children are aware that everyone in such classes is struggling in one way or the other to become confident and this helps them overcome their fears.

Eventually, such child confidence classes prove to be very beneficial in the confidence development of children.