Teaching Your Child Life Skills to Boost Their Self-Confidence
Self-confidence is key in a human being’s professional, social, and family life, and the good news for parents of young children is that it is easy to build! Unlike self-esteem, which is more inward facing and which relates to our own sense of self and how we interact with others, self-confidence is outward-facing. It can be achieved through knowledge and practice. Essentially, the more your child does something, the more confident they become in their ability to do it well. When your child is confident about themselves, it impacts their whole person—including their self-esteem or sense of worth. They are also more likely to brave bullying, school stress, and social tensions with greater resilience, and to feel more secure and motivated about their personal achievements and their ability to relate to others. While there are a host of skills you can choose to share with your child, the following may provide you with a little inspiration.
Encouraging Them to Develop a Growth Mentality
A fixed mentality encourages the idea that each of us are born with set intelligences, abilities, and talents and that these remain unchanged throughout our lifetime. A growth mentality, on the other hand, involves seeing all these characteristics as things we can change and develop over a lifetime. Teaching your child to adopt a growth mentality begins by seeing “failure,” “mistakes,” and “losses” as the biggest opportunities for growth. When your child faces an obstacle, encourage them to take a solutions-based approach and to strategize how they will approach this obstacle the next time. Talk to them about times in your own life in which persistence, hard work, and a positive frame of mind enabled you to achieve goals you may have “failed” at many times previously. If they are being bullied, focus on steps they, their teachers, and you can all take to nip it in the bud. Let them know that bullying can seem like an insurmountable obstacle, but in fact, it can be pulverized when you have a strong team of warriors by your side.
Letting Kids Play a Key Role at Home
It is logical for parents to protect children from common household risks such as burns, falls, and slips, but as your child moves from toddlerhood to childhood, it is important to find them tasks such as doing the laundry, ironing, and cooking. Of course, all these activities have their dangers. However, when your child is mature enough to listen to your instructions and work well under your supervision, they can easily take charge of some of these chores. Start out by teaching your child safe cooking techniques such as stepping up on a stool to reach the workbench, using non-slip bowls so that food remains in the pan instead of the floor, wearing oven mitts to avoid getting burned, and wearing an apron to stay clean. They may make a mess at first when using equipment like whisks and rolling pins, but if you keep them out of the kitchen indefinitely, they could end up going to college without knowing how to cook nutritious meals.
Letting Your Child Be Your Guide
Parents can sometimes sign their children up for activities such as swimming, ballet, or martial arts, since all these activities have a wealth of benefits for a child’s strength, flexibility, balance, and more. However, children can be very busy and have a limited number of hours for extracurricular activities. Therefore, it is important to employ their valuable free time in activities that motivate them. There are many ways to encourage your child’s passion that don’t necessarily involve driving them places or wasting too much time. These include signing them up for online classes, buying them reading, and visual material related to their favorite hobby, and making sure they have all the materials they need if they are into creative or scientific pursuits.
Boosting your child’s self-confidence can have a positive effect on their self-esteem or sense of self-worth. From the time your kids are very young, encourage them to have a “can do” attitude when it comes to learning home, school, and extracurricular skills. Invite them to cook meals alongside you, let them choose their preferred activities, and encourage them to see mistakes and arguably the best opportunity for growth and improvement.
Kay spent several years working as an e-safety officer, dedicated to educating both children and adults on enjoying cyberspace in safety. Since starting a family of her own, she has returned to her first love of writing, and contributes to a number of websites on the topics that matter to her.