Helping Kids Believe in Themselves - Inspiring Confidence in Your Kids

Many people are groomed these days to base their worth off of feed-back from others. If a person gets in the habit of that they will always end up needing low self-confidence help. An important skill to know is how to improve self-confidence.

Ways To Build Self-Confidence

If social grooming or their social life distracts too much from your child's understanding their worth, then you might want to adjust the child's social life. Homeschooling or decreasing time with friends is always an option for families who want a safer social education for their children. The largest amount of social training should come from the family relationships at home.

Discussing the topic of confidence and self-esteem with your child in a deliberate way, using examples from other lives (even your life's stories) may also help a child gain a better perspective about themselves. These stories can inspire conversations which will lead to greater self-awareness and confidence (more about deliberate discussions later).

How to Handle Attention-Seeking Behaviors Caused by Low Self-Confidence

If self-confidence issues are appearing by a child being negative about their appearance, the child may be attention seeking (in a very normal way). What can a parent do?

• Put yourself in your child's shoes and understood that they were questioning their worth because of the perceived worth of their friends. It's important for children to know that these feelings are only perceptions and not truths.


• Validate your child when they ask for it. If a child asks you if you think they are pretty, then validate them. Tell them you do. One calm answer to this kind of question can be all they need at first to know they are perceiving things incorrectly.


• If a child repeatedly seeks attention in a negative way, analyze the situation together and deliberately discussion about what you see happening.

Have a Deliberate Discussion

A deliberate discussion may sound something like,

"Emma, the other day you said you thought you looked ugly. When people talk like this it means one of two things. Either the person has some sadness on the inside because they chose to feel bad about how someone treated them, or they are hoping to find out if they are pretty by pretending to be worried about it.
Either way, the people around you will not feel happy when they are with you. It makes people worry about your happiness and think that something could be wrong. Then the people treat you differently and your relationships feel funny. Your friends could even start thinking you aren't fun to be around if you talked that way with them.

Some people call this manipulating other people's feelings. You want to be careful not to do this if you are going to keep good friends. If you ever wonder if you look nice or are beautiful, you just come say, "Mom, do you think I look nice today?" I will never lie to you. But, you shouldn't have to be sad to get me to make you happy. I want to make you happy even when you are already happy. You are one of my best friends in the world and I am here to help you be happy in life... "

This kind of conversation is good to have with children who seems to continue having an attention-seeking problem or low self-confidence with friends. In fact, the more direct we are as parents, the less trouble our children have in life. Especially in social situations.

Teach Proper Socialization

Proper socialization is taught. It is not something people just pick up along the way. In old times much of the educational experience was centered around etiquette and chivalry; social graces and relationship building. After all, you could tell a person's status by how they behaved socially.

Today we can still tell most people's social status by how they behave. The only difference today is that most families don't actively teach socialization. They hope children will hit a phase where they are properly socialized, mature, and confident. That's just not how it works. For happy children and successful futures teach proper social skills at home. Don't rely on schools, or churches to teach your children how to behave or to build their self-confidence and esteem. These skills come from family teaching and relationships.