Parenting: How we build confident kids

Confidence is something we all aspire to. The confidence to speak our mind, the confidence to take the risk, the confidence to trust our instinct. But what exactly is confidence?

According to Dr Becky Kennedy, Clinical Psychologist, confidence is self-trust. Confidence is the ability to trust ourselves, trust our instincts, trust that we are making the right decisions. When we don’t understand something to trust that that is OK and put our hand up, when something doesn’t feel right to trust our instinct and take the relevant action.

This is what we want for ourselves and this is what we want for our children. But how do we get there and how do we support our children to get there.

We start with small moments. When our child comes homes from school in tears and explains to us that they feel sad because they were picked last for the football team what is our default - to immediately make them feel better. We often do this by minimising their feeling – “you don’t feel that bad”, “I think you might be over-reacting a little bit” Does this sound familiar? It does to me. We find it hard (and sometimes frustrating) to see our kids struggling and we want to move them through the emotion as quickly as possible. Sometimes we even believe that if we stay with the emotion, we will make it worse by paying attention to it.

Here's the dilemma – we want to build confidence and we recognise that confidence is underpinned by a high level of self-trust – and yet when our kids come home with real sadness about being left out or real frustration about not being picked for the team – we essentially tell them that they are overreacting. When this happens every now and then (because we are human) it doesn’t matter but when this happens over and over again we erode their trust in their own feelings.

“I think I am feeling sad but my parents are telling me that I’m fine and there is nothing to be sad about. So maybe I am not sad and maybe there is nothing to be sad about”

Over time our children will learn not to trust their feelings or their instincts. And maybe sometime in the future they will be in a situation that doesn’t feel safe but when this feeling shows up they will dismiss it because their feelings have been wrong so many times in the past so why would they feel confident trusting themselves.

Start small. The next time our kid come home from school and tells us they are feeling angry about something that has happened, believe them. Each time that you validate their feelings you are building their self-trust which is where their confidence comes from.

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