How Parents Can Raise Confident Kids

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How you can break the cycle of punishment based parenting and boost your child’s self-esteem in different ways that focus on their positive traits and help eliminate negative thoughts from their head.

“No one can make you feel inferior without your consent.”
Eleanor Roosevelt

From the moment children are born, they start to learn. This learning process is rapid and whenever a new skill is learned, their confidence grows.

Raising kids with high self-esteem and self-confidence can be tricky, especially if you have an anxious child, or a child that has experienced trauma (like I did when I was growing up).

But it’s not too late to give your child a confidence boost, whether they came from an anxiety driven situation or they simply developed some self-esteem troubles through regular life.

Here are 15 things you can do as a parent to help build up a child’s confidence If you are self-esteem activities and games, I have a guide for you too!

How to Raise Confident Kids

1. Love Them

Avoid harsh criticism or condemning your children, and make it plain to them that you love and care for them even when they make errors or terrible decisions.

This is unconditional love that cultivates strong relationships between parents and children and helps boost a kid’s confidence.

We all love our children, but showing them we love them must be a daily action. One of the best ways to show your love is to find their love language and use it daily.

Pay attention to your child, spend one-on-one time with them, and encourage them to be proud of who they are and want to be. A lack of confidence in young children can be a result of not enough quality time.

2. Be Confident

Show up and be confident yourself. If your child watches you tackle a hard task with preparation, dedication and perseverance, you are setting a good example for your anxious kids.

Of course, you don’t have to make everything look and seem perfect and easy. If you face challenges, a simple way to show confidence is to voice them. Do difficult tasks and test your own capabilities.

Your children would love to see that you also face hard times and if you can get through it, so can they. After all, facing difficult situations is a part of life and it’s one of the most important lessons your kids can learn!

3. Provide Opportunities For Success

When a child struggles at an early age it is important that they find success in those challenges once a while. Your child’s confidence can grow if they have opportunities to succeed, even on bad days.

If they are constantly failing, the children’s anxiety can heighten and develop a low self-esteem, especially if you have a perfectionist child.

Guide your child to get involved in confidence-building activities that they can be successful in so that they can move on to a bigger challenge and improve their skills, confidence and self-esteem.

4. Allow Your Child To Make Choices

Children feel more powerful when they make their own age-appropriate choices. One of the greatest gifts we have as humans is the ability to make choices!

Whatever the child decides should be fine with you, because you are the one who mentioned the choices they have, and you wouldn’t give your child inappropriate choices would you?

Something as simple as letting your toddler choose the red sweater or the blue sweater can give them a little confidence boost.

5. Not Everyone and Everything Is Perfect All The Time

In the world of social media, it can be very hard to believe that other people around us don’t have perfect lives as they make it out to be online.

I fall into this trap All. The. Time. It’s a devil that’s difficult to resist.

Remind your children (and yourself) that no one is perfect and that real life is often not posted around on social media.

It can be destructive to their self-esteem if they believe that the world online is the real world, so if you love your social media, stay on the positive advice side and get out of the comparison world.

6. Encourage New Adventures

Your child may have many skills that they are good at. Make sure to nurture those activities to help them become even better at them.

For example if you child loves camping, help them by teaching skills, buying them camping themed gifts to get them excited and go on camping adventures.

At the same time, try to incorporate new challenges and activities into their lives so they can keep learning to adjust to new situations in their lives.

7. Provide A Helping Hand

Encourage your children to help out around the house. Children will feel valued when they have jobs to do at home.

Kids often feel proud when they accomplish a simple task such as gathering any garbage around the home and putting it into a bin.

Simple tasks from tidying up toys to helping a sibling put on their shoes and other simple age-appropriate chores. They don’t need to get involved in big important jobs, but simple things that little kids can tackle are always a good idea if you’re trying to build up children’s confidence.

The feeling of being needed and contributing to family needs is super important and helps build a healthy self-esteem.

8. Allow Mistakes

As parents, it is our duty to protect our children from harm and failure…to an extent. Kids learn from failure and if children don’t fail, they won’t be able to learn to overcome challenges.

These are very important skills in adulthood that need to be acquired during the growing up years.

Makin a mistake means a chance was taken, and the chance-taking should always be rewarded ( as long as it was not a dangerous or harmful experiment). In order to build a child’s self esteem they must learn how to deal with failure.

9. Celebrate Accomplishments AND Efforts

Confident and resilient kids have parents who are proud of the efforts they make, whether they were successful or not.

New skills can take time to perfect. As they say, practice makes perfect.

If efforts are not being celebrated, then more practice likely won’t happen and the accomplishment of perfecting a new skill will not be there. This causes more anxiety in an already anxious child.

Like they say ” We miss 100% of the shots we don’t take” and that directly applies to confidence and sense of self.

10. Encourage Them To Find Their Passions

It is important for children to have the freedom to explore the things that they are interested in.

This helps them develop a sense of who they are which is an instrumental part of growing their confidence. One of the enemies of confidence is too much pressure on children who do activities they are not passionate about.

Tips for parents to help children find their passion:

Observe – Simply watching your child and listening to them speak about their interests can help you get a good sense of their likes and dislikes. Over time these interests can turn into passions.
Encourage – encourage your child to pursue their interest no matter how small the interest may seem at first.
Try different things – Try different activities and find out their passion. Try concerts, ballets and plays as well as swimming, soccer, and hockey and really drill down into your children’s interests.
Ask questions – Talk to your child and ask questions to help him discover things that he may not even know about himself!

11. Create Daily Connections

Connecting with your child on a daily basis is imperative to their success in life.

It’s not just about finding out how they are doing in school or what is happening in hockey practice, it’s about checking in on the emotional state, which is super important if you know your child suffers from anxiety.

If you are trying to connect with your child with a device in your hand, you may miss some of the emotional clues that they are providing you during the check-in moment.

Be sure to fully be present and be aware during your daily connections.

12. Use Positive Language

Even when an answer is NO, saying YES, even though you mean No, instead of NO is a huge confidence booster for children.

If that’s confusing, let me explain.

This approach isn’t for everyone, and many people argue that this is a way to teach your child that the world doesn’t have disappointments and that is entirely untrue.

This is simply a positive parenting approach to discipline. You can say YES to a situation and what you’re actually saying is NO if you use phrases such as ” YES you can watch move tv after lunch. We’re having yummy pasta today!”

What you’re saying is NO tv right now, without saying the word NO and causing a huge meltdown.

Avoid the meltdowns, and use positive language around your children.

13. Make Them Feel Special

There is nothing more powerful than making kids feel special.

Making a child feel special can be as simple as hanging their scribbles on the fridge or making an extra big deal about the B+ they got in Algebra that day.

14. Utilize Daily Routines

Routines are beneficial to children. A child’s life is more comfortable, consistent, and stable when they have a regular routine. While adults may find repetition to be tedious, toddlers thrive on it and it helps them develop a positive self-esteem.

A child feels empowered when they have a daily routine or schedule because they know what to expect. They take charge of their everyday life, develop habits, and are aware of your expectations. This boosts a child’s self-assurance.

15. Encourage Children To Feel All Emotions

Empathize with your child and validate his or her feelings. You are under no obligation to agree with them. All you have to do is be there for them and encourage them. Don’t strive to make things better. They need to know that you understand them and that you are there for them.

Assist your child in putting words to their feelings. Children lack the language to express their feelings. They require your assistance, and when you do, they will feel understood and empowered.

Bottom Line

As you can see, there are numerous things that parents may do to raise self-confident kids that tackle negative thoughts quickly and efficiently.

Encouraging a growth mindset (and discouraging a fixed mindset) can help children overcome whatever hard time they may be facing.

Your young kids will appreciate the hard work and effort you put into their self-esteem building and they will carry these habits into adulthood.

15 Best Tips To Boost Your Child’s Self-Esteem