You may find yourself asking how to build confidence in children and you must realize this is a task that everyone has to take part in from parents, to teachers, to anyone else involved in that child’s life and their development. Unfortunately, some people don’t realize this is important and the task of building confidence in children falls to the side.
One of the best ways of building confidence in children is positive reinforcement. Have you ever met someone who doesn’t enjoy having someone tell them what a good job they have done, how proud they were of what that person accomplished? Not likely, children are the same. You can find those that need the positive reinforcement, as when they get told something positive, they just glow.
Building confidence in children with positive reinforcement does not have to be difficult, it just has to be done and repeated. This is why teachers quite often will tell Johnny how proud she is of him for getting an A on his math test, or even if he didn’t do well, she tells him that she can tell he really tried hard and she is proud of him for that. Johnny may be feeling down on himself, but she is working on building confidence in children by saying she is proud of him, no matter what.
Parents can reinforce the good behaviour and as a result work on building confidence in children the same way. While it is easier to give negative reinforcement, in order to make sure the child gains confidence, positive enforcement has to be done. If you do feel the need to scold, add something positive with it to work on building confidence in children. If they make a mess when playing, you can say, “yucky, we don’t like being dirty” but follow up with something like “you did such a great job playing today!” This way the child remembers the positive and feels good about playtime.
If all the attention you give your child is negative, they are going to continue with that behaviour as they feel that any attention is better than none at all. In this case, the parents need to change their attitude in order that they are building confidence in children instead of just creating a negative behaviour and attitude. The longer this negative behaviour continues, the harder it will be to change how the child behaves as they get older or that they will be building confidence in children.
When you are praising your children, make sure that it is earnest as otherwise it can cause stress to the child. By saying to them they are always neat, they know that isn’t true, and they stress out about it. Part of building confidence in children is being specific in the praise by saying something such as you were so impressed with the job they did cleaning their room that day. It is positive, and they know specifically what you are talking about.
Being positive is important when building confidence in children, but the flip side is not always praising them as they can come to depend on it. Trying to find the balance can be the hard part. We want to be building confidence in children, but not creating cockiness.