How to Help Your Child Develop Confidence?

As a parent, you hope for many things for your child. You want them to grow up and do well academically, develop their talents, find successful and fulfilling careers and live an independent life once they’re older. You want them to be happy and develop good friendships.  One thing they need to achieve all these goals is confidence. When a child is confident, they have high self-esteem, which builds their social and mental health. How your child thinks and feels about themselves determines how they behave. If you’re looking to help your child build confidence, you’ve come to the right place. Here are several tips you can utilize to raise a confident child.

Change Your Body Language

Children learn a lot from your body language. They can tell when you’re upset, sad, stressed, or happy. To help instil confidence in your child, you need to show confidence in your actions. When experiencing a particular challenge, change your body language by standing straight, looking up, and putting a smile on your face instead of slumping your shoulders and showing signs of exhaustion. Your child will learn to embrace challenges and approach problems with confidence.

Consider Your Compliments

Kids need a lot of encouragement on every achievement they make in life. However, you don’t want your child to get used to the usual “good job” comment as they may find it hard to distinguish which accomplishments are worth celebrating. Don’t praise your child for doing what they were supposed to do. Instead, give them a simple “thank you.” You can also develop a rewarding plan to gift your child based on what they did. For instance, if they did well in school, you can gift them a book or box of crayons. You can check out Our Generation and other kid’s stores for all your child’s gifts.

You also want to be specific when giving compliments to help your child understand. Instead of telling them that their reading skills are excellent, you can point out that their pronunciation of some words is terrific.

Avoid Rescuing Your Child

While it’s essential to keep your child safe and prevent them from getting injured or discouraged, you will not be doing them any good helping them do what they want. Children need to know that it’s okay to fail, but they can accomplish anything with determination. They learn to succeed by overcoming obstacles, not helping them or keeping them away from their challenges. Allow your child to take risks and encourage them to do more. You can even attempt the same challenges and fail on purpose to help them feel that it is not wrong to make a mistake.

Give Them Room to Make Decisions

Allow your child to make independent decisions from a young age. Learn to have multiple options for them and ask them to choose what they want. For instance, don’t ask a four-year-old what they want for dinner. Instead, give them options to choose from. At the same time, ensure that certain choices can only be determined by you.  For instance, let them choose what to eat or wear, but not when to eat, play or go to school..

Nurture Their Special Interests

Expose your child to multiple activities and observe what they prefer to do most. Determine whether they develop a liking for music, cooking, cars, beauty, arts, or any other skill and enroll them in a class of their interest. Help them take advantage of their interest and connect with other children. For example, if your child likes soccer, help them interact with other children in their school or neighborhood that like soccer.