How To Build Confidence In Your Kids.

Confidence is something that is built at a very early age. The earlier you build confidence in your kid, the more likely they develop confidence in their young and adult age. It’s not that only kids can develop confidence at a young age, adults can also build confidence after a certain age due to social problems, personal conflicts, and the surrounding environment. It’s very necessary to make your child confident enough to face the world today. Due to the increase in technology, science, inventions, and the economy, every human has become stressed to be successful and strong. We want to be successful at an early age and retire after a certain age. Keeping this in mind, all people are running towards the race of success. At this time self-confidence is very important for a human to get up after failing at every step. If you don’t have confidence you will not start again after failing. And this will end your successful journey. This happened with me too since I was not a confident girl since childhood. I gained confidence after struggling with my personal matters. So I taught of teaching my children about confidence and courage at a very early age so that they be successful in life or at least not give up if they fail several times. In this article, I will tell you how you can teach your kids to be confident and not overconfident.

What is Confidence?

Confidence is the belief in oneself and one’s abilities. It helps people take risks, face challenges, and grow. Healthy confidence comes from experience, self-awareness, and a positive mindset. However, too much confidence can turn into overconfidence, leading to mistakes and poor decisions. Balance is key—being confident but also aware of limitations. It is a crucial trait that allows individuals to trust their abilities, make decisions, and take action without fear. It stems from self-awareness, experience, and a positive mindset. A confident person believes in their potential, embraces challenges, and learns from failures rather than being discouraged by them. To build true confidence, one must develop skills, gain experience, overcome self-doubt, and maintain a growth mindset. Confidence is not about being perfect but about believing in continuous improvement and facing challenges with a strong and resilient attitude. There are two main types of confidence: self-confidence and overconfidence.

What is Self Confidence?

Self-confidence means trusting in your abilities, decisions, and worth. It’s the belief that you can handle challenges, learn from mistakes, and succeed in different aspects of life. Self-confident people are not afraid to take risks, express themselves, and face difficulties with a positive mindset. Self-confidence comes from self-awareness, experience, and a willingness to grow. It can be built in young children through their parents. Trust me it’s very easy to build self-confidence in your kids. But first, you should be calm, patient, and confident. Self-confidence is a balanced and realistic belief in oneself, helping individuals stay motivated and achieve success.

What is Overconfidence?

Overconfidence means excessive belief in your abilities, knowledge, or judgment, often beyond what is realistic. It can lead to underestimating risks, ignoring advice, or making mistakes due to arrogance. While confidence is good, overconfidence can result in poor decision-making and failure. These people fail in every situation, They fail in relationships, jobs, businesses, and self. Their overconfidence will help them succeed only for a few days, but in the long run, it is always a failure. People don’t like overconfident people as they are arrogant, and angry all the time, and they don’t have control over their emotions. They think they know everything and others don’t know anything. Overconfidence is an excessive belief in one’s abilities, which can lead to mistakes, underestimating risks, and ignoring valuable feedback.

Difference Between Self-Confidence and Overconfidence:-

Definition:- Self-confidence is a realistic and positive belief in one’s abilities. Overconfidence is an excessive and unrealistic belief in one’s abilities.

People Mindset: Self-confident people are balanced and aware of their strengths and weaknesses. Overconfident people have overstimulated abilities and ignore weaknesses.

Decision-making skills:- Self-confident people make informed decisions with careful consideration. Overconfident people make impulsive decisions without evaluating risks.

Learning attitude:- Self-confident people are open to feedback and willing to learn. Overconfident people ignore feedback and believe they are always right.

Risk-taking: Self-confident people take calculated risks after analyzing the situation. Overconfident people take unnecessary risks without considering the consequences. 

Reaction to Failure:- Self-confident people see failure as a learning opportunity. Overconfident people blame others or reduce to accept failures.

Impact on growth:- Self-confident people help in continuous self-improvement and success. Overconfidence can lead to mistakes, arrogance, and downfall.

How to Build Confidence in Kids:-

1. Appreciate: When your kids do something good, like helping you with household chores, drawing a picture in the book, telling a rhyme, writing alphabets, eating food by themselves, wasting clothes, doing potty on time, or doing anything else good for them, appreciate their hard work. This boosts their confidence and encourages them to do it again and again perfectly. Appreciation boosts confidence in both adults and kids.

2. Praise Them:- Telling your kids these words like ‘Good job’, ‘You are a good boy’, ‘You are smart’, ‘You can do it’, etc can boost their self-confidence. Praise them for every good act they do. Praising encourages your kids to do the work completely and perfectly. Don’t praise them when they do mistakes. Supporting your kids when they make mistakes is good but you should also teach them what’s good and what’s bad. If you continuously praise your kids even when they do mistakes then they may develop overconfidence. When they make mistakes, tell them it’s wrong. Don’t try to cover or support their mistakes. This will make them think that whatever they do is correct.

3. Support:- Parents support is very important to the child. Your support makes them successful and a good human being. Be a friend to them. Listen to their problem patiently and give advice like a friend, not like a leader. Support them in every situation. Whenever children are depressed or sad, they first look up to their parents for support and care. If parents don’t help then they find someone outside who supports them. When your child does something wrong, try to tell them what’s right and what should be done instead of just giving punishments and compliments.

4. Love:- Love is something that is misunderstood by almost everyone in this world. People find love only in good-looking things and outside their homes. They don’t see the love of their family members, friends, and relatives. Love is not attraction. It is sacrifice, patience, and accepting people the way they are. Just like a mother sacrifices her beauty, health, sleep, and career for her kids and a father sacrifices his dreams, money, desires, health, and works day and night for his kids. This is true love. So love your child the way they are. Young kids understand only one language and that is LOVE. This makes your kid self-confident, strong, fearless, and respected.

5. Social Interaction: Confidence comes when your child engages in family gatherings or other groups. The way they speak, behave, and act will help them understand their confidence level. So, taking your kids to gatherings at an early age will help them build confidence by watching others. You can take them to family functions, birthday parties, reunions, parks, malls, and schools. Here, children will learn to interact with others, play with them, and try to talk to them.

6. Avoid Negative Talk: Don’t tell your child, “You are useless, you are worth nothing, you are a burden, you are not able to do it, you have grown up so big but still don’t know anything, you will be unsuccessful in life,” etc. These words can damage your child’s confidence, self-worth, and emotions. They will lose hope in you. If they get any problem, they will not share with you instead they will ask others for help. You all will become like strangers living under one roof. Every human being is unique and has his talent and way of doing things. So let them do what’s right.

7. Give them work:- When your children are at home, encourage them to help you with your household work. There are many small household chores that your child can do. Like folding clothes, keeping clothes in the washing machine, cleaning the surface of tables and furniture with cloth, making sandwiches, plucking leaves of green leafy herbs, making salad, etc. All these works teach them cleanliness, discipline, helping nature, and hard work at a very young age. It also creates a bond between the parents and the child.

8. Allow them to make mistakes: It’s natural to make mistakes when trying something new. Children also make many mistakes when trying to learn something. Making mistakes is good, this is how we learn to do things perfectly. So let your children make mistakes. Don’t shout at them or punish them when they make mistakes. Encourage them to do it right and be very patient.

9. Self-Love: Teach your children about self-love. Tell them to be happy with how they look, speak, behave, think, do things, and learn. If they are not doing something right and need to change it, tell them politely.

10. Set small goals: Goals are very important for every human being to achieve something or move ahead in life. Children also need goals to achieve success or learn. You can set small goals like completing a painting, writing the alphabet, learning something new, or making a project. Once the vo is completed you can reward your child with his favourite things. These activities keep your kids engaged at home and also improve their skills. 

11. Self-independent:- Your child needs to be independent and do many of his things on his own. Like eating, bathing, wearing clothes, arranging his clothes, folding his clothes, brushing twice a day, Keeping his room clean, packing his bag, packing his lunchbox, etc. These practices make your child not dependent on you for each and everything. They will learn to do their own work in future too.

12. Positive Talk:- Always create a positive environment in the home. Talk softly and politely to all the family members. Respect each other and express your feelings with each other. Children learn from their parents. Tell so many positive things about your child in front of him. Praise your child in front of other people. This builds confidence and self-love in your kid.

13. Avoid comparisons:- This is something every parent does. And it’s the worst part of humiliating. According to me, this is the biggest insult your child gets from you. Comparing with siblings creates hatred in their hearts towards their siblings. Comparison with other people and relatives destroys your kid’s self-worth and confidence. Every child is unique and they have their own talents. Just like all the five fingers on our hands are not the same size, siblings are also not the same in a family.

14. Accept criticism:- There are many people out there who love to criticize you for everything. And it’s a good thing that people criticize. With their words, we can learn from our mistakes and try to rectify them. So always take negative feedback positively. This helps you grow mentally and emotionally healthy. Teach your children to accept the criticism that they face in schools, gatherings and from family members. They can learn from their mistakes and improve.

15. Problem-solving skills:- This is a very important part of life. Everybody is going to face problems in life. Only those who find solutions or try to solve those problems become successful in life. We need to teach our kids to face the problem instead of running away from it or just sitting in a corner and crying. Encouraging and supporting them continuously will help your child to move ahead.

16. Helping others:- Trying to talk and help others improve your kid’s social skills, communication skills, and problem-solving skills, they gain experience and learn from all these things. People with helping nature are loved by all. Helping others is like helping ourselves. This nature starts from home. When you help your child and show them how to do it, they will blindly follow you.

17. Physical activity:- Encourage your children to participate in sports or exercise daily. This makes their body fit. If the body is fit, the mind will also be relaxed, and looking at their body and health, children also feel confident. Take at least one hour out for indoor and outdoor games for your kids.

18. Overcome Fear:- Teach your children to overcome the fear of heights, animals, scary things, strangers, dark, etc. Kids get afraid very easily for small things. As a parent, you have to be beside them and support them. Make them fearless from a very young age. This will help them to face fear when they are not along with you.

19. Avoid overprotective Behaviour:- Let your child do some things on his own. Don’t always come to help your child. Let them help themselves first. If they are not able to help themselves, you can help them at that time. Initially let them help themselves.

20. Learn from failures:- Teach your children to learn from their mistakes and failures. If you teach them at an early age, they will learn from their mistakes when they grow up.

My Personal Experience

I have 2 kids. My elder son is a little calm and quiet. But my second daughter is very active and sharp. Since my son was a little calm, I tried to teach him so many things when he was very young. He was very shy and didn’t talk to anyone other than me and my husband. He used to hide behind me when people came to our home. He did not talk much. He started talking perfectly when he was 5 years old. He was not confident like other children or according to his age. So I decided to teach him. My second daughter learned everything by watching her brother’s actions and words. So she didn’t need any special teachings.

I continuously appreciated my son’s efforts and praised him for every little thing he did. Before, he didn’t care at all. But after continuous appreciation, he understood what is the meaning of appreciating is and slowly gained confidence in himself. I still support him in every way possible. If someone teases him, I tell him to talk back to them if they are wrong. It took so much time but it’s worth it. He is now a confident young boy. He tells me straight when I scold him that I should not scold, and talk politely to him. When I get angry he tells me to calm down. When I am not able to do something, he tells me that I can do it and I’m very strong. When I try to hep him with his clothes or fees him he tells me he will do it on his own. Seeing this difference and change in him, I feel very proud of my 5 year old son.

I strongly believe young minds have the power to grasp every little detail they see and hear around them. That is why it is important to nurture their minds when they are young. A d everything starts from HOME.