3 Tools that Build a Child’s Confidence

Young children are full of their own ideas, confidence, and enthusiasm for the new. As much as we hope they’ll retain this strong sense of self, as they get older it’s possible that their confidence can diminish with the influence of peers or self-doubt that comes from not being able to bounce back from failure.

I hope that my kids can retain a strong sense of self as they grow older. Given that my kiddos are girls I’m acutely aware of how easily they can lose themselves in the face of strong personalities. The rise of books such as Raising Confident Girls: 100 Tips For Parents And Teachers, The A to Z Guide to Raising Happy, Confident Kids, and how girls THRIVE demonstrate just how critical this issue is for children, and perhaps girls morso than boys.

I wrote a post about Six Tools for Building a Child’s Confidence and share three more with you today not as doctrine but as inspiration. I’d love to hear your thoughts on this — what tools do you think are important for building a child’s confidence?

Tool #1: Trust.

Children put an enormous amount of stock into what their parents or teachers think, and it’s our role to show them that we believe in them.

My 4-year old loves, loves, loves my sewing machine. I don’t let her use it unsupervised, but when she does use the machine all I do is help her guide the fabric. She presses the pedal, lifts the foot, and cuts the thread. The same can be said for the hot glue gun, electric mixer and cooking at the stove. We don’t do these things all the time, but I try to find ways to build these moments of trust into our days together.

Tool #2: Iteration

For a child to truly understand how things work, he or she needs to test it out multiple times and in various ways. Think of the child who just learned to write his name and how he’ll write it in various sizes, on different kinds of paper, vertically and horizontally, all in an effort to understand the written word and his particular place in the world.

In this image taken of my daughter last year, she was painting with watercolors. She paints with watercolors frequently and had experimented with brush painting, dipping paper in the paint, and squeezing paint with droppers. On this day, she wanted to see test the results of blowing paint with two different straws. One worked far better than the other, and she only figured this out because we dedicated time to iteration.

Tool #3: Tinker

Pulling things apart to undertand how they work helps children grasp the bigger picture of the world around them. We had an old monitor that was scheduled for a trip to the dump, and decided to pull it apart (carefully) so that my daughter could get a close look at some circuit boards and wires that live behind the computer. Another, safer, way to go about this is to give children some small tools and an old clock, and a fair amount of time to take it all apart.

For more on this topic, check out Six Tools for Building a Child’s Confidence, 

What tools do you think are important for building a child’s sense of confidence?