Building Confidence in Your Children!

As a parent, it is important to make sure our children are feeling confident. But how do we do that? Here are some tips on how to build confidence in your children.

1. Setting Goals for your children. You can do this by establishing short-term SMART goals. SMART goals provide the detail, support, guidance children. 
   1. S: Specific: This will help them get extremely detailed about the goals they set.
   2. M: Measurable: Will help them keep track of their goals.
   3. A: Attainable: Make sure to set achievable goals that are challenging but are reachable goals.
   4. R: Realistic: Make sure their goals are at least within reason. Setting realistic goals can be done by little successes. Not all goals have to be achieved at one time. Just like recovery small steps matter. This will give children self-esteem and give them the confidence they need to strive for bigger goals.
   5. T: Timely: Help your children break their goals down into smaller steps to get there.
2. Don’t get upset at your children’s small mistakes. Mistakes are powerful and can be used as learning tool. When you increase children comfort making mistakes, you’ll build their willingness to think outside the box and interpret information with wider perspective. Help your children recognize they’ll build the confidence, problem-solving perseverance, and creatively by understanding that mistakes can be brain boosters.
3. Decreasing the negative chatter from your children. Encourage children to stop talking negative about themselves, saying I can’t do something, or saying I am terrible at something. Enforce to them they can do something they put their mind to and work hard to achieve. Also, reinforce to your children that you can get better at something by studying and reading more in school, practicing at something they are good at for example, sports or a musical instrument. By doing this, they will improve!
4. Be a good role model for your children. If you want your children to be confident, you will also have to do everything that you are preaching to your children. You will have to be confident as well, set goals for yourself, not talk negative around your children, and improve on your mistakes and apologize for your wrong-doings and grow from them. Your children will follow you in the way in which you behave and by your actions. Be a role model!
5. Make sure your children don’t get upset about their mistakes. You want to make sure they grow from their mistakes, and don’t make the same mistake next time. If they continue to be upset about their mistakes, and don’t do anything to fix the mistakes. The mistakes will continue to happen. Do something to fix those mistakes, to be confident you don’t make the same mistakes again.

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Sources:

Use SMART Goal Setting to Build Self-Esteem in Kids (mysouthernhealth.com)

What to Do When Mistakes Upset Your Kids | Psychology Today