Raising Confident Children?

Don't do it for them!


Step back and allow your children the opportunities to get the experience for themselves.

Unconfident Children:

School age children need all the confidence they can muster. They are away from you for many hours each day. Who does the thinking for them then?

The biggest problem with under confident children comes from loving parents who do it all for their kids.

Many parents believe that their job in good parenting is to look after all the many physical needs of their children.Sometimes it just doesn't occur to parents that they could do with stepping back a bit and encouraging their children to do more for themselves, have more responsibility.

How can your children cry, "It worked! I did it! Come and see what I did!" if your habit is to do it all for them.
Build self esteem. Children need every opportunity.

Take a long look at all the things in your daily routine that you just do by rote for your children and see what you could change.

As you allow your children to plan, decide, and act from their own sense of confidence, you are providing them with opportunities to say look at what I can do and to know it and experience that thought deep within themselves. That is confidence.

Raising Confident Children:
Effective Parenting is Always a Balancing Act:

Yes, children need to be children, but they need to be raised towards independent thought and action as well.

Getting the balance right takes thought and consideration, but the payback is wonderful.

Set Up These Opportunities Regularly:

• Have them make their own lunches, make their own beds, do their own room cleaning.
• Have them be more responsible.


• In other words, have them look after themselves more and be party to their own planning and decisions.

They can, you know, they really can. And they will thank you for it in large measure when they are older.

Raising Confident Children:
Show your Children that you Trust Them:

How?
By giving them the opportunities to do trustworthy things.

Have them work alongside you in the kitchen so they become familiar with cooking and cleaning up.

Then suggest one evening a week, or month when your school age children have the responsibility for the evening meal - the planning, the cooking, the serving and the cleaning up.

Plan outings together, showing them all that needs to be taken onto account. Then have them take responsibility for planning a day of family activity on the weekend.

Talk through the routines necessary for getting off to school each day, and then have them take more responsibility for their own planning. This is a necessary precaution in case of parental illness or other interruptions to your normal family routine anyway.

These are only a few of the many ways your children can be encouraged in their own self confidence.

Read about How to Build Self Confidence in your children