How To Raise a Confident, Competent Child

Many parents assume that confidence comes first and competence follows. In fact, the reverse is usually true. Competence is the confidence that comes from experience. Children become confident because they have repeatedly experienced themselves succeeding, learning, recovering from mistakes, and mastering new tasks.

How can you help your child develop competence?

1. Let your child do things for herself.

From toddlerhood on, resist the urge to rush in. Stand nearby, ready to help if needed, but give your child the chance to try.

Whether she's climbing a play structure, pouring her own milk, or packing her backpack, every successful experience teaches:

"I can do this."

Clucking anxiously about how worried you are as he climbs that play structure may make you feel better, and it may impress the other parents on the playground with your attentiveness, but it won't help your child. In fact, it unintentionally limits him.

Just ask if he is keeping himself safe, then stand by and spot him. Smile proudly. Say

 

"Look at you way up there! Wow!"

(And if he falls, you’re there to catch him. Which is, after all, what allowed him to try it.)

2. Offer scaffolding, not rescuing.

Children learn best when they're challenged just beyond what they can do alone.

Provide support, suggestions, demonstrations, and encouragement, but don't take over.

Emotional development researchers call this "scaffolding," which could be defined as the framework you give your child on which she builds. You demonstrate one step at a time, or use questions to suggest each step, or simply spot her, which helps her to succeed when she tries something new.

These small successes achieved with your help give her the confidence to try new things herself. Scaffolding also teaches children that help is always available if they need it. You want your kids to know that deep in their bones before they hit adolescence.

3. Don’t set him up for failure.

Should you step in when you see failure ahead, or "let him learn a lesson"? Always a hard call.

Rescuing children can prevent them from learning important lessons. But children who see their parents stand by and let them fail experience that as not being loved. Instead of learning the lesson that they should have practiced that clarinet, or read the directions on that science kit, they learn the lesson that they're failures, that they cannot manage themselves, and that their parents did not care enough to help them not be failures or teach them to manage themselves.

But isn't stepping in “rescuing them?” That all depends on how it's done. If you take over the science fair project and do half of it the night before it's due, that's worse than rescuing: not only does your son learn that you'll bail him out if he goofs off, he learns that he's incompetent.

But if you observe, intervene early if necessary, and offer structure to help him succeed, he'll learn how to succeed instead of how to fail. In other words, help him each step of the way to organize his ideas and his work, BUT resist the impulse to improve on the project yourself. He'll complete the job hugely proud, and having learned something about how to plan and execute a complex project.

4. Don't test. Teach.

When you say "What's this color?" and your toddler answers correctly, you get excited. But then you keep asking about the next color and the next, and sooner or later you get to a color that he can't identify. To you, that's just one more color you're teaching him. But to him, that's a failure. He's disappointed you.

You think you're teaching him colors. But you aren't. You're teaching him that he isn't good enough. (Do you really want to teach colors? Do it just like you do anything else, by using the names in everyday life. "Let's get the purple one.") There is never a reason to test your child. And lecturing, drilling and testing aren't the most effective ways to teach. Children learn when they discover for themselves.

5. Empathize with your child's excitement about achievements, instead of evaluating her.

If you call Grandma in front of your child to report on your child's latest achievement, you're setting your child up to worry that unless she's brilliant and precocious, she's a disappointment. That creates a child who worries that she always needs to impress those around her. If you tell her she's smart, that makes it worse, because she knows that she isn't always smart, and she doesn't know how to get smarter -- it isn't something she has control over. When we make a big deal about kids' achievements, they feel evaluated, and they often worry so much about performance that they refuse even to try new things.

Praise evaluates the outcome of your child's action: "Good job!"  It doesn't give the child much information about what was good about what he did, or why you think it was good, and it teaches the child to rely on external sources to evaluate him.

You can refine your praise to make it serve your child better by giving him he power to evaluate for himself.

Instead:

• Comment on what she did that was successful: "You kept trying until you got it. I love how you never give up!"
• Empathize with the excitement she feels about her discovery or her achievement: "Wow! You figured out how to do that!"
• Encourage: "That's a hard puzzle piece, but I see you trying every space to see where it fits. Sooner or later, you'll find the right spot!"

6. Encourage effort, persistence, and learning--not results.

When children accomplish something, resist the urge to evaluate. Focus on what the child can control: effort, persistence, problem-solving, creativity, and learning.

Instead of:

"You're so smart!"

Try:

"You kept working on that until you figured it out."
"I see you worked so hard on this."
"Tell me about your painting."

Notice you aren't telling him what a great artist he is. That's an evaluation, bound to make him freeze up or turn him into a praise junkie, looking outside him for someone to tell him he's good enough. Even if his painting is objectively great, the point is never the product -- you don’t want him resting on his laurels at the age of six, or sixteen. And you don't want him to think he has to live up to some previous pinnacle of achievement. What you want is for him to keep trying, practicing, improving, and to learn that hard work pays off. 

(For more on how to give helpful encouragement rather than getting stuck in "Good Job" see this article: What To Say Instead of Praising.

7. Treat mistakes as part of learning.

Competent people aren't people who never make mistakes.

They're people who know how to recover from mistakes.

• When the milk spills, hand over a sponge.
• When the block tower falls, help your child take a breath and start again.

Mastery grows through practice, experimentation, and plenty of mistakes. 

As Ms. Frizzle of the Magic Schoolbus famously said, "Get messy! Take chances!" Children who get the message that spilled milk is a problem and there's one right way to do things often end up with less initiative and creativity. Just smile, hand her the sponge and say "We always clean up our own messes. I'll help." 

8. Give your child opportunities to make a difference.

Children develop a sense of competence when they experience themselves as capable contributors. Competence and feelings of mastery are about power and derive from a child's experience of herself as having an effect on the world.

 

"If I stand on the stool, I can flip this light switch and light up the room!"

• Let them help.
• Let them participate.
• Let them matter.

The child who thinks,

"I helped make dinner"

or

"I fixed that"

is developing a sense of agency that will serve them for life. Minimize the number of times your child gets the message that her actions don't matter.

All children will experience reasonable limits to their power (“I can't make the rain stop, and neither can Mommy"), but the more your child has opportunities to make a difference in the world, the more she will see herself as capable.

Competence develops one experience at a time.

When children are given opportunities to try, fail, learn, contribute, and succeed—with support when needed—they develop the confidence that comes from knowing:

"I can handle this."

Are kids today really less confident than they used to be?

Alfie Kohn, in The Myth of the Spoiled Child, assembles lots of evidence to refute this idea. But we do know that kids don't get as much autonomous play as they need, and therefore that they're missing the opportunity to gain confidence that can only develop from handling all the problems that arise when kids learn to solve problemswithout adults to manage things. And I don't think it's news to any parent that our natural desire to protect our children from discomfort often prompts us to step in to solve things for our kids.

Our job as parents is to work ourselves out of a job.

This starts when our children are very young. All kids eventually grow up and live their lives without us. How they live will depend partly on whether we've been able to rise above our own anxiety and our impulse to control them, so we can support them to chart their own path and make their own mistakes.

You know the old adage about giving our children roots and wings? Unconditional love is the roots. Confidence is the wings. Young people who have both live bigger lives.