Here's The 1 Thing Parents Get Wrong About Raising Confident Kids
Raising confident kids today can feel like an uphill battle — particularly in a time when social media stirs up feelings of inadequacy, comparison and self-doubt among young people.
Parents want to help their children feel capable and self-assured as they move through the world, but sometimes the way they go about it is misguided.
Developmental psychologist Aliza Pressman, co-founder of the Mount Sinai Parenting Center and author of “The 5 Principles of Parenting,” addressed one of the common mistakes parents make in an August episode of the podcast “On Purpose With Jay Shetty” — a clip of which has been making the rounds on Instagram.
The key thing to remember, she said: “Competence builds confidence, not praise.”
“Telling your kid they’re amazing is not going to make them feel like they’re amazing. It’s the competence — like helping them develop the skills,” Pressman explained in the episode. “And those skills don’t have to be that you’re like a star violinist or tennis player. It can be that you know how to cook or put the dishes away. Just a functioning individual.”
She goes on to say that parents “tend to do everything” for their children even when the kids themselves are capable of handling it, “but then praise them, as if that’s building their confidence.”
In an interview with HuffPost, Pressman said that while it is, of course, important that we show our children that we believe in them, “a pathway to believe in themselves is to watch themselves get competent at something.”
“And then our praise is actually this authentic mirroring of what they already know to be true about themselves,” she explained.
You can bolster confidence with competence in any area, she said — even by contributing to household chores. A long-term University of Minnesota study found that kids who helped with basic household tasks as young children were more self-reliant as adults than those who did not have chores or started doing them in their teenage years.
Give your child some developmentally appropriate tasks around the house and resist the urge to micromanage them.
“Don’t give them a chore and fix it because you do it better,” Pressman said. “Let them get better at it through practice.”
And it doesn’t just have to be chores. Start by having your child practice things they already have an interest in because that will make them more motivated to develop that task or skill.
“Whatever they practice consistently will get stronger,” Pressman said. “Then they experience the delight of building competency, and it can be translated to things they may be less interested in later.”
Telling your kid they’re amazing is not going to make them feel like they’re amazing. It’s the competence.Aliza Pressman on “On Purpose With Jay Shetty"
Neuropsychologist Sanam Hafeez also emphasized that it’s important for parents to allow their kids room to solve problems on their own.
“Give them support, but don’t rush in to fix everything,” Hafeez, director of Comprehend The Mind, told HuffPost. “Ask them to verbalize how they feel about how they handled something. Validate their feelings. Remind them that you love them unconditionally and you’re always there to support them if they need it.”
To strengthen confidence in kids, she also suggests teaching them to take time to reflect on their past achievements. Remind them that things they are capable of now once felt out of reach.
“For my own children, I often point out that six months ago, they couldn’t do some things that they can do now. And how six months from now they’re going to be able to do a lot more things,” Hafeez continued. “I show them how learning or skill-building doesn’t happen overnight. It really is one foot in front of the other and staying with the building blocks.”
And while strengthening confidence takes time, the pursuit is worthwhile.
“Caregivers rightfully care so much about supporting confidence,” Pressman said. “Confident kids make better choices, they know who they are and they also can be more generous to others.”
