How To Actually Increase Your Child’s Confidence

There are a variety of ways to build child confidence levels inside and outside of the home

Many kids struggle with confidence, especially today. Confidence in children is at an all-time low, having fallen 22% since just 2016. Studies have found a pattern: confidence declines gradually around ages 7 or 8, then has a sudden drop-off at ages 10 or 11 as children enter middle school. Kids themselves have even recognized this; 60% of kids aged 7-11 report wishing that they were more confident. With this confidence crisis, many parents are at a total loss for how to help. We’re a team of therapists and educators, so we have seen these low confidence levels in children and understand how to help children improve confidence. Through our facilitated social groups, we have helped many children unlock a new, self-assured part of themselves and face life with a new outlook.  

Building Your Child’s Confidence Starts With You

You can boost confidence in children by giving them an example to follow - you!

Increasing self confidence in kids starts in the home, and the best way to boost your child’s confidence is to model confidence yourself (As we all know, this is a challenge!). As a parent, it's important that you focus on self-care, therapy, and building positive relationships. All of this helps you become the most confident version of yourself, which gives your child an example to follow – in other words, don’t just talk the talk. Let your child see you approach new things, meet new people, and go to new places. This shows them that they can do the same. If it helps, be upfront about it! Let your child know when you’re dealing with a difficult situation and how you remain confident despite it. They will appreciate your honesty, and this will build trust between you and your child. But most importantly for increasing your child’s confidence, you can model for them that it is normal and healthy to have these issues, and you can show them how a real human being works through them. 

Improve Confidence In Children Through Acceptance

To increase your child’s confidence, first, show them that you accept and love them.

To increase your child’s self confidence, they need an environment of total acceptance. There should be no doubt in your child’s mind that you will love and respect them no matter what. A key to building children’s confidence by aiding acceptance is the way you respond to your child’s efforts and mistakes. The most effective model is process-based praise over outcome-based praise. Outcome-based praise compliments a child on the end result of what they were working at. While this is still beneficial for the child, process-based praise, which compliments a child on how hard they worked at something, has been shown to increase resilience and self-worth. You can use this principle in response to your child’s negative self-talk. For example, if they talk about not being good at a sport or activity, try to reorient their focus to how hard they are working at it. If you can shift their thinking from the outcome (being “good” at something) and to their effort and progression, it enables them to view mistakes not as something to avoid, but rather as a potential learning experience. I’ve found discussing what we can work on or even joking around with kids about mistakes can help reduce some of the concern and negativity that they might associate with errors.  

Positive Support Systems Boost Self Confidence In Children

Having supportive social connects can improve children’s confidence greatly

While there are many ways to help your child build confidence levels, as a parent, you can only do so much. While children need a positive home environment, they also need a strong group of peers that also provide strong and consistent support. In other words, they need to feel that same acceptance from their peers that they feel around you. If a child feels insecure in their group of friends, they can become overly focused on maintaining their status, how they are perceived, and avoiding criticism. Of course, parents can’t choose your children’s friends – but you can put them in a good setting to make them! Signing them up for properly structured sports or clubs is a great way to expose them to positive support systems. Children need to feel that they have a strong group around them that they can return to for support no matter their levels of self-esteem and build your child’s confidence back up.

Help Sensitive Children Increase Confidence Through Practice 

Practice is key to building confidence in children

But knowing what to tell children is not enough. We all know that you can tell kids (or adults!) something a million times, but it doesn’t quite click until they have the experience to back it up. Low confidence can often be a result of not feeling properly prepared, skilled, or capable of tolerating negative outcomes. The only way to improve this competence is by practicing. No singular activity will be perfect for every kid, but certain activities are more successful in helping confidence and self-esteem. First, the activity has to be engaging and fun for the child. If the child enjoys the activity, it can alleviate some of the discomfort felt when they need to approach something that they are not so confident in. Second, the activity has to be active, involving choices and actions on the part of your child. Children often have a tendency to hesitate, overthink, or even totally avoid making decisions. Some parents try to enable their children to avoid making decisions, but this in fact makes the problem worse. Engaging your child in decision-making in a fun, low-stress situation like a game, can help them practice without feeling the pressure of judgement or consequences. Finally, the activity needs to give them opportunities to engage with small levels of unpredictability, something low-confidence kids struggle with. They will often find themselves waiting to start something until they have set it up perfectly, which can reinforce their low self-esteem without actually addressing it. To build confidence in children, they must practice something that they cannot fully control. This mimics the unpredictability of life and ensures that children practice the skills of tolerating the nervous energy that builds when things are out of control and improvising when things go wrong.  

Activities To Help Improve Child Confidence Levels 

There are many activities to help improve self confidence in children, including social games like Dungeons & Dragons.

In our groups, we’ve found an effective way to build children’s confidence: Dungeons & Dragons. Though you might be surprised to hear that a game about elves and wizards can increase self esteem in children, the game actually maps perfectly onto a lot of the important elements of building children’s confidence. Firstly, D&D is inherently collaborative, which naturally builds friendships. Playing as a character, all players are a part of a team, cooperating with one another to creatively face challenges and get through them together. This enables players, especially children, to develop deep and meaningful connections, built through teamwork, that give them a space to be totally themselves. The characters that kids play in D&D often reflect themselves in truer ways than they can normally express. We have seen how playing a character they create allows kids to embody their true selves in a safe environment, which brings massive boosts to confidence. D&D also presents a uniquely fun, structured, and comfortable way to practice decision making and unpredictability. What happens is partially controlled by players who need to make decisions to progress the game. Unlike real-world decisions, however, the choices players make D&D feel less difficult because they take place within a game and are aimed at in-game rewards. Framing this practice in terms of the game’s world can make kids excited to practice their decision-making skills (and develop their confidence). The other element of control in D&D is out of players hands: dice rolls. Often dice rolls are kids’ favorite part of our games, turning what could be stressful lack of control into fun and engaging practice.  

In our groups, we build confidence in children through facilitatingDungeons & Dragons groups. Because of our backgrounds in therapy and education, we ensure that each child is matched to a group that will enable them to be their truest self and develop confidence that will last a lifetime. We have seen firsthand how powerful these games can be to help bring kids out of their shell and build them into strong, courageous individuals. If you’d like to meet with us to discuss participating in these groups, sign up for our waitlist and we’ll connect with you!