Praise Their Achievements, Understand Their Fears

A parent’s role of praising their child’s achievements as well as understanding their child’s fears are two topics that we will go over in this chapter. It is important for a parent to understand that both are equally important when it comes to the process of instilling confidence into their child.

We will go over the importance of and the ways to praise a child’s achievements first.

Praise Their Achievements

Praising your child’s achievements, no matter how small it may seem to you, is vital in the process of creating confidence. This will make your child feel good about their self and will also create a self-confidence because they will feel as if they are constantly doing things that impress you.

Praising your child’s achievements can actually have more of a positive outcome than constantly pointing out the negative things your child might do. This is not surprising since always pointing out the wrong thing a child does makes them feel as if they cannot do anything right. On the other hand, always praising your child’s achievements and not talking to them about mistakes that they are making will have negative outcomes as well. This is because the child will feel as if they can do nothing wrong. It is important to find a healthy balance between pointing out mistakes and praising achievements. When praising your child’s achievements, you must be careful to spoil or over treat them. If you provide your child with a large reward every time they complete a small task, they will naturally begin to think that this will happen every time they do something. This can lead to negative behaviors when the rewards stop as the child will be confused about why they no longer receive a reward for a certain task. It is advised that rewards be saved for bigger accomplishments. When it comes to smaller achievements, verbal recognition or a pat on the back will suffice just fine.

Understand Your Child’s Fears

Understanding your child’s fears also play a large role in the development of your child’s self-confidence. You may be asking, how can fear make my child more confident in their self? The answer is the fact that overcoming fear can boost a person’s self-confidence dramatically. While trying to overcome fears it is important that you first understand them. You do not want to set your child up for failure. Some of the things they may be scared to attempt may actually be too difficult for them. One of the worst things you can do while trying to build a child’s confidence is put them in a situation where they will not win. You need to talk to your child and discover what it is that they are afraid of attempting and determine if it would be a good idea to push your child toward facing those fears.

Once you understand your child’s fears and have determined the possible negative and positive outcomes of facing them, you may make the decision to motivate your child to face those fears. Accomplishing a task that a child once feared they would fail is probably one of the best ways to build their self-confidence. This is because this process shows them that they can do things, no matter how hard they are or scared they were, if they just put their mind to it.

It is important to not push your child in to facing to many of their fears. Pushing your child too hard may result in an outcome completely different from one you desire. It may make the child anxious which could have an impact on the rest of their life. This make actually further lower their self- confidence because the anxiety may keep them from being able to accomplish other tasks that they could do effortlessly at one point.