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Raising Confident Children - Confidence Through Experience
- written by Helen Williams, a family counsellor and parent educator from New Zealand
Confidence comes through experience.
Experience comes about by doing it yourself!
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. |
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.
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.
About the Author:
Helen Williams is a family counsellor and parent educator from New Zealand currently living in Dubai, UAE, where she runs a busy practice called Counselling Dubai. As well as counselling clients, Helen runs regular Consistent Parenting and Becoming Authentic workshops. Helen has four children and is a proud grandmother and believes that being a consistent parent is both vitally important and totally necessary to ensure a happy family life. However, becoming a consistent parent is rather like trying to push water uphill if we are not consistent within our selves. Consistent Parenting Advice addresses HOW to adopt a firm, clear, consistent parenting approach, while enabling parents to enhance and increase their emotional well-being and become consistent themselves.
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