Cultivating confidence in your child

“Believe in yourself!” One of the most cliché sayings you’ll hear people tell you is exactly this. However, an interesting thing about it is the meaning hidden in between the spaces of every word. If you look closely the phrase ‘believe in yourself’ highlights another very familiar and significant term known as ‘confidence’.

Confidence is what makes people take risks and try new things even if the odds are against them. Confidence is what’s hidden behind every ambitious decision, and every big goal that we set. Confidence is a belief in the self, it is built up by self-efficacy (the belief about your own ability to perform a certain action), optimism, hope and resilience.

Some may think of confidence as an inherited trait, and others might think of it as a skill. Which brings us to a concept introduced by Carol Dweck about the existence of two different types of mindsets. Carol and her colleagues researched and identified growth and fixed mindsets. The terms both refer to a certain pattern of thinking, and it is important to note that all of us actually use both mindsets in different contexts. As the terms themselves imply, the fixed mindset is a way of thinking about skills, qualities, performances, and values as set for life. Whereas the growth mindset indicates a way of thinking based on the belief that skills, performance and abilities can be improved.

Let’s talk about children. Parents want the best for their children. We want them to be good people, have ambition, be happy, be confident… But how do we help them achieve these values? How do we help them become self-sufficient, confident human beings, capable of creating their own path? 

This is one of the areas where we can benefit from Carol Dweck’s research and theories. By raising our children using the basic principles of growth mindset, we offer them the opportunity to grow confident and more likely to become their best, truest selves. How though? How do we even teach the growth mindset?

Firstly, we need to understand that every child is exposed to a lot more stimuli than just our presence, therefore, all we can do is try our best to be a positive, growth-oriented influence in their lives. In other words, you cannot control everything, but you can ‘plant a seed’ of the growth mindset in your child’s life.

Carol talks about a variety of ways to indirectly introduce this way of thinking to children. One way is through effective praise. We often tend to praise results – our child gets a good grade on a test and immediately the grade becomes a reason for praise and a reminder for all the good qualities and abilities of the child. This might seem like a great way to boost confidence, however the conditions under which praise happens, also create a downside. What happens when failure comes? Which eventually, it will. If a child experiences praise whenever a positive result is obtained, then it will also associate failure, with overall failure and incapability. This is exactly what the fixed mindset entails. How do we revert from this fixed mindset?

It’s simple: give praise for effort instead of result. Now, we are not talking about the ‘every student gets a medal for participation’ kind of thing. We are talking about honest and real reflection of one’s efforts to reach a certain result. For example, if your child achieves excellence in a sport, maybe praise the hard work, effort, dedication, and resilience they showed throughout every practice. This shows and teaches children that an outcome is the sum of previous actions and commitments, and not utterly based on inherent qualities and capabilities. We are not denying talent here; we are distinguishing self-worth from success and failure. This in turn gives the possibility of improvement, excellence, ambition and striving to become the best one can be.

In addition to changing the way we praise our children we can make sure to try to manage the way we approach failures as well. If failure in a task is labelled as a characteristic of the person who failed, then we are setting our children up for disappointment and psychological paralysis after future setbacks. I often hear young people say, ‘I’m a failure’, and when digging further into that statement, I see that they feel like failures because of an incident of failure. This happens because of a fixed mindset. What if we approached failure as simply what it is: an event or outcome? What if we stopped attributing failure to inability or lack of intelligence? If we help our children to reflect on what contributed to the failure, then we teach them a way of thinking which is focused on growth, problem-solving and improvement, instead of an idea of abilities being fixed and set for life. 

To sum up, the growth mindset is essentially taught through teaching a process of thinking. It’s more about teaching our children where success and failure came from, and detaching the link between these outcomes and personality or ability.

Imagine how many more possibilities and options children will have when they learn how to approach failures, with a problem-solving attitude, and learn how to gain from success through adopting success-related habits in their daily life. Could be pretty amazing, right?