Building Children’s Confidence
Skills your child has already acquired
Highlight the many new skills your child has already either acquired, improved, or mastered. For example “You’ve already learned so many things!” “You’re so good at…” “You’re a master of…” “You’ve become so much better at…”
Large goals should be broken down into smaller incremental steps to help children have the confidence they need to succeed.
Reveal the reasons for your confidence in them
Build your child’s confidence by telling them why you’re certain they’ll succeed. Say, for example, “You’re so good at learning new things”, “You understand really well why learning this is important”, “You have such a good team of supporters”, “You’ve already become so much better at doing this” or “When you decide to learn something, you’re so determined that you learn it in no time.”
Small steps when learning new skills
Another way of building your child’s confidence is to make sure the new skill they are learning is not too large-scale or too difficult. Large goals should be broken down into smaller incremental steps to help children have the confidence they need to succeed.
Suppose the problem is nail biting, and the skill they should learn is letting their nails grow. The initial goal could then be growing the nail on just one of their fingers, then two, then three etc. If a child easily gets involved in fighting with other children and the skill they should learn is how to play nicely with others, the initial goal could simply be learning how to ask other children nicely whether they would like to play together.

