We all want our children to grow up with a healthy self-esteem.
There are some kids who are just naturally born to be confident children.
Other kids might have a hard time and face challenges when it comes to having a growth mindset.
Whether a child has a high self-esteem or a low self-esteem can have a big impact on how they see their own experience of life.
One of the most positive things you can do to help your young children (as well as your children in their teen years) is to help them build up a good self-esteem.
There are many different things you can do to help.
If you have a child who is naturally shy, check out this article on how to help shy child grow confidence.
These self esteem questions for girls are also a great way to get the conversation started.
It can be a challenge to help your child (and you) get out of your comfort zone to talk about these new things.
Open-ended questions can really help a child develop good feelings about the new challenges of working on these new skills.
Asking the right questions for your child will really help get this conversation started off on the right foot.
Your very important role in the lives of your kids is to make your young person feel safe and comfortable talking about the challenging subject of building confidence.
It is very important to take your time and to let go of any unrealistic expectations you might have before you start your conversation.
Remember that these challenging, yet interesting conversations are meant to help them gain a sense of self and let them know you are there for them.
Questions To Ask Your Kid To Boost Their Confidence
1. What makes you feel proud of yourself?
To be more specific, you could ask them to tell you about a specific time when they felt proud of themselves.
If your child says they have never felt that way, you can sympathize and then tell a story about a time that you felt proud of yourself and why you felt that way.
In order to really bring the point home, you can follow up with a story of a time when you felt proud of your child.
The point is for your child to have confidence in themselves, so you want to model being proud of yourself first.
Then, you follow up with a story about your child to show that they indeed do things that they themselves can be proud of.
2. What would you say to a friend if they were feeling down?
Sometimes letting your kids think about how they would speak to or help others who are down can open up the conversation about positive self-talk.
It also leaves room to discuss how negative self-talk can be just as damaging as if a bully was saying those words to them.
3. What are your strengths?
Many people who experience a lack of confidence have never taken the time to take stock of their different strengths.
Perhaps no one has ever spoken to them about their strengths.
Opening up a dialog about what they are good at is a simple way of building them up to become more confident kids.
4. What would you like to learn about?
Helping your child figure out how to set realistic goals and then reaching them is a huge confidence booster!
Once they have pinpointed what they would like to do, you are able to point them in the right direction to follow through.
There is nothing better than the feeling of accomplishment to help increase a child’s confidence!
5. What is your favorite thing to do?
Letting your kids share their interests with you and you spending that quality time listening to them sends the message that they are important to you.
You must make sure to ask follow up questions and really hear what they are saying.
Giving a child your time and undivided attention goes really far and sends them so many positive messages about their importance.
6. What helps you stay calm?
Helping your kids identify things that are calming or steading for them can really assist when they are feeling shy.
Being shy can come with some anxiety, and if your child is able to access a calming method for themselves, they can face the world with more confidence.
In addition to that, when your child feels they can regulate their own feelings, their confidence will soar!
7. What does confidence mean to you or what does it look like to you?
Sometimes we go into these conversations with our children assuming that they have a clear understanding of the vocabulary.
To take this a step further, they may know what the word means as far as a definition, but the more important definition is what it means to them.
This question opens up a discussion about how they see confidence, how it appears to them in others and how they see, or do not see confidence in themselves.
Discussing this topic can help lead them toward where they want to be and talk about how to get there.
8. Tell me about a time you were able to do something you did not think you could do at first?
Recalling a time they overcame a seemingly insurmountable challenge is a big confidence booster.
Just the simple retelling of the story can set of the same good feelings they felt when they completed the challenge.
This helps solidify those synapse connections in the brain that will boost their confidence levels!
9.When do you feel the most confident?
When your child can identify what it feels like to be confident, they are more likely to be able to replicate it.
You can talk about which elements of what they are doing make them feel that confidence.
If they do not have an answer for you, start again with your own example of yourself.
After that, you can follow up with a story where your child appeared confident to you.
10. What do you do when you are feeling bad about yourself?
Part of being confident is knowing how to handle the challenge of failure and that it is ok to fail.
How someone handles failure will shape whether or not they recover and try again another time.
Knowing that one failure does not end the journey is a big confidence booster.
A child that knows to learn from failure rather than let it beat them down will have a much easier time with their own self confidence.
If your child does not have the tools to do this, having this conversation can help lead into helping them learn.
Please also realize that this is a matter of practice (for all of us!) and that you might have to lend a bit of help until your child is able to do this automatically.
Either way, learning how to fail without giving up is a life skill we can all use and that is a valuable skill to learn early on in one’s life.
Helping your child with their confidence is very important.
It is good to be ready for some of the things your child may say.
Be ready to perhaps hear some things that might be difficult to hear.
Remember that your child is trusting you with what they are saying, so never tell them that how they are feeling is wrong.
Instead, be inquisitive about other ways of looking at a particular situation and let your child meander to their own conclusions.
Take a bit of time before talking to them to reflect on confidence, what it means to you, examples of your own confidence and of course, examples of your child showing confidence.
Because of the nature of the conversation, you may need to approach it with your own kind of confidence.
And, because we are not all naturally confident, you can always fake it until you make it!
As we know, our kids take a lot of cues from us and are always (oh my goodness always!) watching what we are doing and how we are approaching different situations.
Please make sure to remove all distractions (NO phones!) before you start these conversations with your kids.
It is so important to build their confidence by letting them know that they have your full and undivided attention.
Another important thing to remember is to not put so much pressure on yourself.
You are already doing so well in helping your child with their confidence; it does not have to be perfect.
You just have to be yourself and listen to what your kids have to say.
And, as always, you’ve got this!