4 Habits with Which You Damage The Self-Confidence of Your Child
Of course, even as parents we are not omnipotent. But we can lay the foundation for our children to develop a healthy self-confidence. We should avoid the following habits.
Most of us probably know from our own experience how difficult it is to build up a stable self-esteem, develop healthy coping strategies and find a positive attitude towards life. All the more reason for us to do everything we can to make all this a little easier for our children. Unfortunately, all too often we are groping in the dark …
The US-American psychologist Carol Dweck, who is particularly concerned with developmental psychology and the creation of thought patterns, provides us with at least one direction. According to Dweck, there are two possible models of thought that we adopt as children and that shape our self-perception to a great extent:
- Fixed Mindset: It is believed that qualities such as intelligence, creativity and talent are innate and we cannot influence them. Challenges and failure are filled with great fear.
- Growth Mindset: It is understood that people develop and grow, skills are acquired or improved through practice, and that the brain can be trained. Challenges and failure are seen as opportunities.
It should be our goal as parents to provide our children with a Growth Mindset – and in order to do this, it is advisable to wean ourselves off the following educational measures if possible.
4 Habits with Which You Damage The Self-Confidence of Your Child
1. Protecting the child from everything
If parents constantly place themselves over their children in a protective manner and never leave them alone, they are communicating to the little ones that they need this protection and that something terrible happens when they are on their own. In doing so, they deprive them of the chance to learn how to assess situations and dangers themselves. Of course this does not mean that we should leave our baby unattended next to the hot stove. But if the eight-year-old falls off the swing because he didn’t hold on properly and we let him do it, it’s usually less of a drama for him than a valuable lesson.
2. Giving feedback to the child with regard to his intelligence
Honestly: We should anyway slowly give up the habit of classifying “intelligence” in the sense of a measurable IQ as such a great quality. Without self-confidence, a high IQ is not particularly helpful. And being able to complete a series of numbers correctly is worth far less in real life than having a good feeling for people. It is best not to give children the idea that the intellect is something a person can be proud of. But if we praise them for being clever, or worse, for being stupid in their emotions, that is exactly what we do: we make them realize that they have a certain mental capacity with which they have to come to terms. And that can cause pressure and fear of failure, among other things. Instead of feedback like “you’re so smart, my little Einstein”, it is better to refer to the concrete stroke of genius of the little super brain, e.g. “you solved the task cleverly, really great, my darling”.
3. Helping the child with everything
If you give your child the opportunity to face a challenge on his or her own and let them experience early on that the world will not end if they fail, you will be doing them a great favour. Sooner or later we will not be able to take everything from our children and it would be unfair not to prepare them adequately. Moreover, if we help our child with everything, we give him the feeling that we don’t trust him with anything – with the consequence that he doesn’t trust himself.
4. Describing a task as simple
“Try it, it’s easy!” It’s an easy sentence to say, but its consequences can be quite disastrous. First of all, let’s get one thing straight: What may seem simple to us as adults is often not so for children. If we now call a task easy that the child can’t solve, it thinks, “What a loser I must be not to be able to solve even a simple task.” If he in turn accomplishes the task, his joy and his sense of achievement are diminished if we have previously described it as easy: “It wasn’t difficult …”. Better motivations than “it’s easy” are phrases like “you can do it” or “just try as hard as you can, it’s not bad at all if you can’t do it.”