How to help your child develop self-esteem

What is self-esteem?

Self-confidence or self-esteem is an integral part of our personality; it is an aspect of healthy development of children and a crucial aspect to achieve success in school. Self-esteem is the ability to direct your behaviour, body language and trials one encounters in the world.

Have you met people who earn the room with just their confidence? A confident personality when enters a hall grabs all the eyeballs. Wouldn’t it be wonderful to have confidence that boosts one’s self-esteem? When it comes to children few have the confidence to conquer the world without us being able to instil confidence in them. What about the remaining few who have low confidence leading towards low self-esteem?

It’s important to provide your child enough confidence for getting along with others, working out social challenges like making friends, sharing, competition, etcetera; we need to ingest self-esteem in children to not only survive, but thrive.

Here are a few tips that will help your child develop healthy self-esteem.

1)      Set an optimistic example: Even though you are feeling low and lack the confidence, you should try doing new things. Seeing you take on new challenges will boost the confidence of your child; also this way you will prepare your child to be optimistic. Make sure you do share your nervousness and anxiety just to explain that nobody is perfect. Teach them to focus, even if you are nervous.

2)      Inspire them to take up new things: Parents should inspire their children to channelize their energy into different things instead of focusing one thing that they already excel at.  Diversity will help them attain additional skill sets and much needed confidence to face new challenges that come their way.

3)      Learn from mistakes: It’s vital to teach your children that mistakes are a part of life and everyone makes mistakes and there will be no exception for them. Teaching them to not dwell on the mistakes and building a confidence to face new challenges will give them the much-needed boost.

4)      Failure is a stepping stone for success: Failure is the first step towards success, this need to be quaffed into the children. It’s natural for parents to be protective towards their children and shield them against any failures. Failure teaches resilience to try and try again to reach success, and on the way provides the confidence to never give up.

5)      Let your child take few decisions: Allow children to take their own age-appropriate choices, this will make them feel empowered and learn the consequences of their decisions.

6)      Praise your child: It’s important to give your child praise when he/she earns it; it is extremely valuable for boosting self-esteem. Praise can often be misused, so praise for their talent, certain skill set or efforts should be realistic.

7)      Set up goals and rules: Children tend to be more confident when they are aware of who is in charge and what to expect. Enforcing rules will give confidence as to what they can and can’t do. These rules need to be changed over time based on your child’s age and their confidence level. Being a parent and their friend should walk hand in hand, you should be able to let your child have the confidence to say “no” under peer pressure.

8)      The weapon called love: Your child should know that you love them no matter what. From failure to success and even when you are angry at them. Knowing that parents have their back will give them confidence and bolster his self-worth. But one should be sure that this love and appreciation should be towards right and not unnecessary and fundamentally wrong things.

Children when they trust their own capabilities thrive more when compared to the others. It’s by living through success and recovering from failure that they will develop healthy self-confidence.