Understanding and Building Confidence in Kids

What is confidence?

Self-confidence comes from understanding that we can handle whatever comes our way.

It doesn't mean we can do everything on our own or that we're experts in every field. Rather, it means we're competent people who can navigate through the world. Confidence is often confused with thinking we're better than others, but that's not confidence at all — confidence has nothing to do with comparison.

Confidence is about self-value and self-esteem.

It's a feeling of worthiness, trusting yourself to get help when needed, and believing that your thoughts and opinions are valuable and worth sharing. Self-confidence means understanding that even if you make mistakes, it doesn't devalue you, or mean that you’re stupid. Confidence is recognizing that errors and failures are a normal part of the human experience.

Confidence goes hand-in-hand with authenticity.

We can't really be our authentic selves if we're not confident that we'll be accepted. Confidence is closely related to showing up authentically in your relationships and the world. People who lack confidence in their ideas and opinions are likely to stay quiet, afraid to speak up for fear of saying the wrong thing or not being taken seriously.

Confident people are willing to share their ideas.

Being confident doesn't mean expecting your ideas to be the best or immediately accepted by everyone. Self-confidence is understanding that you're on a level playing field with everyone else. It's believing that your ideas, opinions, or perspectives have value and are assets to the teams you work with.

Why is confidence so important?

Confidence is the foundation of building skills and abilities.

Confidence is the first step in developing skills and abilities because all skills and abilities require practice. If we're not confident enough to practice those skills, even when they're not perfect, and even to try them in the first place, we can't develop them.

Having self-confidence allows us to figure out what we're good at. If we aren't confident enough to try new things, we may never know what skills we actually have because we're too afraid to try. A person who assumes their ideas aren't worth sharing will never sign up for a speech class and never find out that they are a world-class speaker.

Without self-confidence, people are not able to show up and offer their ideas, try new things, build, or create.

Anything we do in life requires some degree of confidence, from sitting in a job interview and being able to look the employer in the eye and clearly articulate what you bring to an organization, to working on a group project at school and offering up your insights to make the project better.

If we're not confident in our abilities — or we don't know what they are — we aren't able to fully engage with the business of our life. Individuals who lack confidence will often sit back quietly, afraid to make any suggestions or offer any input. They don't contribute because they're afraid that whatever they're thinking or wondering is wrong or not good enough.

What does confidence look like in children?

Sometimes people think that a confident child is one who thinks they're the best at things and even puts other kids down. In fact, it's often just the opposite; students who are prone to bragging and put-downs are often the ones experiencing the lowest self-confidence. They want other people to see them as capable because they don't feel capable and are worried others will know this.

Confident kids don’t fear failure.

Confident kids usually are willing to try new things because they're not worried about failure. They don't believe that failure indicates something innately problematic about who they are as a person. They know that failure is a normal part of growth and nothing to be ashamed of or to hide. They're willing to try and they're willing to fail. They're going to be less worried about how they appear to other people because they have developed an internal sense of worth and competence that is not easily shaken by the opinions of others.

Confident kids admit when they are wrong.

A child who lacks confidence will deny any mistakes because they feel that making a mistake somehow devalues their skills or abilities. Their confidence is fragile as it's built on the unrealistic expectation of always being the best and never making mistakes.

Confident children are the ones who admit their errors and mistakes. They're willing to fail.

Confident kids lift up others.

Confident kids aren’t threatened by the success of others.

When you see a child offering support, suggestions, or instructions to someone else, that is a strong indicator of confidence. It shows that they trust their own understanding and their ability to effectively communicate that understanding to help someone else.

A child who lacks confidence needs everybody else to seem less than they are. A child who is prone to put-downs or bullying others is a child who is lacking self-confidence.

Confident kids don’t brag.

Confident kids aren’t trying to constantly get attention for their achievements from others, because they feel an innate sense of pride and confidence in their own abilities.

Confident kids ask lots of questions.

A confident child is going to be willing to share ideas and ask a lot of questions.

How can parents build kids’ confidence at home?

Take them seriously.

That means taking their concerns seriously. When they are worried about something, listen. While their concerns may sometimes seem small from an adult perspective, to a child they are very real and important. The concerns of childhood are a warm-up for the concerns of adulthood. By treating children with respect, we are actually teaching them that they should expect to be treated respectfully by others. They will carry themselves in the world as people who expect to be taken seriously, and often that is a prerequisite for being taken seriously.

We teach kids to value themselves by showing that we value them, and we teach kids that their thoughts and ideas are valuable by showing them that we value them.

Normalize mistakes.

We can develop confidence in our kids by being authentic with them about our own failures and mistakes. If kids only see adults do everything right and never acknowledge any errors or mistakes, they come to believe that that is the way you should be in the world. They may believe that competent people should never make a mistake or failure.

We can model for kids that even as adults, even as thought leaders, and bosses, and entrepreneurs, sometimes we make an error, or we forget to do something we were supposed to do. If when we make those mistakes, we point them out to kids and we say, "I made a mistake here. I was wrong, I forgot to do this... I made an error", we normalize errors.

Teach them to trust their own instincts.

Building children's self-confidence can look different than people often think. Sometimes adults will try to build children's confidence by telling them everything they do is good, by complimenting and praising things even when the children themselves don't feel good about the work they've done. This doesn't actually build self-confidence; it causes them to distrust their own intuitions.

If I draw you a picture and I know that I could have done better and I feel like my picture was poorly drawn, and I tell you this, and you tell me that it was perfect, that it couldn't be any better, you're telling me that my intuition is wrong.

When what a child feels on the inside is not reflected by you on the outside, this can actually decrease confidence.

Sometimes kids don't see how good they are at something. Perhaps that picture is truly beautiful, and their lack of confidence makes it difficult to see that. In this case, providing specific, clear feedback is a great confidence builder. So rather than just saying, "I love that picture! It's really nice," try to get specific: "I love the line work you did," or "I really enjoy these colors... this shadow looks so realistic... or that angle adds a lot of dimension... or the style of this makes me feel really calm and peaceful." Offer clear and direct examples of what you like without arguing over subjective ideas like whether the drawing is "good" or not.

This practice can help them see things in their own work that they hadn't seen before. So we can compliment our children even in areas they don't feel very confident in, but we should be highlighting things that perhaps they're missing rather than simply devaluing their opinion.

So, what we're really describing here is this balance between helping children see the best parts of themselves – their authentic skills and innate value — but doing it in a way where we do not dismiss or diminish their own feelings and intuitions about themselves. We can think of this as being able to respectfully disagree with a child about their performance. That disagreement should be authentic and specific but should not attempt to overrule their own feelings.

We need to help children develop trust in their own abilities and in their own intuitions and understandings of themselves. If we are constantly pushing kids to do things that they don't feel ready for, we teach them to ignore their internal voice, their own internal sense of readiness, and perhaps just to dive headlong into things that they don't have the skills for, in which case we're setting them up for failure.

If we think of confidence as a building block for leadership, there's a real danger in telling every kid, every time, that they are always ready for everything. By doing so, we teach them to ignore their inner signals, their warning signs that they need to slow down. We teach them not to recognize when they need more preparation before taking on a challenge.

We want kids to know what their skills are. We want them to know what it feels like to not be ready. We want them to know what it feels like when there's an internal signal that they need to prepare a little bit more. We want them to recognize that feeling so that they can also notice when it's absent. Knowing when they are actually ready to take on a task is an important skill.

How we build confidence at Neptune School

We take kids seriously.

Each student gets a monthly one-on-one meeting with their teacher to discuss their personal goals and progress in the program. Our students' needs and concerns are listened to and treated with respect. Between these meetings, every child receives regular personal feedback reports from their teacher. This feedback is used to celebrate their growth, challenge them in new areas, and highlight their stand-out moments in class. As we highlight students' progress, we see their confidence grow.

We get to know our students as individuals.

By getting to know our students as individuals, we can see when they are stretching themselves, stepping out of their comfort zone, or trying something new. We recognize the importance of those moments and make sure those efforts — even the baby steps — are acknowledged.

We reflect it back, being conscious of each student, knowing which kids will really appreciate a shout-out to the whole group and which might prefer a quiet comment in their feedback letter.

We do not have a cookie-cutter approach, and by acknowledging each child as a unique individual with their own skills, abilities, and personality, we allow them to feel valued in who they are and confident in trying new things.

We give our students authentic challenges.

Neptune class is hard. Our students are learning to do difficult things - things that even adults can struggle to do. But we trust that our students — given the right coaching and support — can develop the skills they need to succeed at these challenges.

Our students see themselves getting better at strategic thinking, or working together, or understanding a new concept. While the game is imaginary, the skills they are learning are real.

Just like a baby tiger pouncing on a leaf or their parent's tail, play behavior is designed to wire our brains toward the skills we need for life. Unfortunately, kids are not often put in a situation where they can use play to develop high-level skills like complex communication, systematic approaches to problems, and problem-solving.

At Neptune School, we create an environment where student confidence can flourish by creating just enough structure, genuine challenge, and a real need to develop the same skills that adults need in their lives. So it may look like play to us, but what's really happening is that students are seeing genuine growth in themselves. And when we grow, confidence naturally follows.

We normalize mistakes.

At Neptune, we acknowledge and even celebrate mistakes, recognizing them as opportunities for growth.

As a teacher, pointing out when I make a mistake is one of the most powerful tools I know to help our students start feeling comfortable with their own mistakes, and not feeling like they need to hide them, or be shy or shut down because they made them. When students see that even their teacher can acknowledge mistakes with confidence and composure, it helps create an environment where everyone feels safe to learn from their errors.