3 Easy Ways to Boost a Young Child’s Self-Esteem
Being a parent is a both a fulfilling experience and an enormous challenge. The way you behave as a parent will have a lasting impact on your child. It happens too often. Someone with low self esteem and limited accomplishments could have found success if they had received more praise as a child. The thing is: giving a child confidence is not rocket science. Below I discuss three easy ways to boost your child’s self esteem so that they can grow up comfortable in their own skin.
1. Assign your child responsibility.
If you give your children responsibility, it will make them feel more valuable. This practice has the added benefit of giving them a strong work ethic, a trait that has obvious value later in life. The best technique is to not simply hand over chores to your young child but to include them in the jobs you do around the house.
Giving your child responsibility can be fun for both of you. A great outdoor activity would be to plant flowers. Give your child the seeds and help them bury them. When the flower grows, your child will be thrilled that it was their doing.
To give your child a true sense of responsibility, reward them every once in a while for their dependability. For instance, offer to buy them a gift but only if they can prove that they can take care of their belongings. Don’t simply purchase them numerous toys. They should feel that they have earned the gift.
2. Give them the attention they need to boost their confidence (and keep them from acting out).
The key here is to give your child the extra attention they need. If you seem distant to them, they will continue to act out and you might damage their self-esteem. It is their way of finding out if you still care. If you give them ample attention when you are with them, however, it should prevent them from acting out as often. This does not mean that you need to spoil them with gifts every time they behave themselves. But if your child gives you a hug, be sure to show them affection back. When you are home, give them a fair amount of quality and exclusive time. Bring them to a park, play a board game with them, read to them. These small gestures of affection will remind them that you still care.
3. Commend them when they do something good.
If you do not often give your child praise when they feel that they did something worthwhile, it could have a negative impact on their self-esteem. You do not need to give them too much acclaim. If you do that, they might grow up with an impractical view of themselves and their accomplishments (besides, if you fake it, they will be able to tell). If your child writes you a poem, however, you should tell that child how lovely that poem is and how impressed you are. In this case, the acclaim will give the child some motivation to use their creativity. If you were to passively thank the child for the poem, they might feel that their creativity is not adequate.
Giving your child ample positive feedback is also a great technique to help them avoid bad behavior in the long run. If you give your child positive feedback for something, they will like that feeling and will want to do more of whatever it was you praised them for.
Above are just a few techniques you can use to boost your child’s self esteem. The right balance of attention, praise and responsibility will give them a strong sense of value and they will likely find success throughout their life.
