3 Ways To Increase Your Child’s Self Esteem
3 Ways to Increase Your Child's Self-Esteem
When kids are young, it's the role of parents to protect them from things that may hurt them and set them up for success in social situations. As kids start to grow, the role of parents change as kids become more independent and rely less on their parents. At this point, it is the job of parents to help kids find the solution for themselves.
This is especially challenging as kids begin to deal with challenging social situations. There isn't a quick fix for helping a child who has been the target of mean comments at school or the child who wasn't invited to a birthday party. As parents, it's hard to fight against the desire to protect and save kids. But in order to raise kids who are self-assured, independent, and confident, it's important to give kids the opportunity to sort out challenges themselves. In this blog post, we will be discussing strategies to help kids improve their self-esteem.
What is self-esteem?
Before we dive into how to help kids improve their self-esteem, it's important to have an understanding of self-esteem. Self-esteem means feeling good about what you do and yourself. Self-esteem matters because kids with higher self-esteem feel more confident to try new things and cope with mistakes. As kids grow, their self-esteem develops through experiences like making friends, trying new activities, and receiving positive feedback. Self-esteem develops differently for every kids. For some kids, it can come naturally but for others, it can be more challenging.
Here are 3 ways to increase your child’s self-esteem:
Show them how to do something. Rather than doing something for them, first attempt to have them learn by watching you and then trying it for themselves. When learning new skills, make sure they're appropriate developmentally and that they are not too challenging or else this will lead to frustration.
Praise effort on tasks. Praising effort over completion of tasks teaches children the importance of endurance and trying on activities that are hard. When kids hear positive feedback about how they are doing, this will lead to more positive attempts at trying challenging things.
Allow kids to help out more. Kids self-esteem develops when they have a chance to see that the work they are doing helps others. Involve them in work around the house or complete a service project as a family.
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