It takes confidence to be a child. From making new friends to playing new sport games, there are many unfamiliar territories for children to explore. In order to take on all these challenges, it is important that children feel good about themselves and, over time, learn to trust in their own abilities. The best way to help children feel good about themselves, and ultimately to build their confidence, is by recognizing their achievements.

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Try the following general advice to improve your child’s confidence.

1. Recognize effort regardless of if it’s successful or unsuccessful

The psychologist Carl Pickhardt recommends appreciating a child’s efforts. So whether your child steals the ball successfully from the opponent in the basketball game or not, applaud their effort. Children should never be embarrassed of trying regardless of the outcome, otherwise they will become scared of failing or disappointing others.

2.   Motivate children to practice to develop their skills further

Whether your child is interested in playing the piano or scoring goals, encourage them to practice. Practice is, essentially, investing effort into the positive expectation that improvement will follow at some point in the future, the psychologist explains. However, it is important that parents do not start to put too much pressure on their children in order to keep expectations in line.

3.   Let children learn by solving problems themselves

It is better to encourage and support children as they attempt to tackle a difficult task and let them try to solve the problem on their own rather than figuring out the solution for them. As Pickhardt explains, when parents help children solve a question, it can impede self-confidence. It will be difficult for a child to develop problem-solving skills and build up the confidence to believe in their own ability when their parents do the work for them.

4.   Encourage children to ask questions

It can get tiring when children ask endless streams of questions, but children should be able to ask as many questions as they have, as this helps them develop knowledge and take in new information. The British newspaper ‘The Guardian’ reported that children who ask curious questions have an advantage over their classmates, because they can learn better and faster by taking in the teacher’s information.

5.   Increase children’s responsibilities by giving them new challenges

Build up a child’s confidence by showing them that they can accomplish goals in their life and that every small goal can build up to a bigger one. For instance, when a child is ready, parents can teach them to ride a bike without training wheels. A child’s confidence will rise automatically knowing that they met an increased responsibility and will try to engage with new challenges more easily.

6.   Do not criticize them

It is absolutely fine to give useful feedback or making suggestions, but never criticize them. Children will be discouraged to try new things or be confident about something when their parents criticize them.

7.   Encourage them to learn from mistakes

Treat mistakes as an opportunity to recover and learn from for the future. As Pickhard explains, learning from mistakes will build confidence and shows children that they do not have to fear failure. When children are able to make mistakes, they can learn how to better approach a situation the next time, by using advice from their parents and understanding what went wrong.

8.   Expose children to new experiences

Opening the door for new experiences teaches children that no matter how different or new a situation is, and how unprepared they might be, they can conquer it and learn something new that may help them in the future.

9.   Be a good role model

Set good examples for your kids and share your knowledge with them, by teaching them what you know about how to think, speak and act. Children will be more confident in their own abilities when they watch their parents succeed. This also includes the willingness to learn. When children see that their parents are excited about them learning, they will be too.

10.    Teach them to live with setbacks

Life is a challenge and every child will have to learn to live with disappointment at some point. It is important for parents to teach their kids that setbacks are a major part of every road to success and that these experiences will increase resilience.

11.  Praise courage to take on challenges

It’s important to applaud children when they take the initiative to try something new. Whether they want to go on their first roller coaster ride or learn a new language, comfort is always helpful to conquer a new challenge.

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What thoughts spring to your mind at the mention of the word “childhood”? Most people likely conjure memories from their elementary school days – lemonade stands, swimming at the community pool, and playground dates. Perhaps the memories aren’t quite as fond, and the mention of the term “childhood” brings back moments that are best left in the past. For better or worse, the idea of childhood more often than not invokes memories of our earliest days.

We frequently forget the significance of childhood in shaping the course of our lives – the lessons we learn, the habits we pick up, etc. The childhood years are our formative years, the time in which we lay the foundation for all that is to follow.

One of the major factors in building this foundation is our interactions with the significant adults in our lives. Whether it’s a parent or coach, a teacher or religious leader, or some other community member entirely, many people can identify at least one adult that has played an important role in helping them to grow and succeed. These mentors provide knowledge and support, guiding us and instilling in us the wisdom that they have gained over the course of their lives.

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It’s no coincidence that most successful individuals are able to point to at least one significant adult from their childhood. This is because regardless of environmental and biological factors, having a stable and dependable relationship with an adult is the single most important factor in the nurturing of successful children. Understanding the impact of these types of relationships, as well as the other scientific data surrounding the concept of resilience, will allow us to improve the way we care for our kids and help them fulfill their maximum potential.

What is Resilience?

But what is resilience? Essentially, resilience is the quality that enables us to adapt to and overcome adverse conditions in our lives. Though it is built up over time, the development of resilience begins during the formative years. It is this time that has the greatest effect on an individual’s resilience as an adult, though it can and does continue to change as we get older.

Though an unfortunately large number of children experience significant adversity ranging from domestic violence to poverty to parents suffering from mental illness, a portion of them experience fewer lasting harmful effects than others. This ability to excel despite early trauma is the result of resilience, and understanding why some are more affected by others will allow us to help a larger number of children succeed.

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Resilience can be pictured as a seesaw or scale, with negative outcomes on one side and positive outcomes on the other. The fulcrum’s position is determined by genetic and biological factors, and this predisposes individuals towards either positive or negative outcomes. However, the fulcrum can be moved. Life experiences both help to tip the scale in one direction or another – positive, affirming incidents lead to positive outcomes, and vice versa – and move the fulcrum. Essentially, the accumulation of life experiences can actually shift a child’s mental and physical disposition, making him or her more inclined towards a certain outcome.

The Most Important Factors in Buliding Resilience

While the most important factor in building resilience is the existence of a safe and reliable relationship with adults, other factors are also at play. Safe communities, skilled caregivers, and nutritious food are all examples of outside issues that play an important role in creating a healthy environment for kids. Additionally, because resilience is about the interaction of environmental, biological, and genetic factors, some children are naturally and inherently more able to cope with hardship than some of their peers.

Resilience can be seen in how the body responds to experiences throughout development, with specific biological factors, including variations in gene sequencing and expression, as well as mechanisms in the brain, playing a major role. Some genes result in protein production in the brain that can exaggerate or mitigate the effects of adversity, and some genes are more sensitive to environmental influences that can affect how people respond to stressful situations. Similarly, differences in how brain chemicals activate and how the brain’s fear and reward systems operate can change how individuals deal with those around them and build traits that allow them to increase capacity for coping.

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Despite the influence of genes and biology, however, there is no “resilience gene”, and overcoming adverse situations is not merely about an individual’s motivation to succeed. The single most important factor is still positive relationships with surrounding adults, as these adults provide the response and protection that can mitigate disruptions to healthy development and help children to build the skills they need to do well, such as the ability to focus, solve problems, and adjust to new and unexpected circumstances. Such capabilities help to move the metaphorical fulcrum, making it easier for positive outcomes to occur.

Understanding the science behind resilience will allow us to reach out to the children that most need our help and increase the amount of individuals who are able to meet their full potential. This in turn will decrease the amount of violence and crime in our society, as a large portion of incarcerated individuals grew up amidst overwhelming challenges. We must change policy to fit the science and needs of our underprivileged – those like social welfare policies that remove children from toxic environments rather than working to restore relationships, and character education programs that don’t fit the circumstances – in order to improve the quality of individual lives and society.

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Many studies have provided evidence that Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs) have been linked to poor physical outcomes. However, there is very little research investigating the relationship between how adverse childhood experiences affect the development and behavior of a child. From a biological perspective, we know that the first five years after birth are marked by a rapid pace of child development and brain growth making this a critical time period of opportunity and vulnerability. So we may easily infer that adverse experiences would have a negative effect – but by how much of an effect? More specifically, how much would experiences such as – physical, sexual and psychological abuse and neglect, as well as household abuse, mental illness, violence and incarceration – negatively impact the behavior and academic success of a child?

Adverse Childhood Experiences Study

Pediatrician Manuel E. Jimenez of the Rutgers Robert Wood Johnson Medical School and his colleagues recognize the importance of how a good living environment establishes the foundation for a child to succeed. Hence, they wished to implement a study that would correlate adverse experiences in early childhood with poor academic, literacy and behavioral outcomes in kindergarten. They decided to evaluate the results at the age of kindergarten as it had already been shown that academic skills and behavior at that time point are strong predictors of educational trajectory.

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What Jimenez and his team conducted is a secondary analysis of data from the Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing Study (FFCWS). The FFCWS birth cohort consists of nearly 5000 children born between 1998 and 2000 in 20 large US cities. Children in the FFCWS study were mostly born in unmarried parents. The data set includes postpartum interviews with the parents and follow-up interviews at ages 1, 3, 5 and 9 years after the child’s birth. In Jimenez’s study, his team sampled 1007 children from the FFCWS and obtained the teacher-reported outcomes as well as primary caregiver-report information 5 years after the children were born. All reports and evaluations recognized the 8 ACE exposures as defined by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and Kaiser Permanente health maintenance organization ACE study. The teachers were asked to rate the children on a 5 point scale from, “far below average,” to “far above average,” in literacy, science, social studies and math. Similarly the teachers were also asked to describe the child’s classroom behavior by using questions from a checklist and describing if the behavior was, “not true,” “somewhat or sometimes true,” or “very or often true.”

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The results were clear. 55% of the children had one ACE while 12% had experienced 3 or more. Despite adjusting for confounding variables, a logistic regression displayed a general pattern of worsening in academic, literacy and behavior outcomes with more ACEs. The average number of ACEs for children with poor outcomes was 1.2-1.54 compared to those without, at 0.92-0.97. Children with more than 3 ACEs were often far below average academically and far above average for attention problems, social problems, and aggression.

The Study Cannot Establish Causality

Despite the convincing evidence, this study can only illustrate strong links between ACEs and poor kindergarten outcomes that place children at elevated risk for poor educational achievement and subsequent health difficulties. It cannot establish causality. This is because there are numerous confounders or lurking variables that affect a child’s behavior and success other than ACEs. These include if the child is from a urban or rural environment, who the child’s friends are and how successful are his or her parents. Furthermore, in the FFCWS data set, it is the parents that retrospectively describe what ACEs the children have faced. This method of data reporting is subject to bias as it is impossible to be absolutely sure if the number of ACEs for a given child is accurately reported. The study by Jimenez and his team can be better supported by future research that correct for these variables which is generally difficult to do with a secondary analysis study.

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My take-away from this study is the need for integrated cross-sector approaches to enhance the development of vulnerable children. This would involve a method of early identification of children who have had an ACE or are living in a household where they are highly susceptible to ACEs. In order for this to occur, teachers need to be trained to identify early patterns of behavior of children who have had an ACE. Furthermore, it is important to strengthen the relationship between teachers and caregivers so that  teachers can better understand the lives of their students outside of the classroom. If a child has already been exposed to an ACE, and the teacher can successfully identify it, the teacher can then give that child increased attention and implement student-specific techniques to expedite academic and behavioral progress.

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We live in a world that revolves around technology and social media, and through this media, ideal body types have set near-impossible standards of health and beauty. People, particularly youth, have gone to extraneous measures in attempts to attain these standards, and have developed unhealthy approaches to their bodies. We are aware that unrealistic body standards are widely expressed through social media and television, but are these standards affecting kids at younger ages than expected?

A recent study released by the Common Sense group found that children, at ages as young as three years, have developed a negative mindset with regards to body image. Children begin to develop such attitudes towards ideal body types by subconsciously choosing to play with thin playmates, and generally having more positive attitudes towards ‘thin’ ideals, and denoting negative stereotypes to those of a thicker build.

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What Causes This?

Research found that the biggest factors that contributed to this mindset at such an early age were parents, peers, and to some extent, media. The role of parents in early childhood development should not be underestimated, as although this role may be positive in many ways, in situations such as this, parents may be instilling an unhealthy habit/mindset in their children, without even realizing it.

Ana Homayoun, an author who is well versed on the matter, says that these type of acts are “certainly not intentional, and that needs to be clear”. She says that things as simple as a mom saying a clothing article doesn’t look good on her for some reason or another could be teaching her daughter the basis of body image struggles. Parents could be unintentionally teaching their children that they should aspire for a certain body type, by saying things like, “I’ve gained weight, I should really work towards losing some”. Although this may appear to be encouraging a healthy lifestyle in which the parent is encouraging a lifestyle of exercise and healthy eating, to the child it only appears as though the parent is not content with their body, and so they begin to think the same thing.

Things like toys and role models for children at a young age also often set unreasonable body standards, and cause children to compare themselves to fictional characters. Barbie has struck news outlets for years for portraying a body type that is not only unrealistic, but encourages an unhealthy thin body image, but many fail to realize that boys experience just as much criticism.  Many toy action figures and superheroes have body types and measurements that are much out of the ordinary and near-impossible to attain, hence adding to the unrealistic standards that children are forced to live up to at an early age.

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At school, other children may resort to calling some children “fat” or “obese”, mainly due to their body type and the stereotypes they’ve learned to associate with people of these appearances. The victims of such name-calling then quickly begin to think that they are different from other children, and not for a good reason. This may cause them to make drastic changes in their lifestyles to alter their appearances, and to begin to taunt other children, including peers and siblings, about similar issues.

Fat and thin are no longer simply assessments of size or weight, but rather of character. So you can imagine why adoption of these attitudes, diet talk and disordered behavior is happening earlier as well, says Dr. Robyn Silverman

Many children also spend substantive amounts of time in childcare or nurseries, providing them with ample exposure to instructors, other parents, as well as other children. Each of these sources may hold their own perception of body-imagery, and unknowingly, pass them onto the child.

What Can We Do to Prevent This?

It may be difficult, if not impossible, to completely prevent your children from being exposed to any type of negative body image representation, however, it is possible to teach them to love and care for their body in a positive manner. By teaching self-love and appreciation, children can learn to care for their bodies. They will also learn to take negative comments and criticisms and fuel them into positive thoughts.

One possible method of addressing this issue, for children nearing their teenage years, can be to initiate a club or group gathering meant to dissipate the stigma surrounding body image issues, and to help the children feel welcome and comfortable discussing their problems and questions. By making the children feel welcome and comfortable in a safe environment, they are being encouraged to develop a more positive attitude.

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An important, and perhaps the most important, step in helping prevent negative body standards in children is to stop talking about food in moral terms. Any time the words ‘bad’ or ‘good’ are associated with food or eating, children quickly begin to associate them with body image and what it means to have a ‘good’ body versus a ‘bad’.
Most importantly, teach your children positive ideals on equality and acceptance, and teach them not to discriminate against anyone. Acceptance and appreciation for diversity is an important moral to instill in children in the early stages of their lives, and it will help them develop into more open-minded people as they grow up.

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