Richard Hogan: What is confidence and how do you instil confidence in a child?

Richard Hogan: "As the cliché goes, life is short, and if we are not going to see what we are capable of and, instead, live a small, frightened existence, we are giving away the miracle of life, that one in 400 quadrillion! So, helping our children to be more confident is an important gift for life." Picture: Moya Nolan.

What is confidence? What makes one child more confident than another? Is it a genetic code or way of viewing the world, or maybe a combination of both? We know it when we see it, and we certainly know it when we don’t see it in a child.

So, how can we instil it in those important middle years of childhood development and maturation? The years between six and 12 are vitally important, because that is when we develop the story we tell ourselves about who we are and what we are capable of.

That story can either be a narrative that sets us up for success or failure. I often meet middle-aged clients who are frightened to go for things, because they are fearful they will meet rejection or they don’t believe they have the capacity to be anything else than what they currently are.

Put simply, they lack the confidence and courage to go for what they truly want. When I explore it with them, I hear the same old story of negative childhood experiences: Being bullied, coaches putting them down, parents labelling them, teachers launching negative comments about their ability, siblings constantly belittling them, etc. It’s an exhaustive litany of negative experiences that has permeated their soul.

Those experiences are long gone. Those people who said terrible things are not even in the rearview mirror; they are so far behind, and yet they are right there in front of them, holding them back and making them fearful.

The destructive comments still resound in their ear: ‘You can’t do that’; ‘Who do you think you are?’; ‘That’s for good people, not you’; ‘You’ll get found out when you go for it and don’t get it!’

I can almost hear the moment the self-limiting belief metastasised and spread out to envelope their entire world view.

No child is born with the belief that they can’t do things or that they are not capable; we teach our children these ideas through their engagement with friends and family and the feedback they receive from their community in those important middle years.

As the cliché goes, life is short, and if we are not going to see what we are capable of and, instead, live a small, frightened existence, we are giving away the miracle of life, that one in 400 quadrillion! So, helping our children to be more confident is an important gift for life.

Children who are confident enjoy life more. They are not frightened to go for things, they are open to experience, meeting new people, and learning new skills. They don’t crumble when things get tough. Confidence is as important as competence.

When you are confident, you have a fundamental belief system that will push you to thrive in life. You go for things with the understanding that you don’t always get them. This is such an important idea to develop in your child when you are trying to build their confidence.

Richard Hogan: "Last summer, I signed my youngest daughter up for GAA. Her older sister loves it, and so I joined her up. She told me she didn’t think she would be any good at it."

We don’t always get what we want. I’m constantly trying to teach this to my children by showing them moments when I went for something and didn’t get it and yet learned from the experience and went again. Children who are overly praised and believe they should get everything they go for struggle and often pull away from competition.

Overpraise can be destructive for a child’s confidence. You would think that praising your child is doing the right thing, of course it is, but if it’s overdone and excessive, your child can become fearful of not achieving and not making their parents proud.

It is important to praise, but not excessively. I had a teenage client once tell me she didn’t want to try out for the school choir because her parents were always telling her how incredible her voice was. She rolled her eyes as she said it, and then said, ‘If I don’t get it, I think it would devastate them’.

How we talk about our children really matters for their confidence. If we want to change how our children talk to themselves, we must first change how we talk about them when we think they are not listening.

They are always listening and looking for confirmation bias about what we hold as truths about them. Those labels we often launch — ‘lazy’ ‘bright’ ‘sporty’, etc — reduce our children and write their future self.

BY speaking more positively about them, and moving away from labels and not joining them when they try to shrink their lives, we can increase their sense of self and confidence.

Last summer, I signed my youngest daughter up for GAA. Her older sister loves it, and so I joined her up. She told me she didn’t think she would be any good at it.

She didn’t want to do it, and as it got closer to the day, she used every tactic she could think of to get out of it.

But I told her, ‘We give things a go first, and then we make a decision. We don’t not go, we try first’. On the way down, she was making any bargain she could to turn back.

An hour later, she was coming out of the grounds with the biggest smile on her face. She loved it! I could tell her sense of self had dramatically increased in that moment.

We must never align with our children when they don’t push themselves. I could have turned the car around and said, ‘Okay, let’s not go and get a hot chocolate’.

I would have been the hero in that moment, but would have sent negative ripples down into her psyche that could last a lifetime. Confidence comes from experiences and internalising the feedback we receive in those important years.

Confidence is also formed in how parents talk about their children and how they push them to go for things, and teach them that we don’t always get what we want, but that doesn’t stop us from trying.