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

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

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.