Teaching Your Daughter Self-Confidence
Teaching your daughter how to gain confidence is something that not every parent pulls off effectively. Why is this? Is it because most parents don’t care about how their children feel? Not at all. It’s because the variance of personalities your child can occupy, and the means in which you can help them with this are both wide and limited at the same time. What may have worked for you in childhood may not work now, and no matter your best intentions you may find this quite challenging. However, the world is better with more self-confident women with self-respect, and helping your child develop this in their teenage years is perhaps one of the most important things a parent can do.
For that reason, considering the following approaches to help your child flourish and act as their best selves could be considered a truly wonderful thing to prioritize. We hope these tips help you through and through:
Goal Setting
Goal setting can be an appropriate method of helping your daughter feel that she has autonomy and self-confidence. This also helps you nip that old poison flower in the bud immediately. What poison flower are we talking about? Well, too many women feel that the main thing they have to offer the world is their appearance. While that’s of course the opposite of the truth, it can be an impression hard to shake. Children with narcissistic or insecure mothers, or perhaps a less-than-supportive peer group at school can often be left with this impression, and that’s an absolute tragedy.
Ensuring your child finds something they are good at, no matter how long it takes, can help them realize the value in their competence, and that they always have something to offer. A small, humble attitude to goal setting can help them fall in love with achievement that means something to them, be that becoming versed in history at an extra-curricular history club, or perhaps applying for the hockey team at school can help them feel good at something. It’s important children to feel good at something. With goal setting, you can make that a reality.
Fashion & Accessories
This heading might seem counter to our previous point, that your daughter should never focus on their appearance as the only thing they have to offer other people. You’d be right to be concerned, it means your priorities are in the best place. However, while your daughter should never feel like she has to impress people, she should feel confident in wearing clothing, and comfortable in her skin. Allowing her to develop a natural (but never forced,) interest in fashion, or simply the clothing they most enjoy wearing can help them begin to develop a healthy self-image, especially in those pubertal teenage years. You may decide to allow them to get their ears pierced, and buy ear piercings online that they most fall in love with, helping them express their personality in a manner verified by you. A too conservative mother can be damaging when it comes to self image, but an overly expressive mother can reduce a girl’s self-worth to nothing. It’s a balancing act, but if you’re reading this blog with care, you absolutely have your perspective calibrated correctly and should have no trouble with this.
Comparison
One of the most important attitudes you can teach any child is that they are only to compare themselves to themselves, no one else. This can be hard to do in those insecure teenage years, but as a parent it’s good to continually express to them. The only person we have to compare ourselves to is the person we were yesterday. This can help your teenage daughter begin to realize, or at least familiarize herself with the idea that becoming self-empowered means caring for yourself, your opinion on things, the way you choose to act and improve. It can help them build confidence, because a grain of confidence given to yourself is better than ten tonnes of it verified by other people.
This can help them at least begin to start their later schooling years with less interest as to who’s wearing what or who has that boyfriend, as they begin to realize that only following things that make them happy and sustained is the real priority they can be focused on. They’re never sure to completely adopt this attitude, and shouldn’t be expected to become perfect thanks to your wisdom. However, a little pep talk in this vein and encouraging them in every good thing they do can really help a child blossom in the right direction.
With this advice, and of couses the care and consideration you apply at your discretion, your daughter is sure to build self-confidence in the right way through her teenage years.