It’s crucial that we build our children’s confidence when it comes to learning. A child who believes in themselves and their ability to learn will be more likely to take risks, overcome obstacles, and persevere when things get tough. So what can you do to help your child?
1. Encourage Them To Take Risks
One of the best ways to help your child build their confidence is to encourage them to take risks. This doesn’t mean having them explore activities that are unsafe. What we mean is inspiring them to step outside their comfort zone and try new things. This could involve signing them up for a new activity after school that requires some time to learn the ropes – rock climbing, instruments and even sports are great examples to start with. Or, you could go simple by letting them lead the way on a hike.
For you as an adult, these may not appear as risks. However, for a child who has yet to explore what life has to offer, any new endeavour is both an exciting and unnerving experience.
What if I fall? What if I am bad at this? It’s not uncommon for your child to have such apprehensive thoughts, but isn’t that what taking risks is all about?
Risks can help stretch them both mentally and physically, making them more open to learning new skills. Should they succeed, celebrate their accomplishment and remind them of the marvel of what learning is all about.
And if the experience didn’t turn out how you imagined it, that’s okay – celebrate your child’s efforts for trying, so they don’t feel demoralised and unmotivated to try something new. This is also the perfect time to discuss what else they’ll like to explore, so you keep them engaged in the pursuit.
How does this play out in the classroom? Your child will be able to adjust to new subjects and curriculums more effectively, and be willing to try creative ways to grasp an enriching understanding of a topic.
2. Let Them Make Mistakes
Another important tip for helping your child build their confidence is to let them make mistakes. It’s natural for us as parents to protect our children from making them, but it’s actually an essential part of learning and growing.
Mistakes provide our children an opportunity to learn from them, which then increases their confidence in their abilities. One of the best ways to assure your child is to constantly remind them not to be afraid of making mistakes. This can help ease them when trying out a new activity or practising a skill, allowing them to focus better on the task at hand instead of feeling apprehensive.
In any academic setting, making mistakes is normal. Preparing your child to experience what it’s like to make them and how they can bounce back reminds them that this is part and parcel of the learning process. They’ll less likely develop a perfectionist mindset, welcome the experience of rectifying mistakes and feel more accomplished at the end of it all.
And as they go along, you’ll realise how much more confident they emerge.
3. Praise Their Efforts, Not Their Intelligence
When it comes to praising your child’s efforts in learning, it’s important not to praise their intelligence too much. This might seem counterintuitive, but research has shown that praising a child’s intelligence can actually lead them to feel less confident.
Even as we put the research aside, it’s easy to see why praising intelligence over efforts can cause more harm than good. This stems from the eventual comparisons your child makes with their peers, and to some extent, those that you make too.
When they learn that another classmate is smarter than them, they’ll feel less motivated to try harder as they’re more likely to equate intelligence with successful outcomes. They’ll also be more unwilling to take risks, as they may fear people’s perceptions of them when they fail.
Naturally, they’ll be afraid of making mistakes too.
So, give them that tap on the back for studying hard for a test or participating in a sport, for instance.
When you praise their efforts, you’re establishing in them the value of trying and doing their best, no matter what the result may be. This means they’ll celebrate the process more than the outcome, and eventually be more motivated to work towards the desired outcome, at a pace they’re comfortable with.
More importantly, they’ll learn and be more confident to accept their inadequacies.
That way, they can learn how to seek help when they need to without feeling fearful of what others may think of them. In other instances, they can channel their energy to finding new competencies in a more positive manner.
Build Your Child’s Confidence In Learning With MindChamps MindSpace
At MindChamps MindSpace, we focus on our students’ behavioural development and social skills to make learning a joyful and productive experience. The well-structured curriculums of our afterschool enrichment classes for both upper and lower primary students comprise the use of impactful pedagogies that facilitate active understanding, recall, storage and application. A core of this lies in teaching them how to learn.
We achieve this through empowering lesson plans that nurture the student’s interest and build their confidence in learning.
Book a visit to our centres to learn how your child can benefit from our after school care activities!