Instilling Self confidence in Kids

Here is a practical way of how you can instil self-confidence in your children:

self-confidence

Make Them Think

Kids love to learn new things and believe it or not, they enjoy challenges as well. Provide ideas that can spark your child’s imagination and then follow up to help them through the process. Here are just a couple of ideas:

Provide riddles or puzzles for them to solve. These can range from a simple open-ended question that sparks creative thought to more standard brain-teasers like Sudoku or board games.

Introduce them to books that ask questions or add new topics and adventures. This will allow them to expand their knowledge and fantasize about faraway places or experiences.

Work together to solve problems, but let them take the lead. Working together with your child to solve a riddle, or performing a task around the house can build self-confidence and allow them to be a superstar in your eyes.

Focus and concentration is a known benefit of kid’s martial arts classes. From the most basic of forms to more complex moves, kids get “in the zone” and this practice expands to other areas of their life, both at home and in school.

Engage Them Socially

Let’s face it; today’s kids spend more of their time in front of a TV or smartphone screen that we would like.  Getting children socially active can help prevent them from becoming withdrawn and can build self-confidence among others in their age group and even with adults as well. Here are some suggestions:

Hold an adult party, or maybe a barbecue, and ask the kids to help. They can answer the door, take coats, introduce guests as they arrive and even help serve (non-alcoholic) beverages and food. Interacting with adults can help them relate to an older age group and expand their horizons.

Have them host their own party. Have them plan, send out invitations, shop for food and supplies, prepare for guests and run the whole show. This will teach planning and make them big shots in the eyes of their friends. 

What could possibly build more confidence than that?

Have them take a class, maybe martial arts, swimming or other physical or craft-oriented education. This will help keep them active and away from the computer or TV while teaching them life skills.

Is there a greater social experience than a martial arts class for kids? Kids learn to work together and help each other improve, while learning to interact with adults in a respectful way, helping them fit in with the other respectful kids! Parents of martial arts students are pleasantly surprised to find out that this becomes an engaging social experience for them as well, as friendships and bonds are made with other parents along for the kid’s martial arts journey!

Have Them Help

Kids like feeling as though they are making a difference. Helping others is a great way to give them this sort of satisfaction. Asking kids to contribute will allow them to see that tasks require effort and thinking, and will prepare them for larger tasks ahead. Here are a couple of ways that kids can help:

Help around the house - this will give them self-confidence by contributing to a safe, clean place to live while working with their parents in a team effort.

Take them on a visit to a senior citizen home. This will allow youngsters to see how adults live when they get older and is an excellent venue for adult praise to be lavished on the kids.

Volunteering at the local animal shelter - kids love animals, and animals love kids. Caring for a shelter animal will build both a sense of responsibility and sense of self-confidence. Just be prepared when your child wants to bring that puppy home with them!

Let Them Pursue Their interests

Kids want to be emotionally attached to what they do. Letting kids independently pursue their own interests is a great way to let them explore for themselves and build a bond with what they are doing. Don't be tempted to force them into what you think they should like, let them develop their own preferences. However, a little parental guidance may be needed if their ideas get too outrageous or dangerous.

Kids love superheroes in action movies. It is very rare that a child does not express an interest in training to learn cool moves like a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle or a Power Ranger! However, something magical happens as their martial arts journey progresses: the goal of achieving a higher belt and eventually becoming a black belt instils goal-setting skills that many other athletic activities do not. Just ask the parent of any martial arts student!

Don’t Overpraise

We like to praise our children when they do well, but this can sometimes go too far. Self-confidence takes time, and when parents shower praise on their kids for every little thing, they can set the bar too low and keep the child from pushing to do better. Praise when something great happens, but save your praise for that special occasion.

Let Them Make the Decisions

Kids feel empowered when they are put in charge. Giving them the opportunity to make their own decisions helps them build self-confidence and good judgment. However, be sure they know the limits and provide them with multiple choices. Here are a couple of examples:

Let them choose between couples of lunch options on school days.

Once they recognize the difference between warm and cold weather, let them make decisions on how warm to dress. (You’ll be surprised how quickly they opt for the warm clothes on cold days!)

Let them, within reason; choose their wardrobe, hair style, and bedroom decorations

Stand Back

We are all familiar with the stereotypical “helicopter parent.” Keeping too close of a watch on your kids can stifle their creativity and sense of independence. Let them take a few risks. Let them be on their own a little.  Here are a couple of things you can try:

    Encourage them to read a book or solve a puzzle on their own.

    Let them stay at a friend’s house overnight or for the weekend.

    Give them a "longer leash" on the playground or the nature trail.

Be Calm & Confident

Children watch their parents much more closely than you would think, and they can pick up on their moods quite easily. Try to keep calm when things don't go as planned, or when the

Adults are having a tough time with parent-related issues. Maintain confidence in your, and your child's abilities. Here are a couple of ways to do this:

Don’t lose your temper when your child doesn’t perform up to your expectations. Encourage, rather than scold them, and calmly guide your child towards improvement.

Be confident in your own abilities to nurture your child. This confidence will come with experience and can also be built through reading books on parenting, or from simply speaking with other parents.

Don’t Rescue

Every child will have their up days and their down days. When things are going well, give praise when appropriate. When things aren't going so well, stand back a little and see if your child can work out the problem on their own. Providing them the opportunity to work through their trouble spots can enhance their problem-solving abilities, promote determination, and lead to greater self-confidence.

Why Should Learning is Fun?

Learning can and should be fun. This is not just a moral position, but a scientific one too.

Learning is Fun

When you learn a new thing, or get a surprise, there is a shot of a chemical messenger in your brain called dopamine. Dopamine is famous among neurosciences for its involvement in the reward and motivation systems of the brain.

Learning something new triggers a chemical release of the same kind as cocaine, albeit in a much more subtle manner. As methods of getting your kicks you can perhaps compare it to the difference between walking up a hill yourself or being strapped to a rocket and blasted up - slower, harder work, but a lot more sustainable and you’re in a better state to enjoy the view when you get there.

One of the many negative things about the misconception that education is about transmitting content is the idea that any fun you have is taking time away from proper learning, and that ‘proper learning’ shouldn’t be fun.

Rather than fun being a relief from learning, or a distraction from it, for most of our history, before school, learning had to be its own motivation. Brains that learnt well had more offspring, and so learning evolved to be rewarding.

In lots of teaching situations we focus on the right and wrong answers to things, which is a venerable paradigm for learning, but not the only one. There is a less structured, curiosity-driven, paradigm which focuses not on what is absolutely right or wrong, but instead on what is surprising. A problem with rights and wrongs is that, for some people, the pressure of being correct gets in the way of experiencing what actually is.

You can try this for yourself, either in any teaching you do, or any learning. Often we will get blocked at a particular stage in our learning. A normal response is to try harder, and to focus more on what we’re doing right, and what we’re doing wrong. Sometimes this helps, but sometimes it just digs us further into our rut. The way out of the rut is to re-focus on experiencing again.

I’ll give you an example from one of the two things I know best about teaching - aikido, the Japanese martial art. Aikido involves some quite intricate throws and grappling moves. Often a student is so intent on getting through the move, and on trying hard to get it right, that they become completely stuck, repeatedly doing something that doesn’t work, and usually too fast. Even if you say or show explicitly the correct movement, they can’t seem to get it. In this situation, one teaching technique that we can use is to tell the student to stop trying to do the move correctly, and instead do it deliberately wrong. “Try pushing over this way to the left”, I’ll say, “Now try the opposite over to the right. Now try high, or low. Which is easiest?” By removing the obligation to get the move correct I hope to give permission to the student to just experience the effect they are having on their partner’s balance. Once they can tune into this they can figure out for themselves what the right thing to do is, without me having to tell them.

However you do it, if you can get out of the rut of right and wrong you free up a natural capacity for experience-led, curiosity-driven learning. Soon you’ll be flying along again, experiencing the learning equivalent of the jogger’s high, and all thanks to that chemical messenger dopamine and a brain that’s evolved to find things out for itself, and feel good while doing it.

Ways to Make Learning Fun for Different Age Levels

Early Childhood Education:

Young children learn best when they are having a good time in a safe environment. Play-based learning is crucial at a young age. Learning through games allows young children to build critical skills in areas such as math and reading while not even realizing they are actively learning. Even so, learning through fun activities, active play, and games breeds positive attitudes towards learning and school.

In addition to learning basic academic skills, young children will also develop social and emotional skills through sharing and cooperating with other children during these activities. Some activities that you can incorporate into learning include rhyming games, singing songs, alphabet blocks or magnets, drawing/painting/play dough/colouring, counting games, math manipulative, sorting objects, etc.

Elementary Grades:

There are lots of opportunities to make learning fun in the elementary classroom - for all subject areas. With the advancement of classroom technology, there are tons of resources to help get students actively participating and enjoying learning. By including hands-on activities in formats such as learning stations, cooperative learning groups, centres’, and think-pair-share, students can actively participate in groups to learn, solve problems, and have fun.

Incorporating technology into the classroom also provides a myriad of ways to make learning fun for students. Using iPads, computers, or SMART Boards allows for learning to become hands-on and game-like. Virtual field trips, classroom apps, and technology to motivate reading and learning games are all great ways for students to actively learn while having fun.

High School Students:

Learning at this age can quickly become difficult, boring, and tedious if not enough effort is put into making learning active, engaging, and fun. There is no reason that more difficult material can’t be taught in fun ways. It just takes a little bit more creativity.

Teenagers still enjoy a good game, group project, or problem-based learning activity that allows them to participate actively and changes up the lecture-based learning atmosphere. For instance, you can make test review fun by utilizing games like jeopardy, trivial pursuit, sink or swim, or head of the class. Teenagers love competition, and this is an excellent way to get students excited about reviewing valuable content.

Science Classroom

The science classroom offers lots of great hands-on learning opportunities to engage older students. Exciting experiments can be done everywhere from inside the school lab to outside on the school grounds keeps learning fun. Math can be made more enjoyable by having students actively solve problems by creating real-life learning situations, or by having students solve equations of everyday objects or situations.

English and Social Studies

English and social studies courses can incorporate technology, group projects, role-playing, guest speakers, presentations, etc. For instance, have students conduct a Shakespeare play, re-enact historical events, or have students research and prepare for a debate.

Are your Children prepared to Face Life with Easy

Leadership has become the buzzword of corporate boardrooms, political back-rooms, and educational halls. Often, success is limited to those who can inspire their associates, employees, customers, and the public with his or her ideas and drive.

Leadership

Unfortunately, the ability to lead, though highly desirable, is often elusive, as evidenced by the thousands of articles, books, videos, and training classes available over the Internet dealing with the subject. Whether leaders are born or trained remains a subject of controversy. However, there is no dispute that all leaders share certain skills that can be identified and developed.

The paths we follow as adults are generally determined by the abilities and interests we develop as children. While there are exceptions, the vast majority of people have established characters and personalities by the time they are age seven. As a parent or as a teacher, this means you have the ability to help your children develop critical, advantageous skills.

Critical Skills to Teach Your Children

As parents, we influence our children by what we do and don’t do what we value and ignore how we spend our time with our children, and the interests and activities we encourage. A number of skills can be introduced to children as part of their normal everyday activities, and will serve them well for the rest of their lives.

1. Reading & Writing

Reading and writing builds vocabularies, instills logical and expressive thinking, enhances listening skills, and consequently encourages empathy and sympathy, which are crucial attributes of leadership.

Reading

Strong reading and writing skills are essential to life in the 21st century. The foundation for lifelong reading begins with oral reading to your children, which introduces new ideas and initiates curiosity and creativity. Reading stimulates the brain and is more neurobiological demanding than passive activities like watching television and listening to the radio.  When you read, you have more time to think. Reading gives you a unique pause button for comprehension and insight.”

Writing

 The act of putting thoughts down on paper enhances self-expression and nurtures individuality. Some experts believe that writing encourages the learning of math and science concepts by “enhancing the brain’s intake, processing, retaining, and retrieving of information.”

Teaching your children to love reading and encouraging writing skills is a gift they will enjoy and cherish for the rest of their lives, and is one that will benefit them in any chosen career. The ability to succinctly and clearly collect one’s thoughts and summarize them into an interesting, persuasive narrative is a skill that many want, but few possess. You can give your child a real advantage in the trials and competitions he or she will face as an adult by encouraging reading and writing.

2. Communication

As the world has grown more interconnected and interdependent, the ability to exchange thoughts, feelings, and information is critical. Effective communication skills on an individual as well as a group basis enable your child to more easily achieve the things he or she wants from life. Despite the obvious advantages of this skill, however, few parents and teachers actively encourage good communication skills, particularly ones that are useful when speaking to groups or public audiences.

However, there are several fairly simple things parents and teachers can do to help their children become good communicators:

Encourage Proper Pronunciation. Words convey meanings and paint verbal pictures. Mispronouncing words, particularly common words that are often mispronounced, creates false impressions and is harmful to your child’s image.

Build Their Vocabulary. The average adult knows approximately 20,000 words out of approximately 470,000 English entries in “Webster’s Third New International Dictionary, Unabridged,” but uses only about 3,000 daily in conversations. The more words your child knows and understands, the better he or she will be able to communicate with others. Reading aloud and encouraging the use of a thesaurus are good ways to improve vocabulary for children.

Teach Them to Speak in Front of Others. Many people develop a fear of standing in front of a group and speaking, even though most children like being the center of attention. Developing an early ability to speak in front of others is an asset that pays benefits throughout one’s life.

3. Bilingualism

Learning a second language at an early age provides multiple benefits, including a physical increase in the density of gray matter in the brain. Gray matter density is associated with language, memory, and attention.

Dr. Andrea Mechelli and her colleagues at London’s Welcome Department of Imaging Neuroscience discovered in a 2004 study that the “structure of the human brain is altered by the experience of acquiring a second language.” Other academic studies have reinforced the fact that bilingual children consistently outperform their peers who speak a single language in tests of comprehension, mental sophistication, and mental dexterity.

In an age where the world is flat, the ability to converse with people in other lands in their own native language, particularly where products are manufactured or sold brings tremendous professional and social opportunities not open to a person limited to English. And, best of all, introducing your child to another language is easy and it’s just as easy for them to learn due to their greater neural and linguistic “plasticity.”

4. Physical Confidence

The benefits of physical activities for children have been known for ages. The development of gross and fine muscles to perform everyday activities, the positive impact upon possible obesity in later years, and the mental stimulus provided by exercise have been found in one study after another. Most experts recommend that children spend a minimum of 60 minutes a day in vigorous play and exercise, and no more than two hours daily, if at all, watching television or engaged in computer games, the Internet, and other electronic media.

How talented your children are at sports is far less important than simply getting out and participating in the ones they like. Parents  and teachers should encourage  kids to play a variety of different organized sports and games, some which focus on individual achievement like golf, tennis, and swimming, and others requiring team efforts like baseball, basketball, volleyball, and soccer.

Golf and tennis are two sports that can be continued and enjoyed throughout life, providing both physical benefits and regular social interaction. Also, both are conducive to later business careers.

 Playing either sport well invariably leads to invitations to “play with the boss,” and thus makes an invaluable connection.

5. Musical Intelligence

While music has been long recognized as an emotional experience, we still don’t know how the sounds are processed in the brain or why music stays in our memories for so long. However, we do know that listening to music or learning to play a musical instrument is helpful in treating children who have experienced physical trauma, have difficulties in regulating their emotions or behavior, or suffer poor concentration.

Dr. Gordon Shaw, Professor Emeritus at the University of California, San Diego, described music as a “window into higher brain function,” and is particularly important during the first five years of life.

Studies of the effects of music on preschoolers through college have revealed several trends:

Involvement in music and movement activities helps children develop good social and emotional skills. Even a single year’s worth of music lessons can have lasting effects on brain functions.

Listening to music, taking musical lessons, or playing an instrument can reduce stress and depression.  Introduce your children to the joy of music early so they can appreciate it for the rest of their lives.

Final Word

As parents and teachers, we seek to give our children the tools to gain happiness and success, but we never know for sure whether we’re doing enough or too much. We wonder how to protect them while we prepare for the time when we won’t be around. We may not be able to prepare the future for our children, but we can at least prepare our children for the future.