14 Simple Ways to Build Confidence in Children
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As can be seen, without trust we cannot educate and, furthermore, there are no magic recipes, just common sense and the desire to give oneself to children. Confidence is not imposed, it is inspired. And it can only be inspired by a homey, familiar, happy environment... Trust is a matter of time and it is the key to entering your child's world. We can only know someone when we "spend time" living with that someone.
1. Enter their world
If we take children seriously, why not enter their world and see it through their eyes? This does not mean that we identify with him, it is simply as if we "put ourselves in his shoes" and see the world from there. Sometimes this can change us, not only the idea we had of the child, but even the world we lived from our perspective. This exercise is very rich in consequences, if for him a certain issue at recess or with a teacher or with a classmate or with any other topic, it is very important that he will feel not only heard but understood, cared for. It is an issue as important as a professional issue with your boss or with your CEO, just as important! And it goes without saying that when we have an issue of this nature and decide to tell our husband or wife about it, we always expect from the other party a lot of attention and interest and even few interruptions. The same thing happens to our children. This will be reinforced if you share games, hobbies, etc.
If to talk to them we wait for great, serious and important moments to arrive, our lives will go by without knowing that we have wasted great moments of small conversations. In adolescence this will be our great lever to guide our son, but it is not necessary to wait until then. Friendship is lived in a certain gratuitousness. However, almost all of us start by asking for friendship. And very few begin by offering friendship.
2. Ask them things
From time to time, just as they do, ask them about things, alone, related to your work or some decisions you have to make, you will be surprised by their judgment and discretion. They will understand it as a confidence, which, as you know, is the basis of all good friendships. It is a bit embarrassing to make them participate in certain things because we think that they will not find out what you are saying and it will be a waste of time. Ask them for their judgment and advice, sincerely, on a certain matter. Man, they are not experts it is true, but they are not stupid, they will surprise you with their answers and sometimes they will be very creative solutions, which you alone or with another adult, would never have arrived at. This helps you reciprocally to get to know and value each other better, surely your children will want to do the same after a few days.
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3. Always think that you are responsible
If you always think they are responsible, they will respond better with their freedom than if you show them distrust. In addition, as with trust, distrust is noticeable, it is perceived whether or not there is complicity, proximity, in a word, that you do not trust them. It is always better to run the risk that at some point they can deceive us, than to think that their parents do not trust them. When a child tells us something, it must have more credibility than a notarial act for us. Trust breeds trust. In this there is no middle ground or you give them credibility or you don't, that is, said a bit simplified, if you do not trust, you can end up becoming a police officer for your children, and you can end up prying into their pants, agendas , etc. Truth that produces embarrassment just thinking about it!
4. Honesty in the answers to your questions
Sometimes, to get rid of a problem, at the insistence of our children on a certain matter, we tell them that we will comply with their wishes later, but without being sure if we can do it and, other times, being sure that we cannot. This ends up undermining the trust that our children had in us. At other times we feel afraid of the truth or of saying what we think, they already know how you think, even if it costs, it is always better to have the courage to say what we think. And if we have doubts, express our doubts too, it's honest.
Regardless of the age of the children, they deserve an honest answer. Honesty strengthens your sense of trust. If we don't answer our children's questions honestly, they will create their own fictitious answers. And worst of all, we have taught them to lie without meaning to.
5. Have a certain intimacy with each child
10 minutes every 15 days is not much and yet it is very difficult to live it. Can we suddenly answer what worries each of our children now? Take the test with one of them, write on a piece of paper what you think is worrying him at the moment and then ask him. Do it naturally, but you can be alone and you can enjoy a certain privacy. And then compare the result. It's very interesting!
Although as a good mother or father you know that faces say it all, and that it is not necessary to ask them, however, there are times that some things are not reflected in the face. It's best we don't take things for granted when it comes to getting to know my children.
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I remember once a father told me about his six-year-old daughter who told him that she was going to marry a boy she had met on the school route. This father took her to her living room, closed the door and began to listen to her as if the girl who was 8 years old at the time was 25 years old and to ask her what the wedding would be like, who she would invite and much more. Her daughter followed the conversation with all seriousness, and naturally, without being able to answer all the questions, naturally everything ended in that, but since then and in the opinion of this man's daughter, it helped her to tell him other kinds of things later on.
6. Know how to apologize
If we know that we are not always right, or if we have not paid attention to them or simply have not respected them, why not ask for their forgiveness? When that does us and them a great good. In addition, it reinforces our authority and influence with our children. Sometimes guided by anger we can exceed ourselves, in others it may be because we simply made a mistake in a judgment about something, etc. In the family, as we well know, we all learn.
On other occasions when we correct them, perhaps (not without reason) we yell at them or we do not respect them, then we have to apologize for yelling at them, although naturally we continue to punish them.
7. Listen not hear
How many times do we listen to our children while we are folding laundry, preparing for a meeting the next day or pushing the shopping cart in a supermarket? Although these situations are understandable, it is important that we take time to give our children our full attention.
We already know that who knows how to listen knows how to communicate. Hearing consists more or less of capturing sound vibrations. Listening is making sense of what we hear, it is an act of the will. In other words, to listen you have to know how to stop, stop, control yourself. It takes practice and it's not easy. Not interrupting is a good way to start. Interrupting, sometimes, is wanting to be the center of communication and that in one way or another is rejected by our children. (and for anyone)
As Machado said, to communicate well, first ask and then listen. Without a doubt, this is difficult, but it is a significant personal improvement. What else would love our children be?
Listening reveals great personal integrity. It means: "Forget what is ours and go out in the other's way", "Empty yourself to fill yourself with the other", "I value you, I take you into account." The behaviors of the parents that generate isolation and distrust in the children are usually: dogmatism, the tone of superiority, speaking without listening, and in general not considering the other.
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8. Patience
Sometimes it seems like little kids take forever to tell us what's on their mind. As adults, we feel the need to speed our children up by finishing their sentences and phrases before they do. Or they are starting to tell us something we don't like, so we interrupt them to correct them. If you try to resist that urge and patiently listen to our children, we allow them to think at their own speed, they learn to express themselves and mom or dad attends to you. Times will come in adolescence when we want to be told things, anyway, good or bad, but they won't tell us anything. However, if they learned from a young age, then it will be easier within the natural difficulty of adolescence.
9. Personal consistency
When we are with friends we have to be the same as when we are in the privacy of the family. Children do not make distinctions and it shocks them when you act differently than what they expected of you.
One cannot spend one's life “selling an image” with one's children, one is as one is. Because otherwise there may come a time when it is not known what his face is and what his "mask" is. To generate trust you have to be minimally predictable. We say more with what we do than with what we say. The word "hypocrite" designated in the ancient Greek world, the actor who assumed a foreign personality. His role was played in front of the public and he had the approval and applause of the gallery as the supreme rule of his performance. Coherence is the opposite, accepting misunderstandings, rather than allowing ruptures between what is lived and what is believed. Not being consistent is to change your behavior according to “what they will say or what is convenient”. We adjust our behavior according to the people in front of us. The Spanish proverb is very rich; "The truth and please together cannot be" or this other "more, eyes make than words." Finally, that other one who says "the empty pitchers are the ones that sound the most". Without a minimum of consistency, it is very difficult to gain the trust of children.
10 The Confidence
“Only through the work of confidence does man manage to achieve authentic friendship”, says Laín Entralgo. Basically, when I share my intimacy, I risk being rejected or questioned or not valued, that is, exposing ourselves to being hurt or wounded. That is the difficulty, among others, of confidentiality. Why? because we give away our vulnerability. Perhaps that is why it costs us.
Communication in a deep sense is when the person, because he wants, becomes "an open interiority". When one opens "wide" his interiority, he is in some way allowing himself to be inhabited by the other. Then confidentiality is shared and this seems to demand reciprocity and true in-depth harmony. This communication does not always happen, but when it happens it does not leave us indifferent, it has a certain power of change, there is a before and after each confidence.
It is necessary that the trustee and the confidant share the confidence. On the other hand, confidentiality is not sharing a secret.
11 Know how to correct them when they make mistakes
Your children, after correcting them, should leave wanting to improve, not humiliated or distressed and scared. Even if he is "cheeky" he should come out thinking that you trust him. We have to correct them because we love them and because when someone we love makes something ugly, we tell them, otherwise we don't love them, to go further, whoever doesn't correct becomes an accomplice in the mistake, and in that case we shouldn't lament the mistakes. mistakes and faults of our children.
But we must not forget that we are facing a problem, not our son. It is not about looking for culprits (correction in a negative way), because otherwise defensiveness will appear, in short, they will put more effort into justifying themselves than accepting what you say. Our son must WANT to improve his performance. The basic aspects for this to be so are: Focus on the problem and not on the person. Don't try to get your son to acknowledge his guilt. Where does that take us? And if he does, he's great he'll give cause for another conversation, but not right now. Listen openly and honestly. Emphasize that you need his help to solve the problem you both have. Use the ideas they offer you, whenever they are appropriate.
If we tell him that we are surprised by what he has done, because he is not like that, we are separating the person from what he does and assuming that we always trust him. And then ask him why it happened and how he comes up with the idea that we can settle this issue between the two of us.
12 Sincerity
If we want to be friends with our children we have to be worthy of their trust. Sincerity is based on the veracity of your words and actions.
To be honest, we must try to always tell the truth, this that seems so simple, sometimes is what costs the most work. We use «white lies» in circumstances that we qualify as of low importance, where we think that nothing is happening and of course it happens, we have lied! and when they discover us, even in a minor matter, it may happen that they lose confidence in us or we teach them to lie. Obviously, a small lie will lead to a bigger one and so on... until they surprise us and don't trust us.
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On other occasions it will be a small inconsistency, for example, it may happen that we tell our children that lying is not good, that we have to be truthful. A few hours later the phone rings and our son can pick it up, the same one that we had talked to him a few hours ago, they are also televising an important game in which you are very interested, your son tells you Dad is for you, so-and-so, in At that moment we can almost involuntarily say "tell him I'm not here" at that moment we generate a certain confusion in our son.
13 Keep what we promise
We all understand how irresponsible it is when someone doesn't keep what they promise, for example our children with their student work and grades. The normal thing is that in the professional field we usually put our faith and loyalty in those professionals who consistently deliver what they have promised. The same thing happens to our children in relation to us.
Fulfilling what we promise must be something stable. Everyone can tolerate someone's irresponsability ocasionally. Doing it frequently is an invitation to stop trusting us.
If we commit to something with our children, we must respect what has been agreed and fulfill it, no matter how small the promise may seem. Or not doing it, even if this means discomfort in our child, which at that moment is precisely what we want to avoid. Our children have to take our word for it and trust what we tell them. With this we are educating them in responsibility and being a person of their word.
14 Give them time
On this matter I will limit myself to making some reflections. It is true that today this time is very difficult. If we were to ask ourselves how much time we spend "awake" (not counting the hours we are asleep) at home, we would be surprised, because it probably does not exceed two or three hours. And besides, we are tired, we accept that we either educate tired or we don't educate, that we live together tired or we don't live together and we go through our home thinking of ourselves, nothing is easier when one is unable to take it anymore.
On the other hand, we always have time for what matters to us, when there is an important game on TV everyone has time to watch it. Why?
Reconciling work and family is not easy, rather it is very difficult. But I don't know why, for some strange reason, everyone dedicates too much time to work, without noticing that one retires from work while that never happens from his family. On other occasions the laziness of the busy person appears, who has so much to do, so much, that he cannot get everything out in front of him so that he whims selecting what he most wants. On the other hand, it may happen that it is more convenient and comfortable to continue a few more hours at work for whatever reason than to return home at the “magic hour” when everyone is tired, have dinner, organize going to bed, etc.
I don't know very well why we have come to think that quality of life is having everything that provides money for which you have to work from dawn to dusk. However, we all have the experience that home is the affection, understanding and shelter that we receive in it, and that this is quality of life and not the other. That requires time or better still dedication. Because we can have little time and yet dedicate ourselves body and soul to our children when we are at home.
At home they love us for who we are, flaws included, and at work they love us for what we are worth or could be worth. How much attachment to our company? Work is a value, no one disputes this, besides, you have to work not well but very well, also you experience that when you work very well you also improve as a person, but success is not a value.
We think that if we earn a lot of money we can facilitate and get better material things for our family, and that's fine, but we forget that what our family values is ourselves. Give ourselves, not give them material things that replace my dedication to the children, who on the other hand grow faster than it seems. And maybe as the years go by we will receive the same treatment from them when we are old.
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