Self-Belief. Your Child’s Passport to a Lifetime of Success and Happiness

Does your child or adolescent lack self-belief? Do they have self-doubts when it comes to friends or schoolwork? With their self-image or being able to cope with stress? These self-doubts may have grown in size as they navigate new challenges.

Let’s be very clear about the importance of young people having strong self-belief. In some ways, self-belief, more than native talent or ability, determines destiny. Without self-belief, our children change and lower their goals when faced with setbacks, mistakes, and failures. They often lack the commitment needed to stay the course.

We see that children need self-belief in three areas:

Emotional Life

We want our children to believe they can manage their emotions and avoid negative emotions (such as worry, anger, and sadness) when faced with adversity or frustrating events.

Social Life

We want our children to feel confident, to expect to make friends, work well with others, and solve problems without conflict.

Work Life

We want our children to believe they can be successful learners, particularly when engaging in challenging learning tasks.

When my two kids were growing up, I noticed that their lack of self-belief was holding them back from time to time. For example, my son, who loved playing football, was not chosen for the starting team because, to the coach, he appeared to lack confidence. There was no question my son was doubting himself and whether he was good enough. We worked on this together. Over the next few weeks, he boosted his self-belief, secured a place on the starting team and kicked a goal.

As a parent and psychologist, I have learned some things parents can say and do to help their children develop self-belief.

Actions you can take that can help strengthen your children’s belief in themselves include:

• The most powerful influence over your children’s self-belief is their success experiences – especially in areas of difficulty and challenge. Make sure that the expectations you have of your children are realistic. That they experience success – even if it requires sustained maximum effort.
• To develop self-belief surrounding challenging schoolwork, help them set short-term goals and achieve each individually.
• Share your obstacles and efforts to accomplish something with your children. Discuss how important it is to believe you have what it takes to succeed.
• Do not compare your children’s achievements. Let them follow their own pace.
• Continuously communicate to your children that they have capable brains that are constantly growing. Explain that the more they try hard and use their brains, the smarter they get. Teach them how to think when they have difficulty doing anything: “I can’t do this – YET.”
• Teach your children that they have a choice in how they think about challenging learning tasks and stressful situations with people. They can think “I can’t do this and never will” or “I have done hard things in the past, I cope and be successful tomorrow.”
• To help your children believe they can manage stress about schoolwork or friends, teach them to shift from a negative to a positive mood by finding something fun to do, relaxing, or talking the issue out with someone they trust.
• Provide children with positive feedback for times when they have stayed calm and managed their emotions in stressful situations.
• When you see that one of your children has not performed at a level consistent with expectations, continue to insist that they continue to try to do their best work.
• Have your children create learning diaries or construct success trees where they record and celebrate small and big successes.
  Have them record when:
  1. they have learnt difficult academic content
  2.  When faced with challenging learning tasks or difficult people, they could calm down and stay calm.

You Can Do It! Education is based on helping young people believe in themselves.

After many years of strengthening self-belief in people of all ages, it continues to help both Patricia and I get through any bad patches. Self-belief gives us the courage to be ourselves and keep trying our best.

You Can Do It! Education has helped our children; over 1 million young people have participated in You Can Do It! Education programs at their schools.

Self-belief does not guarantee success in everything you attempt. Instead, it is an energising force that helps you to try, not be afraid when the going gets tough, and believe in yourself. What can be more potent than that, and what is needed more than ever by our children?