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6 Ways to help your child find their inner Superhero!

4/28/2021

Kids love a superhero and on National Superhero Day there's no better time to help our kids find their inner superpowers.

Children benefit immensely from knowing that they bring something unique to the people and world around them, but it's not always easy for them to identify what that is. Even at a young age, beliefs can be formed around labels and perceptions of self that can limit them. Children can form negative or limiting beliefs about themselves for a number of reasons, including:

taking on the opinions of others (e.g. a label from a parent, teacher or family member).
mis-interpretation and generalisation of an event or incident (e.g. believing they aren't very smart because of one low mark in a spelling test).
judging themselves on their emotional state, which is temporary (e.g. they don't feel confident in certain situations but interpret this as not having confidence at all, which in turn becomes a self fulfilling prophecy!).

We can help our children discover their inner superpowers and see themselves in a positive light. There's a few things that every superhero has: resilience, acceptance of self, a passion or purpose and growth mindset. Here's 6 easy to implement ways you can support your child to find their power within:

Embrace their uniqueness! Our children are not mini versions of ourselves. It's important that as parents we shake off expectations of what we would like our children to be and instead focus on helping them be the best version of who they are. This covers several parenting mistakes that come from a good place. First, ignoring or suppressing our child's traits or quirks because we have some discomfort with it. For example, sometimes parents can worry that their child will encounter challenges such as bullying, judgements or labels because of a unique trait, which they want to protect them from in the from. Secondly, deciding on the path our child's life should take can suppress their unique traits. There's a fine line between pushing our kids to be someone that doesn't align with who they are and seeing their potential and encouraging them along. We have life experience that they don't, so there are moments where of course, we have to guide them and set boundaries. But let's do so whilst allowing them to be comfortable with who they are.
Help them hear their inner voice! As a society, we've become very good at silencing our children's inner voice. Kids seem to be very tuned into their wants and needs at a young age, but often we squeeze this awareness of out them during childhood. We can keep them tuned into their inner voice by recognising what they are feeling and what they desire whilst maintaining boundaries. Look out for what makes your child feel good and point it out them. If you see them in that 'zone', relaxed and at ease with themselves when they are reading, doing art, singing, in a sport etc, make an explicit connection by saying something like, "You look content when you're ...". We can also talk to slightly older children and teens about the things that are important to them and supporting these interests. For example, they may show an interest in climate change or animal conservation which you can support through charitable work, fundraising, learning more as a family etc.
Discuss challenges they've face and how they overcame them. Talking about challenging moments allows children to understand that they can do hard things and survive them. This builds confidence. Taking the conversation on to HOW they overcame them enables a deeper understanding of self, and shows your child that they are powerful. For example, this could involve using patience, determination, courage, kindness or communication skills. Children don't always make the link between overcoming a challenge and how they achieved it, but a simple chat about it can help them wire that experience in their brain and encourage a positive belief about themselves.
Reframe their thoughts. Helping children reframe unhelpful thoughts can really prove to them that they have inner powers they didn't realise were there. This may involve reframing a label they've been given or have given themselves. For example, turning "I'm shy" into "I'm observant and like to listen to others" will be far more beneficial and encourage children to see themselves in a positive way. Not everyone is observant or a good listener, so these are good thing people to have in society!
Use affirmations. Powerful statements can support children to believe in themselves and find their confidence. Affirmations counteract the automatic negative thoughts that our brain likes to try and protect us with, but they can keep us small and stop us from being our best selves. Consistently using affirmations is an easy way to build self esteem and positively frame their unique traits as strengths.
Help your child take responsibility. When we take responsibility for ourselves, we feel strong and empowered. It's the same for our kids. In child appropriate ways, we can help our kids take on responsibilities that help them feel good about themselves. This could includes child friendly household responsibilities, managing pocket money or supporting them to undertake and complete a project. On an emotional level, we can support them through difficult things, rather than fix or remove, such as starting a new after school club or speaking in class.

Enjoy the confidence you see your child find, when you guide them to discover to their inner powers.

Ruth Bussey

Ink and Scribbles Founder

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How can I raise a confident child?

4/1/2021

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Confidence is high up on my parenting priority list. I'm sure you feel the same. Most of us can remember the excruciating experience that a lack of confidence in childhood can bring. As parents, one of the things we want most for our children is to have confidence. Life teaches us that confidence can make life a little easier and can give us access to enjoyable experiences. It also teaches that confidence isn't necessarily what we perceived it to be in our younger years. This is knowledge is a real gift to our children. And whilst difficult moments are something that we all experience at some point (because such is life), there are things we can do as parents to help our children develop resilience and use these experiences to grow their confidence rather than reduce it. Our responses really matter in building our confident kids.

Let's look in more depth at 6 ways you can encourage confidence in your child.

1. Model Confidence
Our children look to us as an example of how to think and act. As parents we have real influence over the minds of our little people, who often absorb our beliefs and values in childhood and take them through into their adult life.

Showing belief in your child also helps them have self confidence. Children read between the lines and even though we might not say we're feeling nervous for them, they can interpret our non verbal communication as a vote of no confidence. For some children, this can have a real impact on their emotional development so even if you're worried about them having a go at something new, don't show it! Or a the very least be very clear that your own emotions are not about them. Because often they aren't! We might be worried about our child starting a new extra curricular activity, for example. But our emotional response is a reaction to our own trigger, such as fear of rejection or the intensity that we feel empathy etc, rather than our belief in our child's ability.

2. Accept Mistakes
Try and react gently to mistakes. I really resonate with this one. As a child, I took adult reactions to my mistakes very personally and they formed my perception of myself for a long time. Getting things wrong became a real fear of mine, leading to perfectionism in many areas of my life and being a people pleaser. Encouraging our children to learn from mistakes reduces the fear to try new things, keeps their inner critic in check and helps self talk stay positive and encouraging.

3. Create and explore new experiences
Helping your child to push their comfort zone teaches them that they can do hard things and still be OK! Our instinct as parents is to protect our children, but this can become detrimental if we constantly keep them in their comfort zone. If your child shows an interest in challenging themselves, you can help them make achieve small goals to prepare for it, rather than hold them back from it entirely because the main goal seems too big. This will also demonstrate to your child that you believe in them, nurturing their self esteem. Holding our children back from new experiences tells them to fear hard things, but what we actually want them to know is that as long as they are safe, they can do hard things and come out the other side.

4. Be OK with allowing some failure
We've already touched upon overprotection being potentially disempowering, and this one adds to this message. Again, our protective instinct can kick in and we can have a powerful urge to fix things for our kids. This is especially true when we see them hurting. But there is another path that is empowering, as well as supportive. When we see our children fail, we can give them the scaffolding they need to learn how to bounce back from those experiences. This builds resilience, a key trait for overall wellbeing and mental health. We can teach our kids that failing doesn't make them a failure. How much more confident would you have felt if you'd been given this message as a child?!

5. Focus on effort and perseverance
This supports our children in developing a growth mindset. Again, this builds resilience. But having a growth mindset will also mean our kids are accepting of themselves and don't value who they are based on things such as grades. Instead, they value effort and know that they can always improve and learn more. In fact, knowing this means they have increased confidence because they understand the control they have over their ability to achieve.

6. Teach them how to goal set.
Goal setting shows our children that they can make small steps towards a bigger goal. Often, we lack confidence because the big goal feels out of reach. It's overwhelming to stand at point A and expect to reach point D without passing point B and C! This means our inner critic turns up with sentences that begin with 'I can't, which is clearly a confidence knock. Planning the steps and achieving the smaller goals increases confidence and gives the knowledge that improvement will happen.

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6 Ways to help your child find their inner Superhero!

Ruth Bussey

How can I raise a confident child?

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