Stop Trying to Make Your Kid Feel Good About Themselves

Dr. Becky (0:00)

I remember seeing two parents basically back to back in my private practice, and it forever changed how I thought about confidence. Get this, both came in with the same worry. My kid isn't confident, but let's keep going. The first parent had a young kid. Oh, I had a birthday party, and all the other kids are running around the gymnastics mat, and Dr. Becky, my daughter knows all the other kids. They're all having fun, my kid is clinging to me. Why can't my kid be more confident? Next session, teenager. Something had happened on a group text, goal found out, and all the kids on the group text, the ones doing the nasty texting and the ones on the text who didn't say anything, got suspended. This kid, the son of the parents I was seeing, was the one who didn't say anything, still got suspended. Parents asked me, my kid should know that's wrong. It was awful, Dr. Becky. Why can't my kid see what other kids are doing, but be confident to know that they can do something differently? Hold on a second. Sessions back to back where parents want their kid to be confident. But in the first session, the parents are defining confidence as going with the crowd, just joining in faster. And in the second session, the parents are defining confidence as the ability to notice what the crowd is doing and act in a different way. How can this be? I think we think about confidence when our kid is young, as jumping in, being the first to do something, or yeah, doing what the majority of the other kids are doing. But then later on, we define confidence as our ability to trust ourself even in the face of other people acting differently. So what's going on here? What are we actually talking about when we talk about confidence? I'm going to answer that in this episode. This episode is in partnership with Carter's. Before I get into what confidence actually means, I want to tell you why we're partnering with this 161-year-old brand. Carter has been making kids' clothes for almost two centuries. And over that amazingly long time, they've been dedicated to growing kids' confidence. They understand that protecting kids' sense of self is one of the most important jobs of parenting. Carter surveyed parents and asked this. When it comes to helping your kid trust themselves, instead of relying on everyone else's approval, what guidance would be most helpful? The clear winner, help my kid trust their own preferences and their own choices. Starting now, we're doing something we've never done before. We are teaming up with Carter's and we are launching the Childhood Confidence Project. Over the next year, we're going to examine what makes confidence in our kids diminish as they get older, and help parents prepare to overcome those moments. As part of this project, I developed a brand new confidence program to help you do exactly this. And thanks to Carter's, it is now completely free. Stick around to the end of the episode and I'm going to tell you how to access it. Okay, if you want to raise a confident kid, I want to tell you something that might surprise you. I don't think our goal should be to make our kids feel good about themselves. I know that sounds weird. Stay with me. I promise it'll make sense. Because I think this is actually part of the problem. If I define confidence as feeling good about myself, then as a parent, I'm going to try to make my kid feel good, feel happy, feel comfortable in any situation. I fix, I reassure. But actually, I think that's part of the problem. Because your kid and my kid, they're not always going to feel good about themselves. They'll fail. They won't get invited. They're going to walk into rooms where they don't know anyone, and they're hopefully going to try a lot of things they're bad at. And if confidence is about feeling good, I think we end up building something really fragile. Great, my kid has confidence when they're in a situation where they feel good about themselves. Don't we all?

Here's how I think about confidence. Confidence isn't always feeling good about yourself. Confidence is trusting yourself even, and you don't. I guess another way to say that is confidence is feeling like it's okay to be you in the widest range of situations, not the narrowest. Example, I didn't make the team, still okay being me. I'm the worst one here, still okay being me. Everyone else wants to do something and I don't, still okay being me. I'm nervous. I try and I fail.