Hi, this is Janet Landsbury. Welcome to UnRuffled. Today I'm going to be talking about a topic that's very intriguing to me because it's so counterintuitive for most of us.

And those kind of challenges really interest me. This topic is helping children feel more self-confident and more positive. How can we do that?

The advice I give in this podcast may be a little bit surprising.

Okay, so parents often reach out to me on a topic that was really important to me as well as a parent.

It's about encouraging our children's self-confidence. How do we do that?

Well, simplifying this, we can look at the Oxford Dictionary Definition of Self-Confidence, which is a feeling of trust in one's abilities, qualities, and judgment.

So how do we encourage children to trust themselves in their abilities?

Well, we trust them and their abilities because we are these powerful influencers in our child's life and it's just like if we want our child to feel that they deserve respect, then we have to respect them to show them that.

It's the same with self-confidence. And this is why Magda Gerber's first principle of her approach is basic trust in the infant as an initiator, an explorer, and a self-learner.

Children have the goods to be learners. They know what they're doing in this department.

They don't need us to decide what they should learn when in these early years or maybe ever.

So we want to trust in them, meaning we are trusting the way that they explore, the way that they process, and the way they learn from their experiences.

And to do that, we actually want to lean into what they're feeling and what they're exploring and what they're interested in in their time rather than taking it upon ourselves or maybe following the normal urge that many of us have.

To try to work them through what they're learning, their issues, work them through situations, work them through feelings, to fix them, to try to make it better.

So if you would have asked me years ago, before I started with Magda, how to help a child feel more self-confident, I would probably have answered, you build them up.

You tell them how wonderful they are and how great they are and how capable they are and that they can do things.

And that's not really trusting. And that doesn't build self-confidence as much as when we actually lean into taking interest in and encouraging our child's process.

I think the easiest way for me to explain this is through questions that parents have shared with me. So that's what I'm going to do. I have three here.

The first one is in the comments section of my website on a post for one of the podcasts I did with Australian parenting expert Maggie Dent called Boys Do Cry and they need to.

So here's what the parent asked. She said, being a mom of two boys, one rooster, age four, and one lamb, age eight. This is very helpful, but it is so challenging.

Switching from the rooster to the lamb is exhausting. My lamb has recently started saying things like, I'm stupid. I hate myself. I don't deserve anything. I'm not good at anything.

How do I address this? I've tried saying it might feel that way because of the situation and it's okay to be frustrated, disappointed, etc.

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