Hi, this is Janet Lansbury. Welcome to Unruffled. 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.

How do we encourage children to trust themselves and 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're 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, I have

it, 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 studied 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.

...