How Parents Influence Confidence Without Realizing It
Yesterday I wrote about Angela Duckworth’s simple, clear, and actionable approach to confidence. Any parent who has concerns about their child’s confidence would be wise to understand Duckworth’s practical approach. Confidence is a unique mental skill in that even if a parent thinks they are doing nothing to help or hurt their child’s confidence, they are still impacting how it develops in their child without even realizing it.
Specifically, a parent influences a child’s confidence just through the environment they raise their child. If a parent raises a child in an environment where everything comes easy, confidence will be hard to develop. Moreover, when things get hard and the parent either swoops in to save the day or lets their child quit, confidence will be even harder to develop.
Researchers typically identify this as helicopter parenting and snowplow parenting.
1) Helicopter Parents
A helicopter parent is a parent that lives vicariously through their child. The parent’s dreams are the child’s dreams. What’s more, the parent takes full responsibility for the child’s experiences, friends, extra-curricular activities and successes. Finally, helicopter parents love to take credit for their child’s successes, but often place blame on the child for their failures.
2) Snowplow Parents
A snowplow parent is a parent who plows every obstacle out of their child’s path. They don’t have to place blame for a child’s failure on anyone, because failure is not an option for snowplow parents. Snowplow parents are willing to do homework for their kids, lie about their age to get them an advantage, bribe coaches, teachers, and administrators, as well as partake in other unscrupulous behavior to guarantee their child’s success. The living example of snowplow parenting are those parents involved in the widely reported 2019 college admissions bribery scandal.
How Parents Can Be Sure They Are Building Confidence in their Children
The first thing a parent must remember is confidence is a skill you earn by doing hard things. So, parents must make sure they encourage their children to do hard things. Secondly, you earn confidence through your successes not through your failures. Yes, you can learn from failure but that won’t help you grow more confident until you take that learning and use it to achieve success.
Therefore, the only way a parent can be sure they are building confidence in their children is to verify they are following each of the 5 steps below.
- Encourage children to pursue difficult goals.
- Help them develop a process to pursue those goals.
- Plan the proper goal progression for those goals.
- Invest in mental preparation.
- Teach the proper way to learn from failure.