Did you know that most self confidence problems as an adult originate from childhood? For this reason, it is particularly important to that you pay maximum attention to other or your own children's self confidence - in other words, help them to develop self confidence as much as possible. They will thank you for it later in life and benefit from it greatly!



To develop your self confidence, one factor is more important than all the others put together which is - unconditional love and approval. If you have that, little else will matter - though of course, instilling a sense of self discipline in yourself is also very important. Love and approval are right at the center of most of the confidence issues people face, though. This is how we tell children that they are appreciated and that they are perfect in exactly the way that they are rather than telling them what they have wrong with them and picking out negative things to say to them.

If we delay giving approval, or if we appreciate our children for their potential rather than for what they are right at the present moment, we are setting the scene for serious self confidence issues and possible other problems down the road. Many a well meaning parent have fallen into this trap.

It is very difficult to help your children develop self confidence if you don't have good self-confidence yourself - it's sort of like the blind trying to lead the blind. Ideally, if you yourself have issues with regard to self-confidence or self estemm, you must try to work them out. You can do this with therapy, or maybe by participating in a course, group or workshop, or even just by thinking, reading and working through your issues on your own, but the first step is deciding you need to work on this particular trait about yourself. We vary in our approach to issues like this. While therapy is generally a great idea, some of us really do better exploring problems on our own.

What happens if a parent has poor self confidence? The problem is that we tend to project our own self-image onto our children. Some people have a greater tendency than others to do this, but no-one is completely immune to it. Then, if you are projecting what you think of yourself onto your son or daughter,and you have poor self confidence, the message you send out will be a disapproving one. It's hard to develp self confidence under those circumstances. Remember that you are you, and your child is your child - he or she has a separate life with its own unique set of challenges.

Support your child in all of his or her endeavors - that's what you're there for. While gentle correction and an insistance on self-discipline is helpful, disapproval isn't. Take a good look at your parenting, and do your best to help your child develop self-confidence.