Why you need to sing your own praises in front of your children, mama

1. Be a positive role model

Make sure your child spends plenty of quality time with an adult who listens, really cares and gives praise and encouragement. It’s also important to allow for mistakes to be made, have reasonable expectations and encourage independence. We can teach problem-solving skills to set children up to succeed at least some of the time. While these are all very beneficial, the importance of modelling good self-esteem so that your child can see it first hand, is often not given enough emphasis.

You are a very important role model for your child. Children absorb so much from watching others . If they see a parent putting themselves down or brushing away praise or being self-critical, that is likely to become the behavior that they adopt. If you do this frequently, you may be inadvertently ‘teaching’ your child that thinking and speaking well of yourself is not a good thing to do.

2. Big yourself up

Talk about your successes, however small, and tell your children what you have done that you are proud of. If you have had a go at something, maybe it was a job interview or you tried to learn something new and challenging, talk about what went well instead of focusing on what did not go so well.

Instead of saying, “Some of the questions the interviewer asked were really hard to understand and I kept having to ask him to repeat things. I felt like I didn’t prepare as good as I should have,” say something like, “There were a few questions I did not really understand, but when that happened I asked the interviewer to repeat the question for me and gave the best answer I could.”

Or, instead of,”I thought singing would be easy, but now I realize that my voice isn’t that good after all,” say, ‘Well that was more of a challenge than I thought it would be, but I’m going to try again—it will be fun to see if I can get the hang of it.”

This may be easy for some people, but it certainly doesn’t come naturally to everyone. And that’s okay—it’s likely something inherent that you’ve learned in the past. As children, we are often taught not to boast or show off. Talking about ourselves constantly, and all the amazing things we have done can be a bit of a turn off to others.

3. Teach confidence, not bragging

There is a difference between someone who likes to show off all the time and to give the impression that they are better than everyone else, and someone who is quietly confident in themselves and does not shy away from saying so. If you pay someone like this a compliment, they will not shrug it off and say, “Oh it was nothing,” but will accept your approval and thank you for it.

We can adjust how we respond to compliments and teach our kids how to be confident in ourselves rather than bragging. You can even call out the difference between the two in shows or movies that you watch together.

If your child is finding something difficult, consider how it would feel to hear them say, “It’s so hard, but I think I can work out a way to do it, I’m just going to keep trying.”Where does a ‘can do’ attitude like this come from? Some of it at least will be from you.