Give your children self-belief

If we could pass on one quality to our children, it would surely be confidence. To know that they were free from self-doubt and viewed the world as theirs for the taking would be a great blessing. Confidence is something we crave for our offspring just as much as for ourselves – more so if we lack it.

Isabel, married with two girls – Rosa, 10, and Amy, eight – is desperately keen that her daughters should feel more sure about themselves than she ever has. ‘I always think other people are better than me. If I have to do anything new, my first instinct is always the same, “I can’t do it. How am I going to get through this?” I get through it in the end, but feel I’m always about to get caught out, that people will realise how mediocre and incompetent I am underneath. So you can see why I’d never wish that on my children.’

‘I never felt good enough’

Isabel’s father was an academic who spent much of his time away from home when she was young. Whenever he was home, he would criticise Isabel and her younger brother. ‘Nothing we did at school was ever good enough. We never really got any encouragement. My mother says it’s because he was so guilty being away from us, but that wasn’t how he made us feel.’ Isabel’s father also had a highly critical father. ‘My grandfather was a very cold man. Even when my father published his first book, his father never acknowledged his achievement. My father never felt he was good enough, either. I don’t think he was ever really aware of how his feelings carried over to us.’

Parents such as Isabel’s father would probably be shocked if they knew how instrumental they had been in the gradual stripping away of confidence. It wasn’t simply lack of awareness; they were part of a generation that viewed ‘spoiling’ a child with the same disapproval that we now view smacking. 

These days, therapists believe that an essential element of confident parenting is the capacity to view the world from the child’s perspective. An inability to do this ‘is to do with deep parental insecurity, where their needs seem greater than the child’s,’ says family therapist Dr Judith Lask. ‘This could happen if there is, say, a rivalry between a mother and daughter for the father’s affection,’ says Lask. ‘So the
mother wants to point out that the child isn’t as wonderful as the father seems to think.’

This steady drip through the generations of feeling unrecognised and criticised by a parent has its most corrosive effect when we are young. ‘It’s the number one reason for lack of confidence,’ says Cliff Arnall, a psychologist who runs confidence-building workshops. ‘In those first six years our brains aren’t sophisticated enough to distinguish between what is true and what isn’t. Whatever children are told about themselves will be accepted as truth and encoded at a really deep level.’