Stop Trying to Make Your Kid Feel Good About Themselves

Dr. Becky recalls seeing two parents back-to-back with the same concern: “My kid isn’t confident.” The first described a young daughter clinging to her at a birthday party while familiar children played on a gymnastics mat; the parent wanted her to join in. The second had a teenager suspended after a group-text incident because he saw cruel messages but did not object. His parents wanted him to recognize the group’s wrongdoing and act differently. Dr. Becky notes the contradiction: confidence first means joining the crowd, then later means trusting yourself enough to resist it.

Dr. Becky rejects the goal of making children feel good about themselves in every situation. Children will fail, be excluded, enter unfamiliar rooms, and attempt activities they are bad at; if confidence depends on feeling good, it becomes fragile. She defines confidence as “trusting yourself even when you don’t,” or believing it is okay to be yourself across a wide range of experiences: not making the team, being the worst participant, disagreeing with everyone else, or trying and failing. The aim is to widen the situations in which children can remain okay being themselves.

Dr. Becky argues that modern parenting makes it unusually easy to remove difficulty: emailing the teacher, immediately hiring a tutor, or handing over a screen when a child is bored. None is inherently wrong, but their accumulation can teach children that something outside them must change whenever life feels hard. Confidence instead grows when a child can stay with difficulty, identify what they feel and need, decide what to do, and receive support rather than automatic solutions. Parents are helping children learn that hard does not mean impossible, broken, or wrong.

The first two confidence-undermining habits are changing the feeling and changing the outcome. When a child says, “I’m so bad at soccer,” reassuring them that they are good may imply they must excel to feel worthwhile; Dr. Becky would rather they learn they can be bad at soccer and still feel okay about themselves. Parents also reflexively fix exclusions, contact teachers, or replace group classes with private lessons. She asks whether they are preparing the road for the child or preparing the child for the road, since confidence requires a track record of surviving unwanted outcomes.

Dr. Becky says parents cannot lecture children into accepting that life will not always go their way. They need accumulated experiences of disappointment without being rescued: “Look at me. Still here. Didn’t like that… I’m capable of handling hard things.” The goal is not to turn every bad outcome around until it becomes favorable; much of life is simply enduring something that did not go as hoped and finding that its pain shrinks over time. Parents should intervene when necessary, but not make intervention their automatic response.

The third habit is making the outside louder than the inside. Questions such as “Did you win?” or “What did your friends get?” can orient children toward grades, popularity, likes, beauty, achievement, coaches, and other external measures of worth. Dr. Becky recommends asking about internal assessment instead: “Tell me about your studying—what worked?” or “What part of the game are you proudest of?” When a child fears not making a team, parents can acknowledge the desire without predicting the result: “I don’t know what will happen, but you’re the same awesome kid, and we’ll get through it together.”