5 Ways to Build Confidence in Adolescent Girls
Written by Kat Hubbard, WIN Staff
Every year, October 11th is observed as the International Day of the Girl. UNICEF launches an annual campaign with adolescent girls to amplify their voices and stand up for their rights. This year’s theme was “My Voice, Our Equal Future”. Inspired, we wanted to take the opportunity to address the driving factor that keeps girls from raising their hand in class, from projecting their voices, and as an adult, keeps them from asking for more: confidence.
There has been much debate whether confidence is innate, something a person is born, or if it is acquired (or not) over a lifetime. We believe in taking a growth mindset approach to confidence - that it is not a fixed point on a scale but that it can be grown.
Navigating social and workplace relationships confidently and responsibly takes time and patience. From a young age, many of us struggled with communicating our thoughts and feelings, overcoming anxiety to voice our opinions, and developing the courage to tackle any challenge that came our way.
The good news is, we can all grow the skill of confidence and as parents, we can help our daughters feel confident in making decisions, taking risks, and stating their needs. Listed below are the top five most important skills surrounding confidence that we can teach our daughters:
1. Decision-Making Skills & Agency
As girls grow older and are faced with new challenges in both their personal and academic lives, being able to solve problems confidently is a critical skill. In little ways, parents can provide guidance and advice for their daughter but giving them responsibilities and a framework to approach problems is a step in the right direction. Teaching our daughters to identify the problem, brainstorm their options, and weigh the pros and cons will give them a toolkit they can use for the rest of their lives. To foster a sense of agency and responsibility, parents can provide tasks to their daughters to get them comfortable in a number of different environments - whether this be ordering takeout on the phone for the family, speaking up at doctor’s appointments, or weighing in on family decisions. Fostering a sense that her opinion has weight will not only build her self-esteem and assertiveness, but it will also provide her the opportunity to think critically about important decisions.
2. Breaking Down the Fear of Failing
Studies have shown that girls internalize their mistakes, and blame themselves when they fail at a new task, whereas boys are likely to attribute their failures to extrinsic circumstances. Instead of addressing areas to improve upon, girls sometimes attribute these failures to a lack of capability - this mentality breeds a need for perfectionism and external reward in girls and can make them hesitant when they go to tackle new problems. Allowing your daughters to make mistakes, and teaching them that failure is a part of the process of mastery rather than an inherent flaw is essential to building their self-confidence and showing our unconditional love for them. Enjoying the process of learning and maintaining a positive attitude throughout can go a long way; and though difficult to resist the urge to protect them from falling down, allowing our daughters to fail and learn for themselves is critical to building resilience.
3. Confidence & Being Responsible Media Consumers
With the ever-increasing presence of technology (and reliance on it during COVID), being conscious of our media use is imperative. Particularly for young girls who can be bombarded with Photoshop and edited photos on social media, understanding the ways in which social media is tailored to feed off people’s insecurities is crucial to developing a healthy self-image. Research has shown that by age 17, 78% of girls experience a negative image of their bodies, which is only exacerbated by social media platforms where the pressure to look perfect is omnipresent. Having conversations about this, particularly about how women are portrayed in the media, is crucial to teaching how to be compassionate with ourselves and be stronger than our insecurities. Teaching girls to be aware of the type of media they are consuming, the smoke and mirrors that go behind cultivating online images, and being conscious of their screen time is one of the most important skills we can teach our daughters.
4. Communication & Developing Her Voice
In friendships, with crushes, at school, and in the workplace, being able to identify and communicate our thoughts, feelings, wants, and needs effectively is an ever-important skill that takes time to learn. This gives us all the more reason to start teaching and practicing with our daughters now. As parents, we can hold space for our daughters’ thoughts and feelings - emphasize the importance of wanting to hear her and validate her input. Encourage her to ask for and work for what she wants, and support her interests. Be a resource for her, allowing her to vent her thoughts and feelings, be supportive, and even practice what to say to help her communicate her thoughts more persuasively and effectively. Not only will you grow her communication skills this way, you will also be honing your own, and bonding with her in the process.
5. Coping Mechanisms & Conflict Resolution
As our daughters grow up, they will encounter increasing levels of independence and greater responsibilities. With this inevitably comes stress and conflict. Yet, these challenges don’t need to be daunting - as parents, we can start equipping our daughters with coping mechanisms that work for them. Learning to identify the range of emotions that she may be feeling and validating those emotions is the first critical step to staying calm and self-aware in stressful situations. From there, having tools to manage our stress and emotions - whether that be confiding in trusted friends and family members, running, or having a creative outlet - will allow her to manage negative feelings and stress. After helping her sort through her feelings, teach, and model for her how to approach interpersonal conflicts and set up boundaries. Teach her when it’s appropriate to apologize, and when it’s more important to stick up for herself or walk away from a toxic situation - this will give her the toolkit to take on any social or workplace challenge.
Finally, acknowledge as a parent, or a friend, that you are only human and that you do not have all the answers all the time. This is huge. So much of the time, we feel as parents we need to always be the strong ones or the infallible, all-knowing guides to our children. But this shiny veneer sets too high a bar for ourselves to have to uphold and as importantly, can be pretty toxic to our children’s development. They need to know that it is safe, no matter what age, to not have all the answers and to be able to make mistakes. In life, our greatest teachers can be our children, and modeling that you as a parent are able to fail too, to have difficulty with communication sometimes, to be overwhelmed with your own thoughts and feelings, will give your children the sense that this is not something they will acquire overnight but that this is a lifetime’s worth of work, and that through practice they, like you, can continue to grow.
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