The outcome of a child’s psychological well-being begins with his self-confidence. It’s quite sad that many parents fail to realize this and when some do it’s almost too late. However, as the saying goes, it’s better to be late than never to get it done. Children, when they are born, possess the energy that allows them to believe they have all they need and lack nothing. They have high self-esteem naturally. The determinant of whether this high-esteem can last is the environment which such a child is brought up in and the family in whose hands they are nurtured.

Another thing parents may fail to realize is that children live by example. Before they can create an identity for themselves, they look up to their parents or ward and emulate their actions and inactions. This is why it is very easy to teach a child a new language and this child won’t forget even when he gets older.

Children only know what they are taught. If a child is being mistreated to extreme degrees, they will take it on, believe they are deserving of the treatment and accept it without questioning. The confidence that was meant to develop within them between the age of 0-4 was demolished before it even got a chance to grow. So, instead of challenging the behavior of parents like a confident child would, the traumatized child accepts the adult’s behavior towards them as a ramification of their own badness and insignificance.

Self-confidence affects every single thing in a child’s life from what the child believes he can handle, the career he decides to choose in the future, the way he speaks, etc etc, and it is not until parents begin to teach a child how to be confident in themselves, that child might take a while to figure he is better than he actually thinks of himself. To understand self-confidence, one must look to the root to understand what low self-esteem is and the reasons low self-esteem becomes a part and parcel of a human being especially from childhood.

To be contd…