As girls approach adolescence, the willingness to take risks and fail can become tangled with pressure to be careful, perform well and avoid mistakes.
Confidence is not simply something a girl either has or does not have. It can grow through action, experimentation, recovery and the experience of discovering that a mistake is survivable.
Make Room for Healthy Risk
Trying new and difficult things gives girls the opportunity to learn that they can recover when something does not go as planned. If they only do what they already know they are good at, there are fewer opportunities to build that evidence.
Parents can help by resisting the impulse to solve every difficulty immediately. Let daughters make age-appropriate decisions, make mistakes and practise recovering from them.
Perfectionism Can Get in the Way
When being “good” becomes synonymous with getting everything right, mistakes begin to feel threatening rather than informative. The pursuit of perfection can discourage experimentation.
Parents can model something different by talking openly about their own mistakes, imperfect decisions and what they learned from them.
Social Media and Confidence
Social media can provide connection and discovery, but it can also intensify comparison and perfectionism. Families can experiment with screen breaks, pauses before responding when emotions are high, more face-to-face conversation and intentional choices about whom girls follow.
Following women working in fields a girl genuinely cares about can also broaden the range of futures she sees represented online.
Role Modelling Matters
If adults present themselves as people who never fail, girls may measure themselves against an impossible standard. Showing how you recover from mistakes teaches more about confidence than simply telling a child to be confident.
Authenticity Is Part of Confidence
Ultimately, confidence also involves the willingness to be yourself rather than continually performing the version of yourself you believe other people want.
Help girls discover their interests, express their views, take healthy risks and build the resilience to recover when things do not go perfectly.
— Daughters of India