5 Strategies to help the insecure child
The insecure child is a withdrawn, fearful child, a child who is afraid of failing, of losing the attention or affection of their parents or reference adults. He is a child with a fear of making a fool of himself, a child with low self-esteem who needs to recover his self-confidence in order to deve
The insecure child is a withdrawn, fearful child, a child who is afraid of failing, of losing the attention or affection of their parents or reference adults. He is a child with a fear of making a fool of himself, a child with low self-esteem who needs to recover his self-confidence in order to develop personally, emotionally and socially. Today we propose 5 strategies to help the insecure child.
How the insecure child feels and how we should help him
The insecure child feels clumsy about any new task or activity that he has to perform or has already faced before without success. Parents, teachers and other educators can help the insecure child regain that lost or undeveloped safety that he so badly needs.
We should start by boosting their self-esteem but also the acceptance of frustration so that they understand that failures are new opportunities for success, learning opportunities that they should take advantage of and not just an adverse result that defeats their purposes. For this we propose 5 strategies to help the insecure child, strategies that will help strengthen their self-esteem and self-concept as well as overcome failures.
Strategies to help the insecure child
1.Praise him instead of criticizing him. Parents should offer children the trust they need to be able to face any task, challenge or circumstance that may arise. This is achieved by encouraging, sincerely praising him, giving encouragement when he is learning to walk, to read, to play an instrument but also when doing other daily tasks such as setting the table, talking with a neighbor, maintaining order in his room, or simply when play.
Constant criticism, the 'How awkward you are!', 'You've been your again', 'Leave that you're going to break!' or other similar phrases ... violate the self-esteem and self-concept of our children, diminishing their security and self-confidence. If we want a child who trusts in himself we must begin by transmitting to him that we trust him.
2.Give him responsibilities according to his age. A child learns to trust in himself and what he is capable of doing to the extent that he has opportunities to face different responsibilities.
An overprotected child, who is not allowed to do anything by himself because he always has someone to do it, is a child who will learn to think that he is not capable of doing everything that mom or dad does for him. It will be a child who will grow up thinking that he will always need someone at his side to overcome any adversity. If we want our child to stop being an insecure child or not to become one of them, we must encourage their autonomy and independence, offering them tasks and responsibilities according to their age.
3.Play, laugh, dance, enjoy. In most cases unsafe children are rigid children in their behavior, do not get carried away for fear of ridicule or criticism, so it is important that they learn to enjoy playing, laughing or dancing in the company of other children or adults. They must see ourselves, their parents or educators, doing these actions, observe that nothing happens, that it is fun to laugh at oneself.
4.Minimize failures. For a child to regain self-confidence, he must experience failures as new opportunities for success, not as something paralyzing and frustrating. That is not possible if he lives or in a family with rigid, authoritarian or false expectations. Educational styles that do not tolerate failures and that generate insecurity. It is necessary to fail to learn, it is necessary to fall many times before learning to walk, lower expectations and minimize the small failures or mistakes that our children make. Each failure teaches man something he needed to learn. Charles Dickens, English writer and novelist.
5.Train positive thinking, self-reinforcement. This last strategy gives children the opportunity to believe in themselves, they must learn to be encouraged, motivated, to say positive things, to change their internal discourse. Change the 'I do not know how to do' with a 'I do not know how to do it yet', change the 'I know I can not' with 'and what happens if I try?', Change the 'what a bad thing I've done' for 'a very good, I've tried, next time I'm sure it will be better'.