Encouraging Bravery in Kids: 3 Key Strategies
Stressful events offer opportunities for courage and growth, and how we handle them can be a powerful gateway to self-esteem. Perhaps the most important defense against anxiety, courage is a critical for children to learn. Yet as parents, encouraging bravery in kids isn’t always straightforward.
Bravery is the experience of being afraid but believing that something else is more important than your fear. It is a choice, and a choice no one can make but ourselves. Kids have to make choices for themselves, and parents can’t force courage. But parents can do a great deal to teach kids why courage matters, and how to be brave.
These three strategies can help encourage bravery in kids.
1. Teach Family Values
However, parents can teach kids, and model, the important things of life – our values. These values can become the reasons to put fear aside and be brave. Talk with your kids about your family’s values. What are the things you as parents and as a family believe are important? Help your kids see the importance of acting on these values in life.
2. Define Bravery
While parents cannot teach kids to be brave, they can teach kids how to be brave. Parents can explain that bravery is about taking action even if you are afraid. Help kids to understand that being afraid is a feeling whereas being brave is an action. Taking action doesn’t require feeling good or safe, it only requires courage. Explain to kids how being courageous is a choice all kids can make for themselves.
3. Explain Bravery’s Path to Self Esteem
Finally, point out and show your kids how good it feels to stretch. Self-esteem is earned, and is flows from stretching ourselves and succeeding. It even flows from stretching ourselves and stumbling, so long as we get up and keep stretching. Self-esteem is not about doing things that are easy. It’s about stretching to do things that are outside of our comfort zone. Only after we really try at something can we feel proud of ourselves. It is as simple as that.
Encouraging bravery in kids starts with recognizing its value in overall growth and happiness. Opportunities for bravery are almost everywhere, and can offer optimal vehicles for growth and self esteem. Over time, these experiences become the stepping stones of our life’s journey, and the seeds of our wisdom that give us the confidence we need to keep doing it.
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