You Can’t Give Your Child Confidence

Why lasting change takes time—and why the struggles along the way may matter more than we realize.

By Dwayne L. Flees
Senior Chief Instructor, KarateBuilt Grand Rapids

 

He was three years old.

And he wanted absolutely nothing to do with me.

His older brother had already been training at our academy for about six months. His mother had watched the changes taking place in him and believed martial arts could help her younger son too.

There was only one problem.

He disagreed.

Strongly.

He wasn’t frightened of martial arts. He wasn’t afraid of me. He simply didn’t want anyone telling him what to do.

And like many three-year-olds, he had already discovered something important about adults:

If you protest long enough, sometimes they give in.

So he protested.

He cried.

He whined.

He wrapped himself around his mother’s leg.

At one point, I honestly thought he was trying to crawl back into the womb.

When class began, I picked him up, carried him onto the training floor and set him down.

He immediately ran back to Mom.

We tried again.

Same result.

Eventually his mother did something that was probably harder for her than anything we were asking him to do.

She left the training area.

She knew that as long as he could see her, he was going to keep running back to her.

So she stepped away.

He headed for the door.

More than once, we had to position another dad near the exit because this determined little three-year-old was prepared to go into the parking lot and find his mother himself.

I remember his mother asking me:

“Am I doing the right thing?”

I’m pretty sure the first time she walked out to her car, she sat there and cried.

I understood why.

Every instinct she had as his mother was telling her to rescue him.

Go back inside.

Pick him up.

Make the crying stop.

Take him home.

There would have been nothing unusual about that decision. Parents do it every day because watching your child struggle is uncomfortable.

But she didn’t.

She trusted us.

More importantly, she trusted the process.

She had already watched her older son train for about six months. She had seen enough to know that what happened on the training floor wasn’t always going to be easy or comfortable.

And she could see two very different possibilities for her younger son.

She could make the discomfort stop right now.

Or she could give him the opportunity to become the confident kid she could already imagine him becoming.

There were no guarantees. We weren’t promising some kind of magic transformation.

What we could offer was a process: appropriate challenges, instruction, encouragement, correction and the expectation that he would keep trying.

She had enough faith in us—and enough belief in him—to let the process work.

And something began to happen.

Not that day.

Not because I gave him a great speech.

Not because someone finally explained confidence to him in language a three-year-old could understand.

It happened slowly.

Week after week.

The crying became less.

The running stopped.

He stayed on the training floor.

He began listening to adults who weren’t Mom or Dad.

He participated.

He learned.

He made friends.

He smiled.

He grew.

Years passed.

Eventually, both he and his older brother earned their Second Degree Black Belts.

Not long ago, my wife and I were invited to his high school graduation open house.

Standing there, I couldn’t help remembering that three-year-old who used to run off the training floor looking for his mother.

There wasn’t one class that changed him.

There wasn’t one breakthrough moment.

There were thousands of little experiences in between.

And that’s the point.

Nobody Gave Him Confidence

Parents frequently ask me:

“Does martial arts build confidence?”

After more than two decades of teaching children, I think there’s a better question:

How does confidence actually develop?

We could encourage him.

We could teach him.

His mother could believe in him when he wasn’t so sure about himself.

But none of us could simply give him confidence.

That had to grow through his own experiences.

Staying on the training floor instead of running away.

Following an instructor’s directions when Mom wasn’t there.

Struggling with a skill and eventually learning it.

Earning a belt.

Performing in front of other people while nervous.

Being corrected and trying again.

Having a difficult class and coming back for the next one.

None of those experiences by itself made him confident.

But they added up.

And over time, what he believed about himself began to change.

“I can’t do this.”

became:

“Maybe I can.”

And eventually:

“I’ve done hard things before. I can do this too.”

That’s confidence.

Confidence Is Not the Absence of Difficulty

I think we sometimes misunderstand what we’re trying to build in children.

Confidence doesn’t mean a child walks into every situation believing they’re going to succeed.

That’s unrealistic.

Confidence isn’t:

“Nothing bad will happen.”

It isn’t:

“I won’t fail.”

And it certainly isn’t:

“Everything should be easy for me.”

Lasting confidence sounds more like:

“I don’t know exactly what’s going to happen, but I’ve handled difficult things before.”

That’s a very different belief.

And it isn’t something we can simply hand to a child.

It grows through experience.

A child tries something they aren’t sure they can do.

They struggle.

They keep trying.

Eventually, they do it.

Then, the next time they face something difficult, they have something they didn’t have before.

They can remember:

“I’ve done hard things before.”

Which creates a problem for those of us who love them.

Because developing that kind of confidence requires something we’d often rather protect children from.

Struggle.

The Thing We Want to Remove May Be the Thing They Need

If that mother had rescued her son every time he cried, she could have immediately made him feel better.

And herself.

That’s important.

Because sometimes when adults rescue a child, we’re not only relieving their discomfort.

We’re relieving ours.

It’s hard watching your child struggle.

It’s hard watching them become frustrated.

It’s hard knowing you could step in and make the problem disappear.

Sometimes you absolutely should.

Children need protection. They need guidance. They need adults capable of recognizing when something truly is beyond what they should be expected to handle.

But there is another kind of struggle.

The manageable kind.

The kind that says:

This is difficult, but you can do it.

Those experiences are enormously valuable.

When we remove every manageable challenge before a child has an opportunity to work through it, we may accidentally remove something else with it:

The opportunity to discover what they’re capable of.

That three-year-old needed his mother.

But in that moment, what he needed from her wasn’t rescue.

He needed her to believe he could handle something he didn’t yet believe he could handle himself.

That’s a very different kind of parenting.

And it’s difficult.

One Small Victory at a Time

Think about a child learning to ride a bicycle.

They may be excited.

They may be nervous.

They may be convinced they’ll master it in five minutes.

Then the bicycle starts moving.

They wobble.

They put their feet down.

They fall.

Sometimes they cry.

Then they try again.

One successful pedal becomes three.

Three become ten.

Eventually they make it to the end of the driveway.

Then around the block.

At some point, they’re riding without thinking about all the things that once required their complete attention.

Nobody handed them confidence before they got on the bicycle.

Confidence grew through the experience of learning to ride it.

One challenge.

One correction.

One attempt.

One small victory at a time.

That’s what I’ve watched happen on the training floor for more than twenty years.

And here’s where things become interesting.

There is a reason repeated experiences like these matter.

There is a reason something difficult can gradually become easier.

There is a reason practice, correction, repetition and progressively greater challenges can change what a student is capable of doing.

Part of the answer is happening inside the brain.

And being from Michigan, I think one of the easiest ways to understand it is to imagine something we’re all familiar with:

A fresh path through deep snow.

—

The Path Continues

Confidence doesn’t come from removing every difficult thing from a child’s life. It grows through experiences that allow them to struggle, learn, improve and discover what they’re capable of.

And there is a reason those repeated experiences matter.

In Part 2 of The Path to Black Belt, we’ll explore why repetition matters, how practice changes what children are capable of doing, and what a fresh path through Michigan snow can teach us about lasting change.

You’re going to love who they become at Black Belt.