How to Build Confidence in Kids (Authentically! No Empty Praise!)

One of the best feelings as a parent is watching your child come alive doing something they love.

My kids have surprised me with what brings this to fruition. It hasn’t been standard things like soccer, or dance, or theater, or even academics.

It’s been frogs, toads, and snakes.

Planning parties for others.

Climbing over boulders.

When a child is doing something they love that they feel good at, they are more themselves.

We recently went hiking as a family, and it turns out all four of my children love rock scrambles. Number three in particular, John, is a quieter, reserved kid, but he loves blazing the trail. He loves being first. He loves doing really hard things and keeping up with his 16-year-old brother. He stepped into confidence we didn’t know he had when we are out on the trail.

My daughter behaves similarly when she is party planning. She’ll take months putting together every detail for a birthday party for someone else with more attention to to-do lists than any school assignment. I wish every parent and every child could experience that sense of confidence at that level.

Declining Confidence in Kids

I truly believe we’ve had a confidence fiasco in the last 30 or so years. We know that it’s always been difficult to be in middle school; it’s always been difficult to be a teenager. But somehow I feel as though teenagers in the 50s or 70s, or even 80s, felt like they had more of an anchor in their sense of self or in their family.

I can’t pinpoint all the reasons that confidence and self-worth have decreased. But I can point to a few statistics.

• In a 3-year period, depression in kids increased 40%.¹
• One in four students experience an episode of major depression during high school.²
• Suicide is the third leading cause of death for human beings age 10 to 24.³

Are those kids brimming over with self-confidence? Something tells me probably not.

What Does Confidence Do for Kids?

I don’t know that there’s any specific research correlating depression, anxiety, or suicidal tendencies with low self-confidence. There may be—I just haven’t found them.

But what is clear is that self-confidence and a sense of self-worth have got to be as good for children as eating their vegetables and getting outside playtime.

Confidence helps kids be able to make decisions and trust themselves. And the older you get, the more decisions you have and the more important those decisions are.

Confidence helps kids advocate for themselves, ask for what they want, end up with a better place in life because they’re not afraid of what everyone else is thinking of them.

Similarly, confidence helps kids stand firm against peer pressure, be able to say no to bad habits we don’t want them to start, and say yes to choosing friends who will build them up instead of tearing them down.

Why Confidence Is Built in the Kitchen

I mentioned that I don’t know all of the reasons for a seeming decrease in confidence in our young people. However, I personally believe that one reason is that kids have less reason to believe in themselves.

Kids are getting empty praise more often. They’re doing less authentic work. They are busier collecting participation medals than ever before by doing not much of anything important.

Confidence blooms from doing authentic tasks, from being able to give of oneself to others, and from knowing without being told that you’ve done a great job, particularly if the work is real and important.

Kids these days do a lot of unimportant work and play, which is why I believe the kitchen is the best arena for building self-confidence that parents have access to.

I’m not the only one saying this about the kitchen and confidence. In fact, in a survey I took in 2020 of our active Kids Cook Real Food^™ member families, more members said that the increase in confidence was the best benefit of teaching their kids to cook than anything else.

Now, how about some stories to put a face to this authentic confidence?

Seven-Year-Old Gains Confidence in the Kitchen

Aidan is a seven-year-old boy from Canada who got on a call with me to talk about what it was like learning to cook.

He shared that he was nervous about sharp knives but very interested in cooking, and that learning proper skills gave him the full confidence to use knives safely.

Aidan is so confident in the kitchen that he even makes up his own recipes. He told me all about an apple crisp recipe he created, as well as a vanilla apple cake with maple frosting.

He made these out of his own head, which pretty much means he’s more confident than his teacher now because I’m afraid to experiment that much with baking recipes!

Feeling confident in the kitchen leads him to serve his family more as well. His mom said that one time she said out loud, “The last thing I need to do for dinner is make a salad,” and her seven-year-old volunteered and made the whole thing. He’s also made birthday lasagna for his dad, and you can see in his eyes that he loves serving his family in this way.

Here’s Aidan sharing his cooking adventures with me. 

Can’t see the video? Watch Aidan’s confidence shine here on YouTube!

Kids Who Take Pride in Their Work Build Confidence

I asked a member mom, Christina Martin, how Kids Cook Real Food^™ had made a difference in their day-to-day family life.

She said her 11-year-old daughter had so much more confidence in the kitchen that it really did improve their lives. “Being part of dinner gives her so much pride in her work,” she said.

Another mom wrote in to say that learning knife skills gave her son “so much confidence in his own cooking independence he kept listing all the things he could make now!”

Grandmothers are using our courses to help their grandkids gain confidence too. I love this from Jeanie A.: “My children and grandchildren have been cooking non-stop since they gained the confidence to be independent. This class was the best thing I ever gave my grandkids for Christmas!”

Julie D. used our classes with her 19-year-old son and 11-year-old daughter. The 11-year-old already loved baking but hadn’t really done much actual cooking of dinner. Julie said, “It has been fun watching my daughter’s self-confidence in the kitchen skyrocket.”

Cooking Skills Help Kids with Special or Additional Needs

One of my favorite parts of teaching kids to cook online has been hearing from individual families, especially those who surprise me.

I didn’t really set out to create classes that served the special needs community perfectly. I just wanted to teach all kids in the best way possible.

Many, many parents of kids with Down syndrome, autism, or otherwise on the spectrum have reached out to tell me the video classes are just what their kids need. Here are just a few families who have seen confidence increase in their special-needs children.

Does Kitchen Confidence Extrapolate Outside of Food?

When I teach stress mastery, I tell people that we have only one bucket.

Just because you’re stressed out at work and your kids have nothing to do with that problem doesn’t mean you’re going to have a full tank of emotional capacity to deal with problems at home. We have one body and one mind. And it’s all one bucket of capacity.

I feel like confidence must work in the same way. When kids gain authentic confidence because they can nourish their families, when they can make up their own recipe or follow something that an adult has written on their blog, they feel confident because they’re doing authentic work.

It stands to reason in my mind that they would feel more confident in other situations as well—at school, in social situations, in volunteer opportunities.

If we as parents want to raise up this generation to be more confident, to send those depression and anxiety statistics spiraling down to nothing, we need to give our kids opportunities to build authentic confidence.

This means teaching them authentic skills such as:

• cooking
• whittling
• sewing
• laundry
• cleaning the toilet

I’d love to hear what else you like to teach your kids that can help them build authentic confidence because it’s an authentic task that needs to be done. In my book, cooking is number one, because it nourishes and pours life into others.

Cooking is a skill that is useful every single day of a child’s life well into adulthood. And ultimately, learning to cook returns and pours life and confidence back into your child.

TEACH A KID TO COOK TODAY!

Footnotes:

1. Kam, K. (2016, December 19). Troubling Trend: Depression Rates Rising in Teens. Retrieved from https://www.webmd.com/depression/news/20161219/depression-rates-rising-teens#1
2. Bettino, K. (2021, March 11). What to Know About Teenage Depression. Retrieved from https://psychcentral.com/lib/depression-in-teens-and-children/
3. Dryden-Edwards, R. (n.d.). Depression in Children. Retrieved from https://www.medicinenet.com/depression_in_children/article.htm#what_are_the_types_of_depression_in_children