Kids – and college teens – need confidence boost

By Dr. Heather Bozant Witcher
Young Adults, Clarion Herald

The end-of-semester rush is upon us. My office hours – once empty – are now filled with students, lining up outside my door.

One of my colleagues asked what I was doing in my office: Did I offer cupcakes and donuts? How in the world was I getting so many students invested in talking with me?

I don’t have an easy answer. But what I do have is something I think everyone, from my 4-year-old toddlers to the teens and young adults sitting in my classrooms, needs to hear: Have confidence.

If I had a dollar for every time I told a student to be confident in his or her voice – to be confident in his or her argument – I’d have doubled my paycheck (at least).

In my composition courses, students work on a single research project over the entire semester.

“You know this material,” I find myself repeating, like a record stuck in a groove. “Be confident in this argument. Be assertive.”

Too often I find that my students hesitate. They’re afraid of making decisions, but they’re also afraid or even shameful of allowing themselves to stand up, to identify what they offer and assert it.

I don’t need to be handing out baked goods. I feel like what I’m “selling” is good, old-fashioned advice that my parents gave me: Be firm in your beliefs and don’t be afraid to assert them.

It’s the same thing I’m passing on to my kids.

This spring, my boys resumed swim lessons (or began them, in the case of my youngest). They were excited. There weren’t many tears, though there was still a sense of hesitancy. After the first session, though, I noticed that, for the twins, the tables had turned.

Last spring and summer, my oldest was extremely confident. He was pushing himself and following his instructor’s directions. By the end of the summer, he was swimming unassisted. His twin, however, was reluctant. We’d have to pump him up in the car to make him excited about learning to swim. We knew he could do the same things as his brother, but he just lacked confidence.

This year, the roles are reversed. That lack of confidence has blossomed: he’s learning to dive and beginning the backstroke. With each emergence from underwater, he looks over at me with a thumbs up and a big smile. “Did you see that, Mama?” he asks as he dries off. He’s proud and wants to keep challenging himself.

But my oldest is holding himself back. “I can’t do it” is the ongoing refrain. The same refrain I hear in my classroom: “I can’t write” or “I hate reading.”

As my eldest dove off the sofa and pretended to swim across our living room, I reminded him that we don’t say “can’t” in this house. We add “yet” at the end and we keep trying. Creatively. Differently. We just keep trying.

And that’s how we build confidence.

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