Faking Confidence for Greater Child Safety

By: Joyce Jackson

Confident kids are safer kids. It's common sense and no special safety secret. Kids who are confident are naturally less of a target for predators and criminals, even the bullies at school.

Confidence belies and underlying, subconscious message that says, "I'm not easy. I'm not going down." Confidence takes care of thwarting the majority of potential threats from other people your child can face.

Unfortunately, there are a lot of kids today that are not confident. They shrink from contact with adults. They bow their heads and look at their feet when they talk with others. They feel just a little less important than other kids and they fail to make eye contact with even the smallest of other children.

If your young child is not very confident, then teach then to pretend they are confident. Yes, this is a very sensitive issue with most parents. No one wants to admit their child lacks self-esteem. In doing so one admits they have not built it into their child from birth. Who wants that kind of responsibility or admittance of failure?

However, you need to make a difficult assessment. Again, if your child is not confident, then teach them to pretend they are. Teach it as a game. Call it the "Feel Good Feel Bad" game.

Ask them if they want to play a game. Get excited, get their attention. Play it with them. Have your child walk around the room and at the command of "Feel Bad!" have them hang their heads, shuffle around and moan. Actually ask them to go back to a time when they might have been sick or sad, and remember what that feels like in their bodies. In doing so, we can actually begin to see some of the
children sagging in their posture.

After a few minutes of this ask them to remember a time when they were really, really happy and excited. Perhaps it was their birthday. Perhaps it was Christmas Day, opening presents. Whatever it is, we take them there in their minds for a brief few moments and have them bounce around feeling happy. You can see them physically straightening up as they envision their happy, exciting moments.

Through a series of "Feel Bad!" and "Feel Good!" commands you expose them to the way these two states feel and the bodily sensations that each of them create. You want them to be able to differentiate between physically feeling good and feeling bad.

More importantly, when you see they understand the difference, you can then teach them to pretend they can "Feel Good" even when they don't. What you are really doing is getting them to turn feeling good on whenever they want to do it.

This means they can at least project confidence even though they may not feel that way for any number of reasons. You can now get them to "Feel Good" and appear so (meaning appearing more confident) especially when they are outside or alone.

If you can get your child to appear confident even when they don't feel that way they become less of a target for predators. Kids can learn to fake out predators with these simple games. They give a child an extra edge of safety whenever they may find themselves alone without Mom or Dad.

It is also possible that if your child can begin to feel good when they need to or want to, they tend to like how it feels. They slowly begin to gravitate more and more to those good feelings we show them. It means they can really take hold if parents reinforce these ideas at home.

Information about the Author:

Joyce Jackson is a child safety expert, #1 bestselling author, consultant, speaker and trainer. For her extensive website and information see www.KeepingKidsSafeToday.com.