The Confidence Code (22 page)

The appeal of faking it, if only for a while, is that it offers a crutch—a way to begin. Here’s a better way to reframe the premise for a quick confidence jump-start: Don’t pretend to be anything or anyone—simply take action. Do one small brave thing, and then the next one will be easier, and soon confidence will flow. We know—fake it till you make it sounds catchier—but this actually works.

•  
Reach for the bottle.
When all else fails, you can always use the oxytocin spray. We tried it. Our husbands seemed sweet, and our work and children felt manageable. Modern liquid confidence! On the other hand, we’d also exercised and were sitting up straight so they were, we admit, fuzzy results from an unscientific study.

7

NOW, PASS IT ON

When Jim Stigler was a graduate student in psychology, he flew to Japan to study different teaching methods. One day, he found himself in the back row of a math class full of ten-year-olds. The teacher was trying to get the children to draw three-dimensional cubes, and one child was really struggling, producing shapes that looked deformed. The teacher called that child up to the front of the room and asked him to draw his design on the board. That surprised Stigler. In American classrooms you wouldn’t single out the child who
couldn’t
do something. That would be seen as humiliating the poor kid even further.

The young Japanese boy started drawing in front of everyone, but he still couldn’t get it right. Every few minutes the teacher would turn to the class and ask what they thought of his efforts, and his classmates would shake their heads, “No, it’s still not correct.” As the exercise continued, Stigler noticed that he himself was getting anxious, and started sweating. “I was really empathizing with this kid,” he says. “I thought, ‘This kid is going to break into tears!’ ” But the boy didn’t break down. He just kept on going, calmly, with determination. And, eventually, he got it right. The whole class broke into applause as the boy sat down with a huge smile, proud of his achievement.

Stigler, now a professor of psychology at UCLA, has come to the conclusion that the profound difference in the way the West and the East view learning has a big impact on confidence. It all has to do with effort. In America, Stigler says, “We see struggle as an indicator that you’re just not very smart. People who are smart don’t struggle; they just naturally get it. In Asian cultures, they tend to see struggle more as an opportunity.”

There is a lesson here for all parents, and everyone who is in a position to guide young minds. In writing this book, we have come to believe that confidence is one of the most important qualities we can instill in our kids. But we are not talking about recycling that well-worn, clichéd technique—in which parents tell their children, try to convince them even, that they can be anything they choose to be. It sounds good. But kids recognize that as an empty assertion. They are creatures hungry for tangible proof.

Confidence gives them something else entirely: a faith in their ability to make things happen, to risk failure, and to all the while maintain a sense of inner calm and equilibrium. Confidence puts meaningful tools in their hands, instead of unproven promises in their heads. It won’t guarantee success, but, more meaningfully, it lifts self-imposed limits. That’s what we want for Felix, Maya, Jude, Poppy, Hugo, and Della. And it’s a possibility, an advantage, all parents, whatever their faith or culture or economic status, can create for their kids.

Praise Progress, Not Perfection

In Japan, Stigler found that struggling with and then overcoming hurdles becomes a chance to show that you’ve got what it takes to succeed. In Japanese classrooms, teachers routinely assign children tasks that are slightly harder than what they’ve already been taught, in order to let them struggle with something that is just out of reach. Then, once they’ve mastered it, the teacher helps them see how they were able to accomplish something they thought they couldn’t, through work and fierce effort.

Teaching a child to accept and even embrace struggle, rather than shy away from it, is a crucial step along the path toward instilling confidence. You are showing the child that it’s possible to make progress without being perfect.

We’ve mentioned the self-esteem movement backlash. Psychologists worry that we still haven’t learned the lessons it should have taught us, that we still aren’t letting our children struggle enough. They fear we are bringing up a generation of narcissists, young people who’ve been told they can do no wrong and so see no need to improve. Jean Twenge, a professor of psychology at San Diego State University, sounds the alarm about millennials who have been raised by parents eager to reward their child’s every move with that infuriating ubiquitous phrase “
good job!”
These children, says Twenge, are attention seeking, have a disproportionate focus on appearance and status, and may even have difficulty forming strong relationships.

You may recognize a few of them. These are the kids who played in soccer leagues where everyone was a winner and no one was allowed to lose. They were the generation who got a trophy just for showing up to the basketball game—the kids whose doting, hardworking, guilt-ridden, baby boomer parents believed that telling their children they were perfect was the best antidote to the harsher discipline of their own parents. Plus, relaxing the rules and lowering the expectations bar for their kids seemed to make up for those long days in the office.

But when we tell our kids they’re already perfect, we are encouraging them to avoid things they find hard. And how do you cope with failure as an adult when you’ve never been allowed to lose in Little League? The cycle of losing, coping with loss, and then picking yourself up to try again is an essential component of mastery, not to mention confidence.

That doesn’t mean all praise is bad. Psychologist Nansook Park says parents should simply make the praise specific to a task and as precise as possible, especially with younger children. For example, imagine asking your four-year-old to help set the table. When he follows your instructions to put out the spoons, Park suggests that saying, “Oh, you are the best son in the world” is too generic. “You have to help them to own what they did,” says Park. “So, say something like, ‘Oh, I like the way you have put the spoons on the table.’ ” And if he gets the spoons mixed up with the forks and knives, who really cares. The important thing is that he tried.

So, let your children make a mess of the cutlery, fall off bikes, crash from monkey bars. And for your part, stop getting overwrought about it. How
you
react can help build a spirit of independence and an aptitude for risk in your child.

Katty has always prided herself on pushing her children to stand on their own two feet; she sees it as one of the biggest differences between her British friends and her American friends. Americans are more protective and involved in the minutiae of their kids’ lives. Brits are more laissez-faire. They haven’t quite shaken the Victorian philosophy of children being “seen but not heard.” But when she looks at how little she has actually let her children fail, she’s shocked by how hard it has been for her to apply this advice. “They sometimes came to me in a panic fifteen minutes before school pickup, in tears, saying they’d forgotten a key piece of homework. Part of me is always tempted to say, ‘Too bad, you should have remembered yesterday evening when you were busy watching TV.’ But, inevitably, I’m racked with unhappiness at their tears, and whip out a pencil and ‘help’ them get it done in time.”

We can’t bear our children’s suffering so we fix their problems, in school, in athletics, in their friendships. But over the long term they become too reliant on us and accustomed to bad things simply being swept out of their way.

How to Fry an Egg

Whether the cause is overprivilege or overprotection, many of us haven’t taught our kids to cope very well with the basic challenges of life.

Dermalogica founder Jane Wurwand is refreshingly frank about how she’s indulged her two children, admitting that she fears she has done them a disservice. But it’s never too late to have an impact, and she’s come up with a simple remedy: Start small.

“It doesn’t have to be learning ballet or Chinese, it can be much smaller,” she says. “My kids went to smart private schools, but they didn’t learn to polish their own shoes. I missed out in not teaching them they can do basic things by themselves. We should draw up a list of twenty small things our kids need to be able to do to cope with life.”

Here are a few things on Jane’s list. You’ll see it’s not hard to come up with your own.

Call a friend instead of texting them

Do your own laundry

Take the bus

Fry an egg

Sew a hem

Change a button

Confront a friend rather than posting comments on Facebook

Make the experience fun. Make it a game if necessary (though don’t reward it with a prize). However you approach it—one egg, one button, one bus ride at a time—teach your kids that they can master the basic skills in life. And here’s your real challenge: When they botch the test or burn the dinner or miss the bus, don’t jump in to fix it or get angry. For all of us, mastering skills requires the ability to tolerate frustration, and if you respond too quickly with a helping hand or agitation, your child won’t develop that tolerance. Take a deep breath and let them figure it out. Let them fail.

It’s Not About You

In Ireland, the Department of Health and Children sought recently to quantify the impact parents have on their child’s mental well-being. They described positive mental health as “being confident in who you are” and being able “to cope and deal with things”—both key attributes of confidence. They asked young people across the country what they felt hurt their mental health. On the hurt list: people judging how they look, the pressure of school and exams, and family dynamics. One of the family factors these young people found most damaging? “Being expected to live up to parents’ expectations since parents sometimes want you to live their dream.” As we encourage our children to try new things and take risks, we must be careful that we’re doing it for them, not us.

We see this all the time, the parents whose own status seems to depend on how well young Henry or Hannah is doing. Those are the parents who embarrass their kids by getting into screaming matches with the referee on the soccer field. Or, better intentioned but potentially just as damaging, these are the parents who spend long nights drilling their teenagers before a critical exam, telling themselves they are merely coaching, when the truth is that they can’t face the prospect of their child not being a high achiever. And we’ve all read the horror stories of the parents who turn up at their child’s first job interview.

What
is
about you is what your children learn from watching you, what they get from the example you set. When they see you struggle and prevail, or simply work hard, your children absorb it. Tanya Coke, our accomplished lawyer friend, thinks this is one reason many African-American women have a confidence habit to fall back upon, nurtured by their mothers.

“Black women of my generation grew up used to taking care of business,” she says. “We had to. Most of us grew up in families with mothers who worked outside of the home. I can’t think of a single black friend of mine whose mother didn’t work. So our model was strong—we do what we need to do to support our family economically. We don’t question our need to get out there and lead if necessary. But that doesn’t mean it’s not hard once we’re there, of course.”

Raising Confident Daughters

Many of the lessons we’ve gleaned about confidence building apply to all of our children, but some are specific to our daughters. When it comes to instilling confidence, raising girls to be more assertive and more independent takes conscious effort, and it goes hand in hand with encouraging them to be less good.

It begins innocently enough. What harried adult, parent, or teacher doesn’t appreciate the child who is helpful, quiet, and generally well-behaved? Let’s face it—these low-maintenance kids are just easier. It’s not that any of us are knowingly pushing the idea that girls should be good; it’s just that girls have an easier time pulling that off at an early age. As we discuss in chapter 4, the result is that young girls, consciously or not, quickly learn that kind of behavior is a fast track to praise. Soon, it’s a reward cycle that’s hard to break, and the result is that we subconsciously train our daughters not to speak up and demand to be heard, or demand almost anything. By the time our focus shifts to that, habits are hard to break.

We aren’t suggesting that we should cultivate belligerence in our daughters, but this constant cycle of pressure and reward for good behavior doesn’t help girls feel confident later in the rough-and-tumble world of the workplace. The impulse that lets many boys shrug off nagging parents, break curfews, and refuse to take showers is the same impulse in adulthood that inures them to the fear of annoying their bosses by asking for pay increases and promotions. They worry less about upsetting their superiors because, unlike their sisters, they haven’t been trained to fall into line, and their brains aren’t wired to be as sensitive to criticism.

When you are an overstretched parent—let’s face it—having a daughter you can count on to be the good child can make your own life much easier. But if you want your daughter to have the confidence later in life to buck the system and advocate for herself, you need to encourage her to be a little bit bad.

It’s a two-step process. First, don’t overly criticize the bad behavior. When your precious girl does interrupt, shriek, throw a tantrum, or tear her new dress, check your instinct to reprimand her. And especially check your instinct to tell her she’s acting out of character, as if somehow being the golden girl was what she’s supposed to be. Phrases such as “Mary, I’m so disappointed, it’s not like you to cause a fuss/not help/be naughty” need to go.

Second, don’t overpraise the good behavior. This seems counterintuitive, almost wrong, but it’s just the flip side of trying to get our girls out of the habit of feeling they always have to be ideal. Because if you constantly reward your daughter for helping out, keeping quiet, or being tidy, you’re instilling a psychological addiction to goodness and to the praise that follows it.