How to Raise a Self-Confident Daughter

Part One: Get Your Own Self-Confidence On

What’s the starting point to raising a self-confident daughter and empowering adolescent girls? You.

This is the bottom line: if you want your preteen or teen daughter to be confident now and to embody confidence throughout her life (and why wouldn’t you? You know what a great person she is and will continue to become), you, too, have to embody genuine self-confidence. Media messages tell us to find our inner rock star and inner child (yikes!) and to “get our cowgirl on.” But the starting point for being a self-confident parent can be the same: find your inner self-confident parent. Be the parent. Be the self-confident adult.

If you can’t muster what this means, begin by being like the adult you admired most for his or her effectiveness with children when you were growing up. Go there. Imitate what you found admirable.

My uncle John was a life-long bachelor with no children of his own, but he knew how to rally his nieces and nephews into organized action. Where other adults yelled and dictated, John just was and his manner got my cousins and me to act from our better selves. John’s way was honest, focused, lively and present. If John had told me to take my medicine or to stop crying or play fair, I would. He got me to eat burnt toast. He made me think staying home was more fun than going shopping. He never scolded. He never criticized. He was an adult with self-confidence and self-knowing.

We declare what we want to be when we grow up: a veterinarian, a writer, an actor, singer, astronaut, doctor, teacher. And someone inspiring represents that occupation to us, someone admirable who we want to be like. Maybe we want to be like this person more than we want to do what she or he does for a living.

But few of us aspire to great parenting in the same way.

To be more confident and impart confidence to your daughter, begin with your body language. Ask yourself now: what gets me to a state of being self-confident in my own skin? What is the answer? Identify and engage what that is.

A few years ago, after any session of working out with my trainer, Jeff, I was easily in a state of greater self-confidence. Jeff put me through the ropes. He challenged me and had me do things I never thought I could. It was a mental workout, as well as a physical workout. After showering and dressing I rarely put on makeup, but, thanks to the effect of the workout, more people were attracted to me because I had the glow of heightened energy and confidence. People I didn’t know wanted to be with me. If I was in the grocery store, other shoppers offered to go to the front of the store to get me a cart; clerks gave me, free of charge, chocolates and tea and baked goods and, once, 50 pounds of puppy chow. That confidence of being me, and not what came from the “beauty” counter, was the real foundation I put on.

So begin by knowing what puts you in this kind of state. It is what your daughter needs to see and experience in you. Empowering adolescent girls: it includes their being around grown-ups whose self-confidence is genuine. And your own embodiment of self-confidence is one of the top ways you can teach your daughter to be her own fabulous, confident self now.

Heidi Olinger is the founder, president & CEO of Pretty Brainy, Inc. She has been a journalist, marketing director, executive director, foster parent, and aunt. “Being pretty brainy,” she writes, “is about believing in your capabilities and locating the self-confidence to act on your ambitions.”