7-Year-Old Niece Confidence Activities I Tried (That Aren’t Stupid Pre-Made Craft Kits I Bought On Impulse)
My sister texted me a couple months ago, all quiet, saying Lila (my 7-year-old niece, duh) had started hiding in the bathroom during art club break instead of joining the other girls, and won’t raise her hand even when she knows the answer. She got so upset when she messed up a drawing of a horse two weeks ago that she erased it until the paper tore and refused to turn it in at all. I’m her cool aunt, the one who lets her stay up 20 minutes late and eat raw cookie dough, so obviously I felt like I had to do something. I Googled around for ideas and got all these generic lists that sound like they were written by someone who’s never spent more than 10 minutes alone with a 7 year old. All “start a daily gratitude journal!” “put on a family talent show!” Yeah, great. If your kid is into that. Lila would just stare at me and ask for more iPad time.
I’ll admit I messed up the first try bad. I bought that pre-painted birdhouse kit from Target, $12, all pre-cut wood and little pots of neon paint. I set it all up nice on my kitchen table before she arrived, feeling so proud of my planning. She sat down, looked at it, and immediately said, “What if I paint it wrong?” I said there’s no wrong way! But she was already leaning in, squinting to get the edges of the roof perfectly straight, got one tiny glob of pink on the white trim, and her lip started trembling. Ten minutes later we were both sitting on the floor, she’s crying into my old sweatshirt, and the birdhouse was in the trash because she said she hated it. I ate three chocolate chip cookies after she left that day, feeling like I’d messed up worse than if I’d just let us watch Barbie movies all afternoon.
So after that I threw out the whole list idea. I just started leaning into whatever silly thing popped into my head when she’s over, no fancy plans, no end goal in mind. The first good thing that happened was the bad art contest. I still had the half pack of crayons and scrap printer paper I’d pulled out for the birdhouse, so I just said, “You know what? All the good art is boring. Let’s have a contest to see who can draw the worst cat possible.” She blinked at me like I’d just said we were gonna go jump in a mud puddle inside the house. I went first, drew a cat with seven legs, one eye the size of a quarter, a tail that went off the page into my old work notes printed on the back. She started cackling so hard she snort-laughed, which is her absolute favorite thing to do. Then she drew her cat: it was on fire, eating an ice cream cone that was also a rabbit, and one of its legs was a lollipop. We went three more rounds after that: worst tree, worst unicorn, worst aunt. When we were done we taped all of them to my fridge, right next to my messy grocery list, and made each other trophies out of an old soda can and a glitter sticker she brought in her bag. That night my sister texted me a screenshot of Lila telling her, “Auntie lets me draw bad and it’s fun.” I almost cried into my coffee that morning.
Another thing we do, I didn’t even realize it was confidence building until my sister pointed it out. When Lila stays over for the weekend, I let her plan the entire dinner. No rules, I mean it. I know, I know, don’t @ me about nutrition. It’s only once a month, c’mon. Last month she decided the menu was: gummy bears for appetizer, Cheez-Its with extra hot sauce (she saw me put hot sauce on my eggs once) for salad, blue popsicles for main course, and one single M&M for dessert. We walked to the corner store down the street, and I made her count out the money herself, carry the bag, check the receipt to make sure we got the right change. She messed up the counting the first time, had to start over, and I just leaned against the counter and waited—didn’t jump in to fix it, didn’t whisper the number under my breath. She got it right the second time, and was so puffed up with pride she walked a little faster on the way home. Of course she got a stomach ache an hour after dinner, from all the sugar and the hot sauce on the Cheez-Its. But she didn’t cry or blame me, she just curled up on the couch with a glass of water and said, “Next time I’m only doing one popsicle instead of two. Still worth it, though.” How many adults do you know that can roll with a mistake like that? I can’t even do that half the time.
Full transparency, not everything works. I did try that trick I saw online, where you practice giving speeches to the dog to build public speaking confidence. Total flop. Lila got halfway through her speech about her favorite My Little Pony, and my dog Maggie got up, sniffed her shoe, and walked out to the backyard to chase a squirrel. Lila clammed up immediately, said it was stupid, and wouldn’t try again. So that one gets scratched off the list. No big deal.
We go to this crummy old park near my apartment a lot, too. The playground has a slide that’s chipped so bad you can get a splinter if you’re not careful, and there’s a little patch of overgrown woods at the back. Last month she started collecting all this random junk there: a bent blue bottle cap, a marble someone lost, a lopsided acorn, half the tail of a broken plastic T-Rex. She wanted to build a fairy house. I started to help, moved a stick she’d propped up against the wall because I thought it would fall, and she got all quiet and stepped back. So I just said “sorry, that’s your house. You tell me what you need, I’ll get it for you.” I sat on a park bench with my iced coffee and scrolled my phone while she built it. It’s totally lopsided, the roof fell down once when a squirrel ran through, and she just rebuilt it in a totally different shape instead of getting upset. Last week she brought the story of the fairy (named Blue Cap, obviously) for show and tell, and talked the whole time without getting nervous.
I still don’t know if I’m doing this right. I don’t have a neat list to hand you, I don’t have a perfect ending where Lila becomes the most confident kid in her second grade class overnight. She still gets nervous before presentations, still crumples up her drawing and throws it away when she doesn’t like it sometimes. But I’ve stopped trying to “build her confidence” like it’s a bookshelf you put together with an instruction manual. It’s just letting her be messy, let her mess up, let the mess not be the end of the world. That lopsided fairy house is still in the woods, I walk past it sometimes when I go for a walk, and it’s still standing. My fridge still has all those bad cat drawings taped up. The half-built terrible Lego set we made last weekend is still leaning on my bookshelf, half fallen apart. It’s fine. None of it has to be perfect. That’s the point, right?
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