Fun Stuff I Do With My 7-Year-Old Niece That Accidentally Built Her Confidence
My sister’s working double shifts at the hospital most weeks, so I’ve got my niece Lila every other Friday night and Saturday. She just turned 7, started first grade this year, and a month ago she showed up at my door with her drawing notebook crumpled in her backpack, sniffling because some girl in her class said her drawing of a mermaid with 12 arms was “ugly and weird.” I panicked, obviously. I don’t have kids, I can barely keep a houseplant alive. I googled “confidence building activities for 7 year old girls” and got all this garbage about gratitude journals and “letting them lead a pretend board meeting” which sounds like something a person who’s never met a 7 year old made up. So I dumped the google results and just messed around with whatever I had lying around. Most of it was unplanned, half of it ended up messier than I expected, but… some of it actually worked?
First thing that sticks out is the bad art contest. I had a half-used pack of construction paper and a box of dried-out markers left over from my cousin’s kid’s birthday party last summer, just sitting in my hall closet. Lila wouldn’t pull her crumpled mermaid out of her bag at first, kept saying it was stupid. So I said screw good art, let’s have a contest to draw the worst unicorn possible. Winner gets to pick the after-dinner snack. I went first, drew mine so bad it looked like a moldy potato with a stick stuck in the top for a horn. She laughed so hard she snort-laughed, spit out her apple juice all over my beige couch. The stain’s still there, honestly. I’ve tried scrubbing it twice and gave up. By the time it was her turn, she didn’t overthink it. She drew a unicorn with 7 horns, all coming out of its butt, and added googly eyes that she glued crookedly all over its legs. When we voted, she obviously won, got to pick the sour gummy worms, and then she just… pulled out her crumpled 12-armed mermaid out of her backpack, and said “Actually, I think this one’s good too. It’s just weird, not bad.” I didn’t give a big speech or anything, just said “Hell yeah it’s good” (my sister lets her swear around me as long as she doesn’t do it at school) and that was that.
The next thing that wasn’t a total disaster was the backyard obstacle course. She’d been refusing to climb the rope ladder at the neighborhood playground for months, said she was gonna fall and break her neck. My backyard’s tiny, just big enough for a rusty old picnic table and a patch of weeds that I pretend is grass. I found an old rope my neighbor left by the trash last spring, it had knots tied in it already for some reason, so I tied one end to my fence post and the other to the leg of the picnic table. Drug out all the old lawn chairs I’ve been meaning to donate to make a hop obstacle, dragged out the broom for limbo, threw my old hula hoop on the ground for jumping through. First time she tried the rope, she got halfway up, slipped, scraped her knee on the picnic table leg. I thought I’d messed up, got the band-aid out ready for the waterworks, but she just wiped her eye and said “Can we drag your couch cushions out here? If I fall I wanna land on something soft.” Duh. I didn’t think of that. So I dragged both my living room cushions out across the grass, she tried two more times, fell both times, got up again, third time she made it all the way to the top, jumped off into the cushions, screamed so loud the old lady next door came to her back fence to check if we were dying. Now every time she comes over, she rearranges the whole thing, adds stupid rules like “you have to meow three times before you limbo” or “the zombie has to chase you at the end.” Last week I watched her climb the full rope ladder at the park all by herself, no holding on, no asking for help. Just did it. Didn’t even look over at me to cheer until she was at the top waving.
I tried forcing a fancy tea party once, because I thought that’s what 7 year old girls are supposed to like. She got bored after five minutes, started throwing the plastic macarons at my head, and that’s how we ended up with the zombie chase routine anyway. So that worked out, even if my original plan was garbage. I also tried the fancy cookie baking thing everyone raves about, that was a total mess. I thought it’d be fun, we’d make heart cookies, decorate them. She dumped the entire bottle of blue food coloring into the dough. Whole batch came out the color of a stagnant pond. Tasted like vanilla and food coloring dye. I was gonna toss ’em, but she insisted we wrap them up and bring them to my mom (her grandma) for Sunday dinner. Mom ate one, smiled, said it was delicious, then coughed into her napkin for five minutes straight. Lila was so proud she gave one to the mail man too. He also smiled and took it. I don’t think he ate it, but who cares? Lila talked about “our blue cookies” for a week.
I don’t know. I’m not good at this whole confidence building thing. Sometimes she just wants to sit on my couch and watch 45 minutes of 10 year olds doing dance trends on TikTok, and I don’t force her to do a craft or an obstacle course. Some days we fight over Uno because she says my +4 is “against the rules” and I say no, that’s the actual rule, and she pouts for 10 minutes then forgives me if I give her a gummy worm. There’s glitter in my car from the slime we made that I’ll never get out, there’s the juice stain on my couch, I’m always out of breath after we play zombie chase.
But last week my sister sent me a photo of Lila standing in front of her first grade class for show and tell, holding up her 12-armed mermaid drawing, and she’d written in big crayon letters at the top “WEIRD IS GOOD THANKS TO MY AUNT.” I didn’t plan that. None of this stuff was planned. I don’t have a neat list of foolproof activities that work every time. Mostly it’s just showing up, letting the mess happen, and not making a big deal out of it when things go wrong. That’s enough, right? It feels like it’s enough, anyway.
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