What I’ve Been Messing Around With My 7-Year-Old Niece, And The Confidence Thing No One Warned Me About
My sister went through a pretty garbage breakup a couple months back, so I’ve been picking my niece Lila up from elementary school every Wednesday, hanging out with her for three hours until my sister gets off work. Lila’s seven, used to be the kind of kid who’d belt Disney songs at the top of her lungs in the Target checkout line, but lately she’s gone all quiet—hides behind people when they talk to her, won’t raise her hand at school even when her teacher says she definitely knows the answer. My sister asked if I could keep an eye out for little things that might help her perk back up, maybe build a little of that spark she lost, and of course I said yes. Then I went home and immediately panicked, because I’m 26, I eat cereal for dinner half the time, what do I know about confidence building?
I dug through a bunch of random online posts first, tried a few of the activities people swore by. First was the confidence journal. I grabbed a sparkly unicorn one from the Target dollar spot, a pack of glitter gel pens, sat her down at my kitchen table after school and explained we’d write down three good things we did every week. She colored the whole cover pink with unicorns, wrote “I PET MY GOLDFISH” on the first line, and every other page after that is just doodles of cats with too many legs. It’s not a disaster, exactly, it just didn’t do the confidence thing people promised. Next I tried the home talent show, which was a disaster. People said it’s great for practicing performing in front of people. I cleared my living room, roped my roommate into being an audience member, pulled out my phone to film. Lila did one cartwheel, then froze, turned bright red, and bolted behind the couch, wouldn’t come out for ten minutes. I felt so awful I ordered her a large fry and a milkshake to apologize, and we didn’t mention the talent show again.
I tried the kids rock climbing place too, that was another flop. I thought “accomplishing a hard thing = confidence” right? That’s what everyone says. She got halfway up the easiest wall, the one that’s only ten feet off the ground, froze, started crying, and I had to stand at the bottom talking the 16-year-old instructor through lowering her down slow. She sat on my lap the rest of the time eating a cherry popsicle, wouldn’t even touch the harness again. I left that day thinking I was just terrible at this, that I’d never figure out what she needed.
Then the thing we do now just sort of happened by accident, no planning at all. We were walking home from school one Wednesday, it had just stopped raining, and we passed that empty overgrown lot by the bus stop, the one everyone cuts through to get to the grocery store and no one owns. Lila stopped dead, started picking up smooth gray rocks out of the dirt, then pointed to a broken old bird bath half-buried in weeds that was full of rainwater, and said we should build a fairy village. I didn’t have any plans that afternoon, so I said sure. We dug out little paths with a stick I found behind a nearby tree. She found a chipped old teacup half-buried in mud, that’s the fairy bathtub. We found a snail the next week, and she named him Gary, said he’s the village mailman.
I didn’t think anything of it for a few weeks, just that it was something she liked doing. Then one afternoon, the older lady who lives in the house right next to the lot came out, and I immediately tensed up—figured she was gonna yell at us for trespassing, mess up all our stuff. Before I could even open my mouth to apologize, Lila walked right up to her, grabbed her hand, and pulled her over to the village to give her a full tour. She explained which fairy lives in the acorn cap house, that the glow sticks we hide under the fern are for fairy night parties, and asked the lady if she had any old jar lids we could use for fairy tables. The lady ended up bringing us out an old wooden birdhouse her grandson outgrew, that’s now our main fairy castle.
Last week, Lila had show and tell at school. She brought the tiny rock chair she carved (well, scraped with a nail) for the queen fairy, and stood up in front of the whole class and talked about the village for five minutes straight. My sister sent me a blurry photo from the back of the classroom, and Lila’s grinning, holding up the rock, no hiding behind anything.
It’s not like she’s a totally different kid now, don’t get me wrong. Last week she still hid behind my back when the Starbucks barista asked her what size lemonade she wanted. She still won’t raise her hand in math even when she gets all the answers right. I still step on her little fairy houses by accident, and she yells at me, and we have to build them again. The whole thing is messy, it’s in an abandoned lot, half the stuff is garbage we dug out of the dirt.
I used to think confidence building was all about pushing kids to do the scary stuff, practice performing, check off little boxes on a list. Now I think it’s just having something that’s totally yours, that no one is grading you on, that you don’t have to be good at. No one’s testing Lila on her fairy village. It doesn’t matter if the paths are lumpy or the acorn cap roof falls off. It’s just hers.
We still try other random stuff sometimes. I’m taking her to paint pottery next Saturday, who knows, that’ll probably flop too. But for now, our three o’clock Wednesdays digging in the dirt are working fine enough. I don’t need a perfect activity to make her confident. I just need to let her have her weird little village, that’s all. (Word count: 1182)
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