Fun Confidence-Building Activities to Do With Your 7-Year-Old Niece: What I Tried That Actually Worked
Last month, my sister flew out for a 4-day work conference, and 7-year-old Lila moved into my guest room with her sparkly sleeping bag and a backpack full of half-colored coloring pages. The first morning, I stood by the pantry asking what cereal she wanted for breakfast, and she twisted the end of her pink braid so hard her knuckles went white and said, “You pick. I always pick wrong.” My sister had warned me Lila’s been holding back more lately: she won’t raise her hand in class even when she knows the answer, she crumples up her art drawings if a line isn’t straight, and she says she’s “bad at everything” before she even tries. I’d been browsing lists of confidence activities online, but most felt either too cheesy or too expensive, so I made it up as I went along. Four days in, I had a handful of low-prep things that actually stuck.
The first thing we tried on that rainy first morning was a reverse scavenger hunt. Instead of me giving Lila a list of things to find, she got to make the list for me. She grabbed a crayon and an index card, drawing little pictures for words she couldn’t spell yet: a sparkly thing, a thing that smells like cookies, a thing softer than my hand. I pretended I couldn’t find the sparkly thing for five minutes, until she huffed and jumped up to lead me to the bathroom, where she’d hidden my glittery lip balm on the back of the shelf. By the end, she was making up silly rules: I had to sing while I walked, I had to give her a high five every time I found something.
I realized halfway through that this works because it’s totally her call. There’s no wrong item, no points to lose, just her being in charge of what we do. Most of the time when adults hang out with kids, we’re the ones setting the agenda. This 10-minute activity flips that, and it doesn’t need any special supplies beyond paper and a crayon you already have lying around.
The next day, we tried “mistake baking.” I pulled out my go-to chocolate chip cookie recipe and told Lila the only rule was we had to change it on purpose. No “right” cookie allowed. She thought that was the coolest thing ever, immediately deciding to add half a jar of rainbow sprinkles and three extra shakes of salt. The cookies came out crunchier than usual, and a little briny, but we ate three warm ones right off the tray, and brought a bag of them to the mail carrier that afternoon. Lila told her straight up “We added extra salt on purpose, it’s our mistake cookie.”
Seven-year-olds are just starting to learn that there are “right” and “wrong” ways to do things at school: right answers on math sheets, right ways to draw a tree, right ways to cut along the lines. That makes a lot of them scared to try anything that isn’t going to be perfect. Normalizing intentional mistakes takes the pressure way off. There’s no failing when you set out to do something different.
One afternoon, I mentioned cutting out paper shapes for a bulletin board I was making for my job, and Lila immediately backed up. She said she couldn’t help because she’s bad at cutting. Instead of pushing her to try anyway, or telling her she was actually great, I said “Oh, actually, I never learned how to hold scissors the right way. Your teacher just taught you this year, right? Can you show me?” Her face lit up. She sat down next to me, took the scissors, showed me how to tuck my thumb in the little hole, and corrected my grip twice. By the end, she was cutting out her own shapes to add to my board, and made a 5-legged cat that’s still hanging on my fridge.
What I didn’t expect was how much this hits different than just praising her. When you let a kid teach you something, they don’t have to take your word for it that they’re good at something. They see it for themselves. You’re not just saying “great cutting” — you’re asking them for help, which tells them their knowledge matters. It doesn’t have to be scissors, either. It can be tying shoes, doing a cartwheel, playing a level on their favorite game — whatever they’ve learned recently that you can pretend you don’t know how to do.
We did have one messy, imperfect day. On our last afternoon, we went to the mini putt course by the mall, and Lila missed three putts in a row, crossed her arms and said she was terrible and wanted to leave. I didn’t give her a pep talk or tell her she just had to try harder. I said “Want to get vanilla ice cream from the stand over there, and then decide if you want to try again or go feed ducks at the park down the street?” She chose ice cream, then ducks, and we never went back. I used to think confidence building meant pushing kids to push through every hard thing, but actually it’s letting them choose when to stop — that they don’t have to perform to be okay.
When my sister came to pick her up, Lila dragged her through my house showing her all the things we’d done: the 5-legged cat on the fridge, the leftover mistake cookies, the secret album on my phone full of photos of her climbing the big rock at the park and her silly drawings that she captioned herself. My sister texted me a few days later that Lila had volunteered to read her chapter book out loud to the whole family at dinner, something she hadn’t done in almost two months.
Lila still gets nervous sometimes. She still says she can’t do things before she tries, and she still crumples up drawings sometimes. These little activities didn’t fix her confidence overnight, they just gave her a few small moments where she got to be in charge, be wrong, and be the expert. That’s all it really takes, most days.
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