Fun, Low-Prep Confidence Building Activities To Do With Your 7-Year-Old Niece
My sister texted me at 7 a.m. last Tuesday: “Flight got moved up to 10, can you take Lila for four days? I owe you big.” I said yes before I remembered the last time I’d watched her, two months prior. She’d refused to order her own ice cream, crumpled up a drawing she’d spent 20 minutes on and said it was “stupid,” and told me she didn’t want to play mini-golf because everyone else would be better than her. I knew I didn’t want to spend four days coaxing her out of her shell, so I jotted down a few low-prep ideas I’d gotten from my teacher friend, and crossed my fingers they’d work.
The first thing we tried was a reverse scavenger hunt. I grabbed a paper bag and picked 10 small random things from around my apartment: a pineapple-shaped eraser, a sparkly hair clip, a stray button, a single Skittle, and the lost foot of her stuffed rabbit she’d left at my place last visit. I handed the bag to her and told her the rules: she got to hide all 10 items anywhere in the apartment, no restrictions except no toaster (I needed it for toast the next day). Once everything was hidden, she had to give me clues to find them.
She blinked and asked, “Really? I can hide them anywhere?” I nodded, and she took off. For 45 minutes, I sat on the couch drinking coffee while she tiptoed around, rearranging my bookshelf and whispering to herself as she moved things. When I finally started hunting, she bounced on her heels the whole time, cackling when I walked right past the Skittle she’d tucked into the soil of my pothos plant. After I found the last one, she immediately asked if she could hide them all again. It hit me halfway through the second round that most of what 7-year-olds do all day is follow other people’s rules: sit here, color this way, find the right answer. This activity put her fully in charge. There was no wrong hiding spot, no penalty if I found everything in two minutes. It just let her be the boss for a little while, which is something she rarely gets to be.
Next, we did mystery ingredient cookies. I had a pre-made chocolate chip cookie mix in my pantry, so I pulled it out and told her I’d do all the boring measuring, but she got full control over picking one extra ingredient from my pantry to add. She climbed up on the step stool to my cabinet and rummaged for five minutes before pulling out a bag of crushed pretzels I’d forgotten I bought. She dumped the whole bag in, stirred the batter, and plopped every blob onto the baking sheet herself. When they came out of the oven, they were sweet and salty and actually really good. I took my first bite and told her that straight out, no fake praise. She immediately wrapped three of them in a paper towel to save for her mom, scrawling “I MADE THESE” on the napkin in crayon. The thing here is that most of the time, when adults bake with kids, we let them stir for 10 seconds then take over. Giving her full ownership of a low-stakes choice meant there was nothing to be scared of. If the cookies had been terrible, we’d have just ordered pizza and thrown them out. No big deal. But because they worked, she got to see that her call turned out good.
After Lila mentioned she thought she was “bad at drawing,” we did a no-winner art contest. I pulled out two pieces of paper and told her the only rule was we had to draw the silliest cat we could think of, and we weren’t allowed to call our own drawing stupid. I drew a cat with 12 legs and a pepperoni pizza for a head, and she laughed so hard she snort-laughed. She drew a cat that lived in a hot air balloon and had spaghetti for fur, and when she finished she didn’t crumple it up—she held it up to show me. We taped both drawings to my fridge, side by side, no picking a winner. Kids are used to comparing their work to other kids’ at school, and empty praise like “that’s great!” doesn’t fool them. When you take the “best” part out of art, you take away all the pressure. She ended up drawing three more silly cats that afternoon, just for fun.
On our last day, I asked her to do me a favor: my throat was a little scratchy from allergies, so could she order both our tacos for me at the food truck we went to for lunch. She hesitated at first, said what if she messed up the order. I told her even if we got the wrong thing, it’s still tacos, and I’d stand right next to her the whole time. She did it, her voice was quiet, but she got the order right. When we walked away, she kept her head up higher than I’d seen it all weekend. The trick here wasn’t pushing her to “be brave” — it was framing the ask as helping me, not a test of her confidence. She wasn’t doing it to prove anything, just to lend me a hand.
When my sister came to pick her up, Lila dragged her straight to the fridge to show off the silly cats and pulled out the pretzel cookies from the fridge. One weekend isn’t going to erase all of Lila’s self-doubt — she still hesitates before raising her hand in class, and still crumples up drawings sometimes when she thinks they’re wrong. But I saw small shifts: she asked a group of girls at the park if she could join their chalk drawing on Saturday, something I’d never seen her do before. Confidence building doesn’t have to be fancy programs or big speeches. It’s just a stack of small, low-stakes wins where kids get to lead, and no one gets upset if it’s not perfect. I already bought another bag of cookie mix, just in case she wants to test another secret ingredient next time she stays.
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