Fun Confidence Building Activities To Do With Your 7 Year Old Niece: A Caregiver’s Real, Low-Prep Tips
Three weeks ago, my sister left her 7-year-old daughter Lila with me for a four-day work trip, and the first 24 hours were quiet enough to hear the dehumidifier running. Lila’s default answer to almost any question starting with “Do you want to…” is “No, I’ll mess it up.” Her teacher had mentioned at the last family birthday that Lila won’t raise her hand in class even when she’s the only kid who knows the answer, and she sits out soccer drills because she’s scared she’ll trip in front of everyone. I’d promised my sister I’d do more than just park Lila in front of the TV, but I also didn’t want to force a bunch of cheesy “confidence building” activities that would just make her retreat more. By Saturday, a random rainstorm canceled our trip to the zoo, so we improvised.
I’d seen a casual idea online a while back and forgot about it until I was staring at a rainy window: reverse scavenger hunt. Instead of me giving Lila a list of things to find, she got to be in charge. She got a sticky note and a pen, and could write or draw clues (since she’s still learning to spell long words) for me to hunt around the apartment. At first she just drew a cat, which was easy, but after I found my cat Mochi hiding under the bed, she got bolder. She drew a thing that smells like grass, and I held up two options: my old hiking boots and the vase of dandelions I picked on the way home from the grocery store Tuesday. She laughed so hard she snort-laughed when I admitted the hiking boots definitely smelled more like grass. By the end she was making up riddle clues that took me ten minutes to solve, and she was bouncing on her heels the whole time I looked. I realized later that Lila almost never gets to be fully in charge of anything. At school she follows directions, at home her 3-year-old brother takes half her mom’s attention and most activities are planned around the whole family. Being the boss of a silly 20-minute game doesn’t sound like a big deal, but it let her practice making choices and seeing that people will follow her lead. No one corrected her clues, no one said her drawing was too messy, it was just her game.
After that, I dragged out the box of random stuff I keep by the door to donate or throw away: an old stuffed rabbit with a loose ear, a broken beaded necklace, a mug with a small crack that still holds coffee if you don’t fill it to the top. I dumped it on the coffee table and told her I was way too clumsy to fix these small things, could she help me out? She grabbed the stuffed rabbit first. I got her a child-safe needle and thread, and she fumbled for almost ten minutes getting the ear sewn back on. It’s lopsided, the thread is three different colors, but it stays on. I set the rabbit on my bookshelf right where she can see it when she comes over. The thing I’ve been thinking about since then is how often adults jump in to fix things for kids before they even ask. If I’d taken the needle from her when she fumbled the first three tries, I would have gotten a perfect straight seam, but she would have left knowing she couldn’t do it. A lopsided rabbit ear doesn’t hurt anyone, but the feeling that you did that, even if it’s messy, that’s the stuff confidence sticks to.
Next we baked cookies, but we did it backward. We had a pouch of chocolate chip cookie mix in the pantry, and I told her we’d follow the basic recipe and add whatever else she wanted. She wanted three extra handfuls of sprinkles, a splash of orange juice because “oranges make everything better,” and half the batch got extra salt instead of extra sugar “for Auntie because you like salty things.” They came out lumpy, some were too sweet, some were way too salty, but we ate three each anyway. When she called her mom that night, she didn’t say “Auntie made cookies” she said “I made cookies, and I got to put all the stuff I wanted in.” That line stuck with me. 7-year-olds are old enough to want to contribute, but most of the time we don’t let them because it’s easier to just do it ourselves. It takes five extra minutes to let them dump the flour and wipe extra sprinkles off the floor, but that five minutes sticks with them way longer than a perfect batch of cookies.
After cookies we were full and slumping on the couch, and I suggested a silly compliment game. The rules were simple: you go first, you say one thing you like about yourself, then one thing you like about the other person, and you have to say both in a silly accent. At first she said “I don’t have anything I like about me.” So I went first, in a really bad British accent: “I think I’m jolly good at finding lost remote controls, and I think you’re brilliant at making up silly scavenger hunt clues.” She thought for a minute, then did a pirate voice and said “I’m good at drawing unicorns, and I like that you let me put extra sprinkles on cookies.” We did three rounds, each with a more over-the-top accent, and by the end she was making up silly compliments out of nowhere. The trick here is we’re always telling kids what we like about them, but we rarely ask them what they like about themselves. Doing it in a silly game takes all the pressure off – it doesn’t feel like a big serious talk, it just feels like playing.
Lila went home after four days, and she left her lopsided rabbit here and her unicorn drawing taped to my fridge. Last weekend she came over for dinner, and the first thing she asked was if we could do reverse scavenger hunt again. She brought her own little notebook from home to write down clues this time. She still says “I can’t” before she tries new things – last week she refused to try a bike without training wheels, and that’s okay. We’re not working on turning her into a bubbly, outgoing kid who raises her hand every five minutes. We’re just working on small, messy wins that let her see she can make choices, mess up, and still be okay. None of these activities cost any money, none took hours of planning, and they worked a lot better than any pre-made workbook I ever saw. Some days, that’s all you need: a rainy day, a box of old junk, and letting a 7-year-old be the boss for a little while.
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