Fun Low-Prep Confidence Building Activities For Your 7-Year-Old Niece That Actually Work
Last month, my sister left 7-year-old Lila with me for four days while she went to an out-of-state work conference. I’d been looking forward to our auntie sleepover week for months, but the second my sister pulled out of the driveway, Lila curled up on the end of my couch, twisted the end of her blue braid around her finger, and wouldn’t answer when I asked what she wanted to do first. Her mom had texted me a heads up: a popular girl in Lila’s second grade class told her her butterfly drawing was “ugly” a week earlier, and she’d refused to draw anything since. She’d also gotten nervous about speaking up in dance class, and hid behind her mom when we met up for dinner the week before. I’d promised my sister I’d help her loosen up a little, and I’d already wasted 20 minutes scrolling through Pinterest for confidence-building activities, only to find pages of expensive craft kits and elaborate weekend ideas I didn’t have the time or budget for. So I started with what I already had lying around my house.
I had a stack of leftover construction paper and broken crayons from the after-school tutoring I do a couple days a week. I spread them out on the kitchen table and said I was sick of making good art. What if we had a contest to see who could make the worst possible drawing of a house? Lila blinked and said, “What if I’m bad at it?” I said, “That’s the whole point. If your drawing ends up looking good, you automatically lose.” I went first: I drew a house with a triangular roof on the bottom, purple grass, 11 windows, and a dog living in the chimney. Lila snort-laughed, which is my favorite sound, and picked up a crayon. She drew a house with a door on the roof and a tree growing through the living room, and we spent 10 minutes arguing over whose was worse. We taped both to my fridge, and by the end of the week, she’d added three more bad drawings to the collection. I’ve left them up, actually.
The thing I’ve learned working with little kids this age is that most of their self-doubt comes from the new pressure to be “good” at everything all of a sudden. First grade is all about messing up, but by second grade, kids start comparing their work to each other, and suddenly everything has to be perfect to be worth doing. Taking the goal of being good completely off the table removes all the pressure. No one yells, no one judges, you just get to make something silly. Lila was doodling on my grocery list by day two, no prompting needed.
It rained on Wednesday, so we couldn’t go to the park, and I came up with what I call a backward scavenger hunt. Normally, an adult makes the list and the kid hunts for the things. This time, I told her I was too tired to make a list, and she had to be the one in charge. She got to make all the rules, write the list (I helped her spell the hard words, but she did most of it), and tell me where to go looking. Her list had things like “find a rock that looks like a french fry”, “find a sock with a hole in it”, “hug the biggest tree in the front yard”. I pretended I couldn’t find the rock, and asked her for help. She marched me all around the yard, pointed right to it, and told me I needed to look closer. By the end, she was bossing me around, laughing, and didn’t even notice she was leading the whole activity.
Confidence isn’t about telling kids they’re great all the time – it’s about letting them practice leading, and proving to themselves that they can make good choices. I never once corrected her list or told her her idea was silly. Even when she added “eat a chocolate chip cookie” as the final item, I went with it. Just letting her call all the shots for an hour did more for her energy than any pep talk I could have given.
Later that day, I remembered the wobbly bathroom shelf that had been leaning for two months, that I just hadn’t gotten around to tightening. I told Lila I couldn’t reach the back screw because the shelf was above the toilet and I’m too short (it’s true). I got my small step stool, gave her a tiny screwdriver that fit her hand, and showed her how to line up the screw and turn it. She held it steady, twisted it all the way in, and when we were done, we arranged her extra stuffed animals on the shelf. That night, she called her mom and told her she fixed my shelf all by herself. Kids this age don’t just want to play – they want to contribute. Giving them a small, real job that actually matters, instead of a pretend activity, makes them feel capable. I didn’t care if the screw was a little looser than I’d have done it myself; the shelf hasn’t fallen yet, and that’s all that matters.
When my sister came to pick Lila up, Lila ran to the car and showed her the bad drawing she’d taken home to hang on her own fridge. Last weekend, she came over again, and brought her full sketchbook, full of drawings of cats, butterflies, and penguin bakers that sell stinky cheese cupcakes. She still covers her paper with her arm when she draws sometimes, and she still wants to quit when she messes up a cartwheel on my lawn. But now when that happens, she’ll stop, grin, and say “Want to do bad cartwheels instead? Last one to the fence loses.”
I don’t think any one activity is going to fix all the self-doubt that comes with being 7, when the whole world is suddenly full of other people’s opinions. But these small, low-prep activities don’t require any planning or extra money, they just require stepping back and letting the kid lead. It’s working, for now, and that’s enough for me.
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