Fun Confidence Building Activities For 7 Year Old Girls: What I Tried With My Niece
Last month, my sister texted me at 2 a.m. asking if I could watch Lila, her 7-year-old, for four straight days while she covered a last-minute work conference out of state. I said yes before I overthought it, then immediately panicked. Lila’s always been the kid who tucks her chin into her chest when you ask her what she wants for snack, who crumples up her drawing and shoves it in her pocket if anyone looks too long. I wanted these four days to be more than frozen pizza and reruns of Bluey – I wanted something that might help her feel a little more comfortable sharing herself, without making a big awkward deal out of her shyness.
It poured rain the first full day, so our plans for the city zoo were off. I remembered a trick a first grade teacher friend of mine mentioned, so we tried a reverse scavenger hunt. Instead of racing to find items from a list, we each made three little things – a paper crown, a silly-faced painted rock, a handwritten note that said “hope your day is good” – then hid them around the neighborhood for strangers to find. Lila hung back at first, twisting her ponytail and asking if people would think we were weird. I told her I already thought the whole thing was weird, so that meant we were doing it right. She hid her first note under a neighbor’s doormat, then peeked around the hedge for 10 minutes waiting. When Mrs. Henderson, the retired teacher who lives two houses down, picked it up and waved right at us, Lila ducked behind the hedge but grinned so big her dimples popped. It clicked for me right then: confidence doesn’t have to come from winning a game or performing on a stage. For quiet kids, that kind of pressure just makes them shrink back. This activity is low-stakes: if no one finds your thing, no one yells at you, no trophy is taken away. If they do, you get a tiny, happy rush from doing something nice no one asked you to do. It’s practice for feeling brave without the pressure to be perfect.
That night, we did bad idea dinner. Lila almost never says what she wants to eat, always just shrugs and says “whatever” when anyone asks. The rules are simple: each of us picks one really weird food combination that sounds bad, you have to make it, and you have to try at least one bite. Lila picked pickles and chocolate chips on waffles. I picked peanut butter and mustard on saltine crackers. She stared at the mixing bowl for a full minute before she said, “I know this is gross.” I told her that’s the point – if it’s good, we messed up. We tried both. Her pickles and waffles weren’t even that bad, actually, and she ate half of it. She laughed so hard when I gagged on my peanut butter cracker that she snort-laughed, something I’d never seen her do around anyone but her mom. The thing here is, 7-year-olds are told what to do all day long: sit crisscross, color inside the lines, eat your vegetables, listen to the teacher. Bad idea dinner takes all the rules away. There’s no wrong choice, because the wrong choice is what we’re going for. It lets kids practice picking something, anything, without the fear of disappointing someone. That’s way more confidence-building than making them order their own food at a restaurant, which always feels like a test to me.
The next day the rain cleared, so we sat on my porch and did the mystery eraser drawing challenge. Lila loves to draw but always shoves it out of sight before anyone can see it, so I made this one up on the spot. Rules: you draw whatever you want for five minutes, then you have to erase one big part of it – not just a messy line, a whole section – and draw something new there. Lila started drawing a pink cat, then erased the entire head and drew a fire-breathing dragon head on the cat body. She ended up with a cat-dragon eating mint chocolate chip ice cream, and she held it up to show me before she could remember to hide it. I didn’t say “wow you’re so talented” – I just asked her what the cat-dragon’s name was. She said it was Sparky, and he only steals ice cream from little kids who don’t share. The lesson here is that most kids Lila’s age think any mistake ruins whatever they’re making. If they draw one line wrong, the whole picture is garbage, so they don’t want anyone to see it. This activity teaches that changes and mistakes can make things more interesting. It doesn’t matter if you’re good at drawing – it’s just practice for being okay with imperfection.
On our last day together, we went for a neighborhood walk where Lila was the official tour guide. She got to pick every turn, and she had to tell me a story about every interesting thing we passed. She led me straight to the big gnarled bush at the end of the block that looks like a T-Rex, and told me it eats lost socks from the laundry line down the street. She stopped at the stop sign with a unicorn sticker on it, and said the sticker was put there by a unicorn who got a speeding ticket. By the end of the 45 minute walk, she was talking a mile a minute, no more long pauses where she waited for me to tell her what to do next. All it takes is giving up control. You don’t need any special supplies, you don’t have to plan anything. Just let them lead, and ask questions instead of correcting their stories. That’s it.
When my sister pulled up to pick Lila up, Lila ran to the car before my sister even got out, pulled out the Sparky the cat-dragon drawing and the painted rock we’d kept, and talked the whole ride home about everything we did. My sister texted me later that night, surprised Lila had volunteered to show off all her work, something she almost never does. None of this turned Lila into a super outgoing kid overnight. She still tucks her chin when she meets new people, she still crumples up drawings sometimes when she thinks she messed up a line. These aren’t magic fixes. But that’s the thing, right? You don’t need magic. Confidence is built in all those tiny, silly, low-stakes moments where you get to lead, where you get to be wrong, where no one is grading you. Next time Lila comes to visit, we’re doing bad idea breakfast. I already picked my combination: cornflakes with orange juice instead of milk. She’s definitely going to think it’s disgusting, and that’s exactly how it’s supposed to be.
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