Fun Confidence-Building Activities to Do With a 7-Year-Old Niece: What Worked For Me
Last month I pulled up to my niece Lila’s elementary school pickup line, and she came out clutching her crumpled art show project to her chest, sparkly pink rain boots scuffing the sidewalk the whole way to the car. When I asked how it went, she just mumbled “I messed up” and climbed in the back, not even asking for her usual cherry sticker from the center console. Her art teacher had asked everyone to draw a perfect flower garden, and Lila had colored all the grass neon green outside the lines. All the other kids’ had straight stems and neat petals, she told me, so hers was bad. I told her I thought the neon grass looked way more fun than boring green, but she just shook her head and stared out the window the whole drive to my house.
I have Lila every Wednesday after school and every other weekend; my sister’s a nurse working 12-hour shifts right now to save up for a family trip, so this is our regular routine. I’d gotten used to distracting her when she was upset—get ice cream, put on her favorite cartoon, change the subject. But this one stuck with me. She kept bringing up how her picture was bad for a whole week, even after I taped the crumpled drawing to my fridge anyway. I started looking for things we could do together that weren’t just screen time or running errands, that would help her feel more sure of herself without me making a big awkward deal out of “building her confidence.”
The first thing that stuck was what I now call no-rules art. I had a stack of leftover canvas scraps from when I tried acrylic painting during lockdown, so I pulled them out the next Wednesday. I told her we were doing a challenge: neither of us could make anything “good.” We had to break every rule she learns at school for art. She stared at me for a second, then grinned so big her dimples showed. “Really? I can do anything?” she asked. I said yeah, even ugly stuff, even messy stuff, that’s the point.
She made a purple dragon with 8 wings and a toothbrush for a tail, covered in glitter glue. I made a black sun with orange polka dots. Then we swapped and added whatever we wanted to each other’s piece. She added a googly eye to my sun, I added a tiny ice cream cone to her dragon’s claw. By the end she was laughing so hard she fell off my kitchen chair. What I didn’t say out loud is that 7 is that weird age where kids start comparing their work to everyone else’s, and they start believing there’s only one right way to do almost anything. Just 15 minutes of breaking rules on purpose reminds them that making something is supposed to be fun, not just perfect. It’s not a big lesson, it’s just a silly activity that takes all the pressure off trying to get it right.
After that, I started doing one full Saturday a month where Lila gets to plan every single thing we do. The only rule is it has to fit my small budget, so no $50 giant unicorn stuffed animals (she’s learned to work around that by asking for birthday presents early). The first time she planned the day, she picked chocolate chip pancakes for breakfast, a walk to the duck pond, a trip to the dollar store for silly putty, and boxed mac and cheese for dinner. I almost interrupted her when she poured a whole cup of chocolate chips into the pancake batter, but I stopped myself. They were sickly sweet, but we ate them anyway. When we got to the duck pond, she decided she wanted to climb a gnarled old oak tree instead of feeding the ducks, so that’s what we did.
Most of the time, adults make every small decision for 7-year-olds: what time they wake up, what they wear, what they eat, what activity they do next. Letting them call all the shots for a whole day teaches them to trust their own ideas. I don’t correct her if she picks something that sounds boring to me, I just go along. Last month she picked weeding my front garden for an hour because she thought pulling weeds was fun, and I just pulled them right next to her. When we finished, she stood back and looked at the empty garden beds and puffed out her chest like she’d built a whole house. That pride was way better than any speech I could give about being brave.
The last thing we do regularly is small, low-stakes projects she can do almost entirely on her own. Nothing fancy: last month we planted marigold seeds in cleaned-out soup cans. She did all the digging, all the seed placing, all the watering. I only helped when she asked. When she spilled half the bag of dirt on my patio, we just swept it up together, no big deal. Two weeks later, the first little green sprout popped up, and she ran screaming through my house to show me. Once we tried baking chocolate chip cookies and she forgot to add the eggs and put in twice as much flour as we needed. They came out hard as hockey pucks. We threw them out and walked to the donut shop down the street, and I just told her that even when the end result is bad, it doesn’t mean she did a bad job. Trying is the part that matters.
Lila still has hard days. Last week she said she couldn’t do cartwheels because all the other girls in her class could do them better. We practiced in my backyard for 20 minutes, and she never got all the way around, but we laughed so hard when she fell into the clover that she forgot to be upset. I don’t know if these little activities are permanently making her more confident, or if they’re just giving us a nice routine to spend time together. But right now, she talks more about the things she makes and does, instead of only pointing out what she messed up. That’s enough for me, for now.
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