Fun Confidence Building Activities to Do With Your 7-Year-Old Niece (What Worked For Me)
Last month, my sister left 7-year-old Lila with me for four days while she went to a work conference out of state. The first morning, we walked to the corner diner for breakfast, and when the server turned to Lila to ask for her order, she squeezed my arm so tight her nails dug through my sleeve and hid her face behind my shoulder. I ordered for her, like I always had, but on the walk back I remembered my sister mentioning Lila had started saying “I can’t” after she forgot her one line in the first grade school play a couple weeks prior. She’d refused to try out for anything else since, and wouldn’t even answer the door when the mailman knocked. I didn’t have any fancy therapy workbooks or big planned trips, so I brainstormed small, silly things we could do that didn’t feel like “confidence practice.”
First up was what I called the “bad cookie challenge.” I pulled out the chocolate chip cookie recipe I’ve used a hundred times, and told Lila the rule was we had to intentionally make one wrong choice. We could add too much salt, leave out the butter, use vanilla extract instead of eggs—anything she wanted. She stared at me like I’d grown a second head. “But we’ll waste them,” she said. I told her if they’re terrible, we throw them out and get ice cream down the street. No rules, no extra work to fix it. She picked adding three extra tablespoons of sugar, stirred the whole bowl like it was a science experiment, and watched them bake through the oven glass. When they came out, they were way too sweet, but we ate two warm ones each standing over the sink, and Lila kept laughing about how sticky our fingers were. I told her about the time I forgot the eggs in my sister’s birthday cake and had to throw the whole thing out, and how we ended up eating cereal for dinner that year. That’s when it hit me: Lila had gotten it in her head that any mistake meant she’d failed. Doing something on purpose that wasn’t perfect took all the fear out of it. It’s way different than telling her “it’s okay to make mistakes” when she’s already upset. She got to experience it being no big deal, instead of just hearing it.
The next day, we did a neighborhood scavenger hunt where I made her the lead. I wrote down five simple things on a scrap of paper: red front door, cat, yellow flower, mailbox with a sticker, kid’s bike with training wheels. I told her I still got lost on this side of town (a lie, but it worked) so she got to pick every turn, and she got to decide if something counted even if it wasn’t exactly what I wrote. When we spotted a pale yellow rose instead of a bright yellow dandelion, she hemmed and hawed for a minute before deciding it counted, and I didn’t argue. When she wanted to cut through the apartment complex’s community garden to check a shed I would’ve walked past, I followed. She found all five things in 40 minutes, and by the end she was pointing out extra things she thought should count and bragging to a woman walking her dog that she was our guide. Most of the time, as adults, we’re the ones calling the shots: we tell kids what time to eat, what to wear, which path to take. When you give them all the power for something small that doesn’t matter, it sticks. She got to see that her choices worked out, even when they weren’t what I would’ve picked.
On our third day, Lila mentioned she’d been learning to do double jump rope at PE, but she said she still wasn’t good enough. I asked her to teach me. I hadn’t jumped rope in years, so I was actually pretty bad, but I played it up even more: I tripped over the rope ten times in a row, I held my arms wrong, I swung too fast. Lila started out giggling, then started giving me step by step instructions: “Bend your knees a little! Swing from your wrists not your elbows!” By the end, she was holding my arms to get them in the right position, cheering when I got two doubles in a row. When we stopped, she said “I didn’t realize I already know how to do this, huh?” That’s the thing I didn’t expect: when kids are the expert, they stop seeing themselves as the person who’s bad at things. They get to see how much they’ve already learned, instead of just being told what they need to do better. We didn’t practice jump rope to get better; we practiced it so she could see she was already good enough to teach someone else.
The last day, we made a comic strip. I picked up a pack of blank comic pages at the dollar store on my way home from the grocery store, and told her the main character had to be her. She could do anything she wanted in the story. She drew herself rescuing a lost golden retriever from a big oak tree, got a medal from the mayor, and ended the comic eating ice cream with the dog. She misspelled half the words in the speech bubbles, and drew the tree lopsided, and I didn’t correct a single thing. It was just hers.
When my sister came to pick her up, we stopped at the ice cream shop on the way to the car. The server turned to Lila, and before anyone could say anything, she said “one vanilla cone with sprinkles, please.” It was such a small thing, but my sister teared up a little in the parking lot.
None of these activities are fancy. They don’t cost more than a few dollars, and you don’t need any special training to do them. I don’t think Lila will never say “I can’t” again. Last weekend, she came over and refused to try hula hooping because she said she’d be bad at it. But we did the bad cookie challenge again, and she added too much cocoa powder this time, and we ate the weird chocolate bricks with extra milk anyway.
Confidence isn’t something you build in a week with one big activity. It’s lots of small, silly moments where you get to mess up, lead, teach, and be the hero of your own story, with no pressure to be perfect. Right now, that’s enough for us.
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