Fun Low-Prep Confidence Building Activities to Do With Your 7 Year Old Niece
Last month, I pulled into my sister’s driveway to pick up my 7-year-old niece Lila for our monthly Saturday adventure, and she came out dragging her backpack, the sparkly jelly keychain I got her for her birthday hanging limp instead of swinging like it usually does. She climbed into the backseat, kicked off her sneakers, and picked at the frayed hem of her blue overalls. I asked if she still wanted to go to the new trampoline park I’d promised, and she mumbled that all the big girls there can do backflips and she can’t even do a cartwheel without falling. She’d just moved up a level in gymnastics two weeks prior, and I knew she’d been comparing herself to the other girls who’d been doing it longer. My stomach dropped a little— I’d bought tickets and everything, but it was pretty clear she didn’t want to be around a bunch of other kids doing things she thought she couldn’t do. So I said, no problem, we’ll do adventure at my place instead.
We stopped for the chocolate dipped ice cream cone she always gets anyway, because even if you scrap the big plan, you don’t skip the best part. Got home, stood in my living room trying to think of something that wasn’t just putting on a cartoon. She said she wanted to draw, so we dragged out the crayon box from the hall closet. She crumpled up the first unicorn drawing and threw it in the trash, said “I messed up the horn again.” I fished it out, and on a whim said, what if we only draw messed up unicorns? We can hang all the bad ones on the fridge and call it our Mistake Gallery.
She stared at me for a second, then grinned. We drew 10 bad unicorns in 20 minutes. One had a horn that was a whole slice of pepperoni pizza. One had five heads and no legs. Mine had eyes where the tail should be. We taped them all up, then started looking around the house for other mistakes to add. I added the burnt chocolate chip cookie I’d messed up the night before, taped it to a piece of paper and wrote “burnt to a crisp by Auntie” on it. She remembered she had a blurry selfie on my phone of her trying to do a cartwheel in my backyard last summer, so we printed it and added that too. By the time we were done, half my fridge was covered. We even spilled lemonade on the coffee table ten minutes later, and I suggested we add the crumpled paper towel we used to wipe it up to the gallery. She laughed so hard she snort-laughed, which is her favorite thing.
I’d never thought of anything like that before, but it hit me that by age 7, kids have already gotten the message that mistakes are something to hide, crumple up, throw away. Every time they correct a wrong answer at school, or a coach says “do it this way instead,” that message sinks in a little more. We don’t even mean to send it. But turning mistakes into something you show off, that’s way more effective than telling her “it’s okay to mess up” because it’s actual practice. It doesn’t cost anything, and you don’t need any special supplies to pull it off.
After the Mistake Gallery, she was quiet for a minute, then said “I actually did a cartwheel last week that only fell over once. That’s better than when I fall over three times.” I had an empty penne pasta jar sitting on the counter from dinner the night before, so I said let’s make a jar for all your stuff that’s good, even if it’s not perfect. We got out some scrap paper and stickers from the dollar bin, she decorated the outside with pink sparkles and wrote (with a little help) LILA’S I DID IT JAR. Every time you do something you’re proud of, no matter how small, you write it down, draw a little picture, and put it in. The first one she added was “I tied my shoes all by myself before school this week.” Then “I fed my class hamster all by myself.” Then that one cartwheel that only fell once. By lunch time, we had seven slips in there.
A lot of confidence building ideas I see online fixate on big achievements, but 7-year-olds win at small stuff every day that no one makes a big deal out of. This jar just gives them a place to put all those wins, so when they’re feeling like they can’t do anything right, they can dump it out and look through them. I keep one at my place for her when she visits, and my sister got an old jam jar for her to keep at home too.
After grilled cheese (crusts cut off, just how she likes it), we did what I now call reverse storytime. I usually read a picture book to her when she visits, but this time I said she gets to make up any story she wants, and I have to write it down and act it out with her. She made the main character a spider named Stripe who can’t spin webs like all the other spiders, but she can do cartwheels that scare away dragons. I had to be the dragon, and she got to tell me exactly what to do, how to roar, how to fall over when Stripe does her cartwheel. I messed up my roar on purpose, and she corrected me like it was the most important job in the world. For 45 minutes, she was completely in charge, no rules, no right or wrong way to do it.
Most of the time, kids her age are following directions all day long— at school, at home, at practice. Getting to be the one that calls all the shots for a little while lets them practice trusting their own ideas, which is what confidence actually is, right? It’s not thinking you’re the best at everything, it’s trusting that your ideas matter, even if they’re silly.
When my sister came to pick her up that night, Lila dragged her straight to the fridge to show off the Mistake Gallery, then dumped out the I Did It Jar to show her all the slips. She still said she doesn’t want to do the gymnastics showcase next month, and that’s okay. We didn’t fix her self-consciousness in one Saturday. Last week, my sister sent me a photo of a new slip she added to her jar at home: “I did three cartwheels in a row today.” It’s working, slow. None of these activities are fancy, none of them cost any money, and you don’t have to plan them weeks in advance. They’re just little things to do when you’re hanging out, that let a kid feel okay about being exactly where they are. That’s all confidence really needs, most of the time.
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