One Way to Boost Your Kids’ Confidence

Our kids are finally at more independent ages, so when they play in their bedroom, we joke that they’ll still be alive when they come out. [Laughs] They both love to put on sparkly dresses and inevitably all of the glitter ends up on our sofa. Colette, our older daughter, will dress up Daisy and pull looks like she’s styling her at a shoot. There’s also a lot of dancing and singing on the weekends.

Their all-time favorite thing though is to give their dad wet willies, which come at totally random times. Suddenly, you’ll hear a lick and a pop, and there’s a wet finger in his ears. He hates it. The girls know they shouldn’t do it, but I don’t stop them either because I get a good laugh from the whole thing.

Teaching responsibility through mealtime tasks

In the summer, I give them both flashlights and magnifying glasses to pick the caterpillars off the tomatoes in the backyard. It’s a very dramatic and very useful task. Usually, they shriek, “That’s disgusting!” and “Omg, get it off of me!” But at least they found them. Then we either call Dad to remove them or find a stick and put them in a jar. When they aren’t on pest control, I tell them they can help with cooking by picking something from the garden. They’ll come in with handfuls of sugar snap peas or lettuce. They find it miraculous that the food is grown from the earth.

How being hands-off can help raise confident kids

One piece of advice I’ve really tried to follow is don’t try to solve all of your kids’ problems. The best thing we can do as parents is be great listeners and let them know they’re heard, then provide the tools and confidence to solve them on their own. I think being a working parent and not having the capacity or time to fix everything is a bit of a blessing too because if I were to do everything for them or step in at crucial learning moments, it would erode their confidence.

It’s all a learning process and that’s the most unexpected thing about parenting for me: the self-realization about how much more I have to learn. Every single day, something surprises or challenges me to be a better friend, person, boss or generally softer and more empathetic. Kids also force you to bring enthusiasm and fun to your routines, be it grocery shopping or going outside. It’s a positive, exciting “we get to do this, how lucky?!” approach instead of “ugh, we have to do this” which I find really refreshing.

Natalie and Caleb Ebel are the founders of Backdrop, the coolest paint company on everyone’s walls. They live with their two daughters, Colette (7) and Daisy (3), in Los Angeles. Their interview appeared in It’s More Fun with You: 36 Families on the Everyday Magic of Raising Kids, a limited-edition book by Charmspring.