Building Christ-Centered Confidence in Kids

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In this episode, we explore how to build your child's confidence in a Christ-centered way. Discover practical steps to ground your child's self-worth in Scripture, reflect God's unconditional love, and guide them to focus on others rather than themselves. Join us for insightful advice on raising confident, faith-filled kids.

Transcript

Note: The following is an auto-transcript of the podcast recording.

Hello friends. Today's question says, "How can I build my child's confidence in a Christ-centered way? My child especially lacks confidence in group settings. I do not believe it is shyness." This is an interesting question and one that I appreciate that the parent is asking how to build confidence in a Christ-centered way, because there's definitely ways to build confidence that are worldly and are not at all in align with Scripture. So it's important for us to think through, how can we help our children know who they are and build confidence in who they are in a way that's grounded in what is revealed in Scripture? So that's the question we're going to dive down deep into today.

My name is Elizabeth Urbanowicz. I'm the host of the Foundation Worldview podcast where we seek to answer your questions so that you can equip the children that God has placed in your care to carefully evaluate every idea they encounter and understand the truth of the biblical worldview. If you have a question that you would like for me to answer on a future Foundation Worldview podcast, you can submit that by going to FoundationWorldview.com/podcast.

Now, as we think about helping children build their confidence in a way that's grounded in Scripture, I think there's really three parts to this. Three parts to building biblical confidence. So the first thing that I think is necessary is to ground your child's value in what Scripture says about God's love for him or her, not in his or her skills, talents, or looks. So I'll say that one more time. First, you need to make sure that you are grounding your child's value in what Scripture says about God's love for him or her, not in her skills, talents, or looks, because that's exactly what our world would do. Our world would say, okay, you need to bolster up your child according to what he or she is good at. And now our children are probably good at many things because they're designed in God's image and God created them to steward creation and has given each of them different strengths and giftings. However, if we ground our children's ultimate value in anything other than what God's word reveals about them, we are building their confidence on sinking sand because our child might be skilled at something, our child might be a very, very skilled athlete. Well, our child could get into an accident that could cause him or her to be paralyzed for life. Does his or her value diminish or go away because they can no longer participate in athletics? No. Or our children might be really good in the arts. Well, what happens when a child moves to town that just blows them out of the water and is so much more talented at singing or dance or painting than our child? Does our child's value suddenly go down? No. So we need to make sure that we're grounding their value in what God has revealed about his love for them in Scripture rather than in anything that they possess, because this is exactly what we see in Scripture. And for those of you who have taken the children, God is placed in your care through our Biblical Worldview curriculum or our God's Good Design curriculum, you know that in these two curriculums, this is exactly what we're seeking to do. We're seeking to give kids a biblical reality based understanding of who they are. In our Biblical Worldview curriculum we cover this in unit four. In our God's Good Design curriculum, we cover this in unit two, and so we want to make sure that our kids are grounded in what God has to say about them.

So I'll just walk us through two passages of Scripture that I think are essential in grounding our kids in understanding what God has to say about them. Now, those of you who are faithful listeners to the Foundation Worldview podcast, you probably already know the first passage of Scripture I'm going to take us to, it's right in the first chapter of the Bible, Genesis chapter one, verse 27, but this is foundational to understanding who we are and how God has designed us. So Genesis one verse 27 says, "So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them." And so we can read this verse with our child or children and say, okay, what truth does this verse reveal about who you are and who I am? That's right. This verse reveals that God created us in his image, and then we can talk with them about how nothing can change this, whether we get sick or hurt, or whether we're great at something or not great at something, or whether one day we get imprisoned or we get stranded somewhere. Nothing can take away the fact that God created us as his image bearer. So that means that each of us has value that can never be stripped away.

Then the second passage of Scripture that I would recommend taking a child to is the first chapter of Ephesians. And I'll read for us Ephesians chapter one verses three through eight. And in these verses, Paul writes, "blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed us in Christ with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places, even as he chose us in him before the foundation of the world, that we should be holy and blameless before him. In love he predestined us for adoption to himself as sons through Jesus Christ, according to the purpose of his will, to the praise of His glorious grace, with which he has blessed us in the Beloved. In him we have redemption through his blood, the forgiveness of our trespasses, according to the riches of his grace, which he lavished upon us, in all wisdom and insight." And then we can ask our child, what does this verse say about God's love for you? It says that God loved you so much that he gave up His Son to be crucified on the cross, that through his blood we could have redemption. We could have forgiveness of our sins, that his grace is lavished upon us. So God loves us so much that he gave up His, Son Jesus so that we could be adopted as his children. I was recently reading a book that was published a long time ago by Josh McDowell called His Image My Image. And in that book, Josh McDowell says something that I thought was just really profound. It's very simple, but it just really profoundly states who we are. And in that book he writes, you are worth Jesus to God because God gave up Jesus. God gave up his only son that we would have redemption through his blood, the forgiveness of our trespasses that we might be adopted as his sons. So we want our children to know that they are worth Jesus to God, and that is where their value lies. So that's the first step. We need to make sure that we are grounding their value in what Scripture says about God's love for them.

The second thing that we need to do is we need to make sure that we are reflecting God's unconditional love in our relationship with him or her because we as parents, we are in the position of showing our children a picture of who God is. And this is especially important for dads because dads have play this role in a unique way because God is often described as Father because he is our heavenly Father. He will be our Father for all eternity. And so dads have this very, very special role of reflecting to their children the heart of God. Now, moms do this as well in a different way, but as parents, we need to make sure that we are reflecting God's unconditional love in our relationship with our children.

So what does this look like? One of the things that this looks like is as we discipline our children, which we need to because our children like the rest of us are sinners, and our job as parents is to make sure that we are showing them the right way to live. So we need to correct sinful behavior. So in discipline, we need to make sure that we are correcting the behavior and loving the child. I'll say that again. In discipline we need to make sure that we are correcting the behavior and loving the child. So when we're disciplining our children, we shouldn't say, oh, I'm so disappointed in you because we shouldn't actually be disappointed in our children because our children are sinners. Our children are going to sin just like we do, but we can explain to them why what they did was wrong and explain how they're going to be disciplined or punished because of what they did. So again, we need to make sure that we're correcting the behavior and loving the child, and as we discipline them, we need to make sure that we are affirming our love for them in the discipline process, that the reason we're doing this, the reason we're correcting them, the reason we're punishing them is because we love them and we care about them.

Another important thing that we can do to affirm our love for them is make sure that we're intentional at giving love according to our child's love language. Now, I know the love languages they're not something that are distinctly biblical. How they are grounded in the biblical worldview is that God has made us as his image barriers giving us the responsibility of stewarding creation and ruling and reigning over all creation. And as people have done research, they found, hey, people give and receive love in different ways. And so we might be someone who really appreciates quality time and we want to spend lots of time with our kids, and that's a great thing. But our child might receive love through physical touch or through an act of service. And so we need to make sure that we understand what our child's love language is and learn how to speak that well so that our child grows up in an environment where they do feel secure and they feel loved. So again, the first thing I said is we need to make sure that we ground our children's value in what Scripture says about God's love for them. Second, we need to reflect God's unconditional love in our relationship with them.

Before we move on to the third and final step, I would ask that if you found the content of this podcast beneficial, please make sure you like and subscribe so that you don't miss any future episodes. And also ask that you would invest the short amount of time it takes to rate this content that just helps us get into more homes and churches and schools so that we can equip more parents and Christian educators and church leaders to get the kids in their care carefully evaluating every idea they encounter.

The third step that I would recommend is we need to train our children to take their eyes off of themselves. So in these social situations when our children are lacking confidence, what the world would tell us to do is, oh, just tell your child how amazing he or she is. Keep bolstering him or her up with positive language. Now, encouraging our children when they do something well is a good thing. However, just trying to bolster them up by telling them how amazing they are all the time. One, it's not based in reality because while we are as humans incredibly loved and inherently valuable, we are not always amazing because we sin and we do things wrong. And so we don't want to just falsely booster our children's ego. What we want to do instead is those first two steps. Make sure they're grounded in a biblical understanding of who they are, and then train them to take their eyes off of themselves because when they're not focused on themselves, they can truly be themselves and they can be a blessing to others. So what I would encourage the parent who wrote in this question to do is make a plan with your child for how he or she will reach out in a social setting. If you're about to drop him or her off at a birthday party, say, okay, who are some of the other kids who are going to be at this birthday party? And then talk through, are all of these kids really good friends? Is there any child there who sometimes is left out? And then talk through how could you be kind to this child? How could you include him or her? So you could also say, could you help the child's mom set up some things? Could you actually be a help in this way? So helping your child stop focusing on himself or herself and look at, oh, who can I help? Who is around me? This is also something really important for us to model, and we need to model this through practicing biblical hospitality and opening up our homes and having our eyes on others and asking others good questions and serving others. And this is something that our children will hopefully naturally pick up on as we include them in this process.

I recently, I was over at my neighbor's house for dinner and the husband and wife, they were commenting. They were like, man, every time you come over, you ask such good questions. We're always so impressed with the questions that you ask. And I was thinking about it, and I thought the way I got good at asking good questions is just by watching my mom and my dad when they had people over when I was growing up. Sometimes my parents would share stories and things around the dinner table, but most of the conversation would always be questions about other people. And my parents were really good at asking questions and making people feel loved. And so this is something that we can model.

And then as our children go into social settings, we can help them think through before they go into the situation, what are some good questions that you can ask others ahead of time? Because especially nowadays when most of our children's peers are going to be so dopamine addicted from screens, they are not going to know how to have a conversation with one another. My last few years of teaching, I actually had to give my students a question every day at lunch that they were going to ask the people at their table because my students literally didn't know how to make conversation with one another because they were so used to staring at screens when they were at home. So if we can help our child think through what are one or two questions you can ask different people in this situation ahead of time, we can even practice this at adults.

When I first started going to the small group that I now attend at my church, we were really small. Now we're really big, we're about to multiply, but we were really small at first. And the leaders of this small group, they had five sons and one of their sons was very quiet and didn't really interact with a lot of people. And so I'm not great with teenagers like that is not my wheelhouse. But I thought, I really want to try to engage this kid. So every week before our small group, I would try to think of one question that I could ask him, and most of the time I just got a simple response, but that was okay. I just thought of a question ahead of time so that even if he didn't want to engage, he would know that I cared about him and that I saw him, and I had to think of those questions ahead of time because I'm really bad sometimes at thinking of questions in the spot. And we can help our kids do that as well. We can also help them think through how they can use their strengths in this situation. For example, if we have a child who's very well organized, we can help them think how at this birthday party or how at this soccer game, or how at this school situation, could you help someone organize something? Or if they're really good at sports or puzzles or something like that, think about how could you use this skill in this social situation? Basically just helping our children prepare ahead of time so that they're prepared to take their eyes off of themselves.

Now, again, just as a reminder, the three things that I recommended is first, we need to ground our child's value in what Scripture says about God's love for him or her. Then we need to reflect God's unconditional love in our relationship with that child, and then we need to train that child to take their eyes off of themselves. And I think when we follow these things, it's not a foolproof recipe for confidence in a week, but I think as we do these things and as we do them consistently, gradually over time, over the months and over the years, our children will naturally be trained to take their eyes off of themselves and we'll learn to grow more and more comfortable in the skin that they have, in the talents and abilities that God has given them because they understand who they are, that they're God's image bearers, that nothing can take away that value, that they understand your unconditional love for them, and they understand that it's their role to reach out and love others.

Well, that's a wrap for this episode. But as always, my prayer for you as we leave this time together is that no matter the situation in which you and the children God has placed in your care, find yourselves, you would trust that God is working all things together for your good. By using all things to conform you more into the image of His Son. I'll see you next time.