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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]My kid being confident - I want someone with no weird fears, someone that can speak to thousands, someone that is bold, someone that can talk to anyone, someone that is not afraid to ask questions. [/quote]

I might have said this, too, in the past.

Then I had a kid who is naturally shy. Neither my spouse nor I is shy at all. I do tons of public speaking for my job and am have learned to feel comfortable in just about any setting. My spouse has a more solitary job, and is quieter by nature, but not shy -- he is very social and probably the driving force of our family social life because he gets a lot of energy from being around other people an talking to them.

But our kid is shy around other people. Not at home (at all). But at school and when we socialize, she is quiet and a little unsettled by others. She does not speak up a lot or ask a lot of questions -- she tends to save them and then ask us later or share her thoughts with us later. She does have friends at school (just two that I would call actual friends, though she does get along well with most kids) and she tends to become quite attached to her teachers and teacher's aides. So it's not that she can't develop relationships. She's just shy and quiet. It's her nature.

I still worry sometimes that she lacks confidence, but then I see her working away on something, quietly, on her own, and I can see she has a kind of quiet confidence in herself and her own mind that does not translate to being bold with other people. She likes to work things out in her own head before speaking up. She does have some perfectionist tendencies, and we definitely work on those, talking a lot about the importance of trying versus getting something just right, and we always celebrate "successful failures" in our house.

But I no longer feel like she has to be bold, outspoken , or even particularly brave. I think it's more important that she is comfortable in her own skin, that she knows she is loved and appreciated just as she is by her family and friends. I could even see her growing into a leader, if that's what she wants, because her quiet focus can be very inspiring.

Anyway, I would encourage you thing more broadly about what it is to raise confident kids. I thought I wanted my daughter to be bold as well, but I discovered that the world needs all kinds of people, including the quiet and the calm and the soft-spoken. Now my main worry is that the world will not make room for her, and will overlook her gifts, because we are too limited in what we expect of people.[/quote]

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