Every parenting book tells you to build your child’s confidence by telling them they can do things. Rabbi Lawrence Kelemen points out a wrinkle nobody warns you about: what you say has to match what’s actually true, or the encouragement backfires in one of two directions.
Say you tell your child, with total conviction, “You can absolutely do this.” Two things can happen. If the child really can do it and simply doesn’t, they now feel like a failure — because you both agreed they were capable, and they didn’t deliver. But if the child genuinely can’t do it yet, and you told them they could, something quieter and more damaging happens beneath the surface: the child concludes, at a subconscious level, that you don’t actually know them. Not “Mom was wrong today” — something deeper: “my parents don’t know who I am.”
Kelemen is clear this isn’t a conscious thought in a six-year-old. It’s a felt impression that gets filed away. And it resurfaces years later in a very specific, very costly way: by the time that child is fifteen, sixteen, seventeen, and going through something real, they don’t come to talk to their parents about it. Not out of rebellion — out of an intuitive, long-buried sense that “they won’t get it.” That sense didn’t appear at fifteen. It was planted a decade earlier, in a hundred small moments of encouragement that didn’t quite match reality.
The fix isn’t to stop encouraging your kids. It’s to encourage accurately. Encouragement that’s rooted in real observation lands as “my parent sees me.” Encouragement that’s just a formula — “you can do anything!” regardless of the actual situation — eventually reads as “my parent doesn’t actually see me at all.”
Three ways to encourage without overshooting:
1. Before offering reassurance, actually assess: is this genuinely within their current ability, or am I hoping it is?
2. If they’re not ready yet, say so honestly and warmly — “this one’s still a stretch, let’s build up to it” — rather than promising a capability that isn’t there.
3. When they succeed at something hard, name specifically what they did, not just that they’re “amazing” — specificity is what makes a child feel accurately seen.
The goal isn’t lower expectations. It’s accurate ones — because a child who feels accurately known at six is a teenager who still comes to talk to you at sixteen.
For more of Rabbi Kelemen’s teaching on building trust that lasts through adolescence, join the inner circle at lawerencekelemen.com.
This blog was co-written with Artificial Intelligence.