How Daily Affirmations Develop Positive Self-Esteem

With Dr. Marie Lahai
Watch Time: 3 minutes

We all want our children to be confident and to feel good about themselves. Dr. Marie Lahai shares how she helps her daughters be more confident by practicing daily affirmations. Hear Marie’s tips on how easy and fun it can be to create affirmations and other confidence-building ideas.

Raising Confident Children

I just love to really push affirmations on my kids—luckily, they enjoy it, so every day we’re saying positive things. They know who they are, and even if they don’t believe it now, one day they will. We actually do affirmations by the alphabet. So “A” is for amazing, “B” is for beautiful, “C” is for confident, things like that. And they’ll look in the mirror and do them and speak to themselves.

I think it’s an act that just grows on you, and then it just becomes a part of your subconscious. I want my kids to be able to speak up for themselves when trials, tribulations, or even great things are happening just to be able to express themselves.

Listen to Your Kids

We also have a lot of conversations about things that are happening. Like my daughter is in kindergarten now and she’s being exposed to a lot of different things for the first time. So, I just like to talk to her about it, see how she feels about it, get her perspective.

Be a Positive Role Model

I believe it’s important for parents to model positivity because our kids are always looking, they’re always watching. I know for me, I’ve had many . . . literally every day my kids will do something or say something that I know they got from me. So, they’re always watching, they’re always looking and so I think it’s very important for us to be good role models.

It’s Okay to Make Mistakes

When we make mistakes as parents, it’s very important for us to go back, and let our children know that we are human, and that we made a mistake, and to really be vulnerable and have the conversation with them. That’s why it’s just so important to always keep lines of communication open and have the kids feel very comfortable with speaking to us as parents.

I think dads play a really important role in setting the tone for how daughters should expect men to treat them. And my husband and I like to tag team on, you know, the common mission being that our kids need to walk through life better than we did. Through the bullying, through whatever may come their way, they need to know who they are and be able to kind of deflect it better than we did while growing up. Because now we know better, so we have the tools to equip them. I just want them to be true to themselves, and not be so swayed by what other people are doing, what they see online, what people say to them, what people tell them. I want them to have a solid foundation and be firm in who they are so that they can make decisions based on that foundation.

Love Love Love

As long as you’ve got love, you’ve got this parenting thing, because we can all figure it out with our kids. You know, we’ll mess up, and we’ll do well, and we’ll maybe not say the right things sometimes and other times we will, but as long as it’s all for the good intention of making them, helping them be better people then I think that’s all that really matters.