Self-efficacy and Children''s Feelings

Parents help develop self-efficacy when they acknowledge and respect their child's feelings. When a parent does this a close relationship can be formed between them. The child learns to trust the parent while the parent provides encouragement and support. It's important for a parent to empathize with the child and recognize the child's feelings are real and help them work through them.

When a child fails or is scared to do an activity a parent can say something like, "I know this is scary but this is how we're going to work through it and I'll be here every step of the way." For example, the first time a child goes down the slide by themselves can be scary. The parent walks by the side of it staying by the child until they sit down, then the parent stands at the bottom and catches them. The parent has acknowledged the child's feelings, helped them work through them and stayed with them every step of the way. They provided encouragement and support and helped the child achieve a task they saw as difficult.

One of the ways I helped my child work through a difficult feeling that helped her self-efficacy is watch her walk next door. Our neighbors had a child the same age as my child and they played a lot together. Only she wouldn't walk over there by herself. I helped her work through her feelings of being scared and developed her self-efficacy by standing on the deck and watching her walk over and not going back inside until she was in their house. Then I just stood at the deck door to watch her until she was in their house. Then one day she told me she didn't need me to watch, that she would be okay. Her self-efficacy in that area had developed enough that she no longer needed me to help. These seem like small, insignificant things, but they are big to a chid, they are important to a child and they are important steps in buildingtheir self-efficacy.

Factors of Self-Efficacy Developed by Adults

There are factors that can contribute to the development of self-efficacy by adults. These factors include successes and failures, messages from other people, successes of other people and successes and failures of groups to which a child belongs.

Once a child develops a high level of self-efficacy, an occasional failure won't deter them. This means if a child is trying to ride a bike and the first few attempts they can't do it, this won't necessarily discourage them to the point where they'll give up, but in fact the child learned they have the ability to withstand frustrations and have developed a disposition to persist even when everything isn't going as they expected. For example, my child never liked getting anything less than an A. Her grade always had to be an A. My expectation for her wasn't straight A's, I was all right with her getting a B but she wasn't. So when she got a B she didn't see this as a failure per say but she did put the effort into bringing it back up to an A by the end of the next quarter. This way she didn't give up on her expectation to have straight A's but she could deal with the frustration she had that a grade was a B and not an A and bring the grade up.

Messages from others develops self efficacy because the messages we send children will either develop or destroy self-esteem. For example if I as parent told my child she could never achieve the goal of straight A's the message I would be sending her is that she's not capable of getting straight A's which would hinder her belief that she could and it's not a goal she would meet because she wouldn't have had the self-efficacy to try because I would have destroyed it through my message she couldn't.

A child's successes and failures can build or destroy a child's self-esteem through the groups a child belongs. For example, when my child was a teenager she had a leader who constantly told her who to be and that she needed to be like another teen in the group to be accepted. This decreased my child's self-efficacy because she started to think she had to be like someone else in order to be accepted, loved and capable of achieving things. Once I explained how the message this leader was sending was wrong and continued to help support in developing a healthy self-efficacy did she learn that the message the leader was sending was wrong and that she was still capable of many things they were just different from the teen in the group her leader was telling her to be like.

Factors of Self-Efficacy

Factors of self-efficacy are: experience, cultural expectations, gender roles and overall support for effort and risk taking. Three other factors that affect self-efficacy are: modeling, social persuasion and physiological factors.  Modeling is when children see someone else succeed at a task and their self-efficacy increases as they believe they can succeed as for well. For example, if a child sees their peer has been successful at a getting a good grade on a history test, they also believe they can get a good grade on a history test. I tried to be a model for my child's self-efficacy as I tackled things that were hard for me such as learning how to get around a new state when we moved from one to another. My daughter and I had lots of "fun" adventures as I would sometimes get us lost as I learned my new way around a new city. It showed her I could succeed at the task of learning my way around a new city.

Social persuasion is encouragement. This is when providing encouragement will help increase self-efficacy while discouragement will decrease it. For example, when a parent gives a child encouragement that they will pass the history test it increases the child's self-efficacy. If a parent tells a child they're not good at history and they're just going to fail the test the child's self-efficacy decreases. I always tried to be a positive social persuasion to my child and encourage her anyway I could. Sometimes she would get frustrated as she worked on her art projects for her art classes. I would look at the picture and tell her what I thought was working and gave suggestions of what I thought wasn't working and gave suggestions of how to work on fixing the spots that seemed working on. This allowed her to talk thing out out loud and see the picture from a different perspective and fix what she didn't think was working.

Physiological factors are when stress affects children physically such as nausea, pains or shakiness and these factors can decrease a child's self-efficacy. Some children feel nauseous and shaky because it's an experience that is kind of scary and it effects them physically and then once they have achieved the activity that increases their self-efficacy and eliminates the physiological factor of the activity. For example, when my child was small there was a small creek that ran by the side of our house. When she was learning how to ride her bike she had to ride by this small creek which scared her because she was afraid she would lose her balance and fall into the creek. I would stay with her holding onto the bike until she got past the creek until one day I didn't. She didn't know I had let go of the bike right before the creek until she turned the bike around to come back and saw that I was still standing by the creek. When I told her I had let go right before the creek she looked upset but I told her to try it again. I stayed standing where I was and she went riding by the creek again. When she got passed it she started chanting, "I did it. I did it." Once she knew she did it and did it again she then had the self-efficacy to continue to do it.