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.