Boosting Your Child’s Confidence: How to Use CBT for Self-Esteem 

As parents, we all want our children to grow up with confidence, but sometimes, self-doubt can sneak in early, leaving our kids feeling less capable than they truly are. It’s heartbreaking to hear your child say things like, “I’m not good enough,” “I always mess up,” or “Why can’t I do this?”

These moments are not just passing frustrations—they’re signs of a deeper struggle with self-esteem. Fortunately, by using Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) strategies, you can help your child challenge these negative thoughts and build a stronger, more resilient sense of self. Learn how to use CBT for self-esteem.

What is self-esteem?

The Merriam-Webster dictionary defines self-esteem as “confidence and satisfaction in oneself.” Children with higher self-esteem tend to feel understood and accepted, have more positive social interactions, be more willing to learn new things, and persevere when things get difficult.

Children with low self-esteem, on the other hand, experience more anxiousness and doubt, feel like they’ve failed, compare themselves to others, avoid challenges, resist compliments, show poor academic performance, and have difficulty making friends.

Understanding Cognitive Behavioral Therapy

As parents, we can help our children build their self-esteem through various psychological strategies. One of the most effective and evidence-based approaches to boosting self-esteem is Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT).

CBT is a type of psychological therapy model that has been successful in treating clinical disorders, such as depression, anxiety, eating disorders, and Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder (OCD), among others. Over the years, CBT has been modified to adapt to the unique needs of children as well. The main principle of CBT states that psychological problems are due to unhelpful thinking patterns (i.e., “I’m not good enough”). From there, the thought leads to specific feelings, such as self-doubt, shame, guilt, sadness, and anger. The feeling will then lead to specific behaviors, such as isolation, increased interpersonal conflicts, and giving up on challenges and/or goals.

In other words, if we can help our children challenge their original negative thoughts, we can help them change how they feel and act. We can utilize effective cognitive strategies to boost our children’s self-esteem.

Applying CBT Principles

A great way to first introduce CBT to your child is to introduce thinking traps. Thinking traps are negative thought cycles in which your child becomes stuck in a repetitive, negative belief about themselves or others.

Common thinking traps include:

Black and White Thinking

This is when your child thinks in extremes, such as good or bad, right or wrong, fair or unfair. Thinking in rigid extremes leaves no room for interpretation. Yet, you can help your child find the “grey area,” or the balance between the two extreme thoughts.

For example, “You’re not just a good player or a bad player. Instead, there will be times when you make a mistake in sports, and there will be times when you score a lot of points.”

Mind Reading

This is when your child believes she knows what someone else is thinking. However, there is no way that she – or anyone – can know exactly what someone else is thinking.

Challenge the thought, “My friend doesn’t like me,” by encouraging your child to guess what you (the parent) are thinking. This is a great way to show your child the impossibility of knowing exactly what someone is thinking.

Predicting the Future

Your child falls into this trap when he makes statements such as, “I’m going to fail my math test” or “It’s going to take forever to finish my science project.”

To boost your child’s self-esteem, you can encourage him to imagine a best-case scenario, such as “What would it be like to have the opposite prediction?”

Perfectionism

This occurs when your child holds herself to an unreasonable expectation, is unable to meet it, and is left feeling disappointed in herself. This rigid way of thinking can lead to harsh, critical statements over small errors.

Encourage your child to create or do something with as many mistakes as possible to teach her that mistakes can be fun, too.

Should Statements

These statements focus on redoing the past and using critical words like “should” or “must.” A great way to help your child move on from this trap is to help him switch “should” to “could.” This switch encourages more psychological flexibility.

For example, “You could have studied more, but that’s okay. We can keep the past in the past.” No amount of “should” statements will change the past, so it’s best to accept and let these thoughts go.

Catastrophizing

Your child falls into this trap when he blows things way out of proportion. The size of his reaction does not match the size of the problem.

For example, if your child was embarrassed at his football game and said, “This is the worst day of my life. I’m never going to get over this embarrassment,” you can help him match his reaction to the size of the problem. Is this a small-sized problem or a big-sized problem? Help him brainstorm other small-sized problems that he coped with well in the past.

Emotional Reasoning

This is drawing conclusions based on emotions. For example, your child feels anxious about her test tomorrow, so she assumes something bad will happen during the test.

Encourage your child to take deep breaths to calm her body before making any conclusions. Help her with grounding techniques to help her differentiate between facts and feelings. For example, “What is something you can see, hear, smell, feel, and taste?” After her body is regulated, prompt her to come up with more realistic conclusions about her test tomorrow.

Over-generalizing

This occurs when your child sees a pattern based on a single event and is overly broad about his conclusions, often using words like “always,” “never,” “nobody,” and “everybody.”

If your child makes a statement, such as “Everybody is going to stare at me,” help him identify counter-evidence or a time when the opposite happened. For example, “When we went to your awards ceremony, did people stare at you then?” Be prepared to help your child challenge mind-reading traps too.

Ignoring the good

Also known as filtering, this occurs when your child ignores all the positive things he has done and believes that good things from the past “don’t count.” Your child with low self-esteem may share thoughts, such as “It doesn’t matter that I got an A on the homework because I failed the test.”

Encourage your child to keep a “Self-esteem Jar,” where he can write down his successes and positive self-esteem beliefs on slips of paper. The next time your child focuses solely on the negative, have him read from his “Self-esteem Jar.”

Judging Yourself Unfairly

This occurs when your child uses very harsh and critical statements to describe herself, such as “I’m so stupid,” “I’m an idiot,” and “I hate myself.” Ask your child what she would say to a friend if her friend made those statements. Then prompt your child to apply that same advice to herself.

CBT for Self-Esteem: The Main Takeaway

Much of the work in building your child’s self-esteem starts with normalizing their thoughts. Help your child understand that all kids—and even grown-ups—experience thinking traps from time to time. If your child can begin to identify their cognitive distortions, then they are already gaining control of their emotions. If you notice that your child’s self-esteem is not improving through the use of CBT strategies, consult a mental health provider who specializes in working with children.

Jessi Gholami, LMSW-C, LCSW-C

Senior Contributor
Jessi Gholami is a dedicated clinical social worker (LMSW-C and LCSW-C) and licensed PCIT therapist with extensive experience working with children, families, adolescents, and adults. Jessi specializes in treating anxiety, depression, ADHD, Autism, and behavioral disorders. 

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