Prevent kids from overestimating their abilities!

Young kids are commonly overconfident in their performances and abilities. However, the underlying reasons for such overconfidence are unclear. If compared with older children, young kids are commonly overconfident in their knowledge and abilities. Kids around 7 to 8 years tend to overestimate their abilities to perform various activities and tasks. They believe they can easily conduct the activity given, whereas they barely can. Although this is a common and established idea, the underlying reasons are still not very clear.

However, kids’ overestimation of their abilities can often be motivated. Parents generally instill confidence in kids and motivate them to do things that can be difficult or even sometimes out of their range of abilities. Building an overconfident personality in kids can lead to the wrong evaluation of their performance and capabilities. This overconfident personality further affects the decision ability, wrong understanding of one’s and other’s abilities, faulty results, and not being able to understand the root causes for failures.

Allowing kids, the proper insights is the duty of their parents and teachers. Kids need to understand their strengths and shortcomings and to know this, they have to rely on the evaluation of their teachers and the words of their parents. Moreover, parents and teachers need to produce a valid and unbiased idea of kids’ abilities. In both the circumstances where a child overestimates or underestimates his ability need to be discussed with him. Additionally, this must be done by whoever discovered the behavioral pattern.

This phenomenon is equally common among adults and is named the Dunning-Kruger effect. To know more about this, Check LogiQminds today.