Trusting your child: the first step in helping them grow strong
By Dr. Roberto Albani, Pediatrician and Gastroenterologist
Building trust: how parental support fosters emotional growth in children
Raising a child involves guiding and protecting them, but one crucial element often overlooked is trust. Trusting a child means believing in their abilities and giving them space to grow independently. This silent support helps build their self-esteem, emotional resilience, and confidence. In this article, we explore how trusting your child fosters their emotional growth and creates a foundation for a secure, confident future.
Trusting your child’s abilities today plants the seeds for their emotional strength tomorrow
When we have a child to raise and educate, we often focus on what we need to do to protect, guide, and stimulate them. But there is one element we often forget, silent and profound, that can make a difference right from the start: trust.
Trust as a gaze
Trusting your child means seeing them as a complete, thinking being, capable of taking action, reacting, and facing small challenges. Without expecting too much or forcing them, but recognizing their own pace and ways of dealing with new situations.
When a newborn cries, becomes restless, or shows discomfort, we often think they don’t know what to do and are tempted to intervene right away. But what if, instead of rushing to their aid, we took a moment to simply watch them, observe them, letting them act independently? What would we be doing? We would silently be telling them, ‘I know you can’.
This trusting attitude is conveyed through gestures, tone of voice, and body language, and will gradually help the child begin to feel that trust within themselves, making it their own. From this positively observant attitude, from the way they are looked at, valued, and approved, self-esteem is born.
Not to replace, but to accompany
A parent’s instinct is to protect, to decide for the child, and so we often intervene ‘on behalf’ of the child, of course with the best intentions. However, we risk sending an implicit message: ‘You can’t do it on your own, I’ll save you.’ Over time, this can undermine their sense of ‘effectiveness,’ their abilities, and make them feel more insecure.
Therefore, we must hold back this sense of protection and instead accompany them without replacing them, allowing them to experience small frustrations or difficulties on their own, showing a trust that strengthens them.
A child who stumbles, who tries and tries again to play, who cries because the food is finished… these are all important opportunities to tell them, with our presence and gaze: ‘I understand that it’s difficult, but I know you can do it.
Trust as a secure base
Trusting your child does not mean leaving them alone, abandoning them, or ignoring their emotions. Instead, it means being with them, with empathy, avoiding anticipating their needs but staying available to recognize, embrace, and support them when they ask for help.
It’s a delicate mechanism, we must give space but be ready to contain, which trains us to tolerate a bit of waiting, a bit of frustration, waiting for a result. It forces us to remain present without wanting to solve everything immediately.
In this way, we become for them a ‘secure starting point’ from which they can venture out to explore the world, knowing that, even if they fall, encounter obstacles, or slow down along the way, there is someone who believes in them and patiently awaits the outcome of their experience.
Trust is built together
💜 Building a relationship based on trust takes time, it’s not easy, and it’s not intuitive. It requires listening and a lot of patience. But it’s a journey that leads far, because every small step the child takes, every time they try and succeed, or try and fail but don’t give up and get back up… these are small seeds that, over time, will sprout and bear fruit.
💜 And that trust we communicate today with our gaze, our words, our silences… will become tomorrow the trust the child has in themselves.