How To Feel Like A More Confident Father
This is a contributed post.
Being someone’s Dad is not always easy, but it can be very rewarding. A lot of people are not quite sure of themselves in terms of their parenting, and this is a very common situation to find yourself in. If you are feeling this way, and you want to make sure that you can improve upon it in your own experience as a father, that’s certainly going to be possible to achieve. The truth is that there are lots of things you can do to become a much more confident father.
In this post, we’ll take a look at some of the main things to consider here. All of the following will be very helpful towards feeling like a more confident father, and you might be pleasantly surprised at just how effective it can really be. So let’s take a look at some of the things you might want to bear in mind.
Redefine Your Confident
Before you do anything, however, it will be necessary to know what you actually mean by confident. This might take some redefining, as so many of us are still in thrall to so many of the old ideas around confidence. A lot of fathers think that confidence means always knowing what to do, or being able to stay calm at all times, or perhaps having all the answers ready for whatever their children might ask. But this is not what it’s about, and it’s not helpful to hold yourself up to those unrealistic standards. You’ll only end up feeling inadequate.
Real confidence is much more about being willing to try, even when you are unsure, and admitting when you are wrong and aiming to repair it as soon as possible. It’s also about staying engaged instead of checking out when things get hard, and making sure that you really stick with it. If you can do those things, you’re bound to find that you can much more effectively feel confident as a father already. Confidence is not certainty, but a kind of steadiness.
Stop Comparing
It is so easy to look at other fathers you know, and compare how you are doing things to how they are doing things. But what you are really doing here is comparing your internal experience to their highlight reel, and that game is only ever going to end up with you feeling disappointed or like you are a failure. So it’s really important, as far as possible, to avoid comparing yourself to other fathers in your life.
Although that might not be an easy habit to kick right away, it really is worth focusing on if you want to improve your confidence as a father. Comparison quietly erodes your confidence, because you are measuring your private struggles against the exterior of someone else. Most fathers are simply figuring it out as they go, especially for their first child, and that’s just how it is. So aim to stop doing this, and it is bound to help you out a little.
Learn Some Essentials
Although everyone is just figuring it out as they go, there are some essentials that you are going to be able to learn too, and it’s really worth making sure that you are doing this if you want to be a much more confident father. There are a lot of areas that you might want to focus on here, from how to teach your children what they need to know to knowing what to do in an emergency, which may require first aid training, PALS Certification Classes and the like. All of that is going to help you a lot.
The more of this kind of knowledge that you have, ultimately, the more confident you are going to feel, so it’s something that you should certainly think about if you want to feel that way. It’s amazing what a difference it can make, and you are going to have a much better experience all in all of what it is really like to be a father this way. That’s one of the most important things you can possibly be aware of here.
Build Trust Through Consistency
What children need from their parents is a huge helping of consistency, and this is exactly what most children don’t really get enough of. So if you want to make sure that you are helping your kids out, and feeling like a better father in the process, you might want to aim for this consistency as best as you can. You might be surprised at just how much this is going to help you and your children, and it’s amazing what it can do for the both of you, and for your relationship together as well.
Kids don’t need a dad who performs confidence. They just need one who shows up predictably, time after time. This is all about simple, repeatable actions that build real authority as well as heaps of self-trust, and it’s a simple enough formula to follow: following through on what you say, being emotionally available even when you’re tired, and setting boundaries which you then hold calmly. If you do all that, you are going to find that you are much more reliable, your child can trust you, and you feel better about your own fathering.
Learn To Regulate Yourself First
One of the biggest drains on fatherly confidence is losing your cool and then subsequently beating yourself up. This doesn’t help anyone. The issue isn’t that you had an emotional reaction, but that no one taught you how to recover. Confidence therefore often comes from knowing that you can pause before reacting, you can apologise without losing authority, and you can reset the moment instead of spiraling. A regulated father isn’t one who never feels anger or fear, but one who knows how to move through those emotions without handing them to his child.
Those are just some of the ways to feel like a more confident father.
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