Hello kind grown-up,
There is a conversation happening inside your child that you cannot hear.
It is the conversation they have with themselves.
When they make a mistake. When they compare themselves to someone else. When something doesn’t go the way they hoped.
Research tells us that the way children speak to themselves — their internal voice — has a profound effect on their confidence, their resilience, and their mental health.
And here is the difficult truth: that voice is often shaped by what they hear around them.
Not just the things said to them.
But the things said around them.
The way you talk about yourself.
The way you talk about your own mistakes.
The way you recover — or don’t — when things go wrong.
Children are watching all of it.
The good news is that the internal voice can change.
It is not fixed.
It can be practised, shaped, gently redirected.
Here are a few things that help:
Name it gently.
When your child is being hard on themselves, try: “That sounds like your worried voice. What would your kind voice say?”
Model it out loud.
When you make a mistake, narrate your own kind response. “I got that wrong — that’s okay, I’ll try again.” Children learn this by hearing it modelled.
Catch the kind moments.
When you notice your child being kind, brave or persistent — name it specifically. Not “well done” but “I noticed how you kept trying even when it felt hard. That takes real courage.”
The inner cheerleader doesn’t arrive fully formed.
It is built, slowly, from the outside in.
Until one day it lives inside them for good.
With warmth,
Lenny 🦁
