Confidence in Teens

What I Love About Myself
By Nicole Bradshaw and Izabela Deleon
For our senior project, we interviewed 30 students, asking them what they love about themselves. We were trying to determine how important it is for teens to have self-confidence, and where that begins.
We went into this project assuming younger children would answer quickly and confidently, middle-school students might not see their own beauty, and older teens would finally know themselves enough to answer well. What surprised us most was that one-third of the students we interviewed could not answer the question at all.
What’s more, we thought at least through sixth grade, children would be able to come up with something that they love about themselves. But in our research, by fourth grade, students stumbled on the answer.
As graduating high school seniors, we see the importance of building confidence among teens. After all, as we prepare to go out in the world on our own, we must know what’s good and skilled and beautiful about ourselves. Otherwise, no one else will, either.
We both admit, it’s not always easy to say what we love about ourselves. In our society, such comments are interpreted as bragging, and we’re always discouraged from doing that.
And yet, it’s easy to find something beautiful in others. Why is it so hard to see our own beauty?
The youngest children we interviewed were super quick to say things they loved about themselves. “I like to invent,” “I’m really fast at running,” “I get a lot of love” were some of their answers.
Even though our school does a good job about introducing technology at a later age, children as early as fourth grade are watching TV shows that send messages that you can’t feel a certain way or you have to look a certain way.
We discovered that from fourth grade until even the middle of high school, students struggled to answer this question. They weren’t used to thinking about themselves with love.
Some teenagers answered, “My eyes” or “My hair.” A few 12th graders said they loved their mind. It was a beautiful thing to hear because it’s not just physical.
It’s important to have confidence at any age, and after doing this project, we hope we can find ways to build confidence in teens. We’ve all had an insecure part of our lives. But confidence breeds confidence. And that’s how we make the world better.
At this point in our lives, we are facing so many big changes - whether deciding where to live after school, making all new friends, going to college, working or something else. It’s all on us now - our parents’ job is done. We have to stand on our own feet.
Without confidence, how is that even possible? You need confidence to voice who you are. If you know who you are, you can tell others who that is and not be hidden. It’s very easy hide, especially in high school.
The impact of this lack of self-love is far-reaching. If we cannot identify something great about ourselves, it’s harder to form relationships. Because if you can’t find something you love about yourself, it would be hard for someone else to.
In order for people to get huge things done or make a big impact in the world, we need to be able to love ourselves, have love for others and work together. It’s hard to work with people when you don’t know what you want for yourself.
With graduation approaching, we are ready to go out in the world and make a difference. This project showed us that having confidence is even more important than we realized.
Being kind to ourselves, finding talents and skills that are unique to each person, and building positive energy is a great place to start if we want to be successful. We hope other teens realize how important it is to be confident and don’t shy away from daring to voice what is truly great about them. This is where we start to build a better world.