The second essential mental software is building children's confidence.
For parents, fostering a child's confidence is an important task at least until the child reaches the age of 25. Before children become independent, parents should protect their confidence as carefully as they would their eyes. Confidence is a dynamic process that requires continual development and reinforcement. One cannot have confidence once and for all; it must be cultivated and maintained at every moment. Confidence is a subjective psychological state that enables children to utilize their abilities, even tapping into potential, to succeed in tasks.
To use an analogy, confidence is like the preparatory program a computer runs before entering the main operating program. If a child lacks confidence, when faced with a problem, their brain may enter a subsystem focused on thoughts like "Why can't I do this?" or "I'm not capable." With confidence, the brain can enter the main program, concentrating on solving the problem. Therefore, confidence is the core psychological mechanism that determines whether a child can accomplish tasks correctly. Confidence is more than just standing tall; it is the mental process used when approaching tasks. A confident child will analyze a problem deeply, exploring the causal relationships between conditions and outcomes to solve it. In contrast, a child without confidence may focus only on the surface, feel pressured and anxious, question the difficulty of the problem or the teacher's intentions, worry about parental criticism, and end up not solving it. Eventually, they may conclude: "See, I'm bad at math; I just can't do it."
