It Just Needs Someone in the Audience Who Believes: On the extraordinary power of being the person who sees her
Think back to someone in your own life who believed in you before you believed in yourself. A teacher, a parent, a coach, a friend. Someone who saw something in you that you could not yet see, and held that vision steadily enough that you eventually grew into it.
How much of who you became can be traced back to that person? To the fact that they were there, watching, certain of you in moments when you were certain of nothing?
This is what we mean when we talk about turning tears into transformation. Not that difficulty disappears, but that it becomes bearable, and then navigable, and then formative, because there is someone present who already knows how it ends. Who believes in the ending even when she cannot see it herself.
“You do not need to fix her difficult moments. You need to be present in them, believing in what she is capable of, even when she has temporarily forgotten.”
The audience that changes everything
Research into how children develop confidence and self-belief consistently points to one factor above almost all others: the presence of at least one adult who holds an unconditional positive belief in them. Not praise for achievement. Not reward for behaviour. Simply: I see you. I believe in you. Whatever is happening right now, I know what you are made of.
This is not about being unrealistic or painting over difficulty. It is about maintaining a clear, quiet certainty about your daughter’s capability, even in the moments when she is struggling most visibly with it. It is about being the person in the room who already knows she can do this, even when she is sure she cannot.
Girls, in particular, are susceptible to what researchers call “performance under observation’: they are acutely aware of how the people who matter to them are responding. When she senses, beneath all the noise of a difficult moment, that you are not panicking, not doubting, not disappointed but steady and certain of her, she has access to something she cannot generate alone: borrowed belief. And borrowed belief, over time, becomes her own.
Growing through the welling up
There will be moments, many of them, when your daughter wells up. When the difficulty is not a problem to be solved but a feeling to be moved through. When she is not broken, not struggling, but simply in the process of growing, and growth, as anyone who has done it knows, is not always comfortable.
Your presence in those moments does not need to be elaborate. It does not require the right words or a perfect response. It requires only that you stay, that you do not flinch, and that you carry in your body the quiet knowledge that she is going to be alright. Not because everything will work out perfectly, but because she has what she needs. And because you have watched her, closely and for a long time, and you have seen what she is made of.
She may not know it yet. That is precisely why she needs you in the audience.
Gillian Panton – Head of Junior School
Sydenham & Dulwich Girls · Raising Empowered Girls · Parent Thought Series