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Learning confidence and adolescent development

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This resource aims to help you to build learning confidence in your adolescent. This will help them as they progress through the dual transitions from:

It suggests practical and fun activities that you can use to help your adolescent to build important skills. These skills will assist them to succeed in their education and future pathways.

Key skills and attributes of confident adolescents

Every parent wants their adolescent to be happy and confident. This also helps them as they transition from primary to secondary school.

There are 6 other skills and attributes that can support positive outcomes during the transition. They also support long-term success in life. These are:

Learn more about each of these elements below.

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Being able to plan and implement actions powerfully predicts success in life. It is especially important as an adolescent transitions to secondary school.

The ability to plan enables your adolescent to:

Activities to help your adolescent to develop their planning skills:

There is a developmental leap forward in adolescence.

Adolescents eventually learn that their first impulse is not always the best thing to do. They gain the ability to control impulses, prioritize, and reflect on the possible consequences of actions. It helps them to be able to anticipate and prepare for new learning that is challenging. It also helps them to deal with frustration in the early stages of learning new information. An important part of this is resisting distractions.

Impulse control also helps them to develop good friendships and collaborate well with others. In the long-term, impulse control is also protective against a range of risky behaviours later in life. These might include gambling, aggression, speeding, obesity, and addictions.

Activities to help your adolescent develop their impulse control:

At times we want our concentration to have pinpoint accuracy. For example, when we struggle to understand a new idea or try to finish a maths task when a best friend has already completed their work.

At other times we need a broader awareness. A simple example of broader awareness is crossing the road. We need to be focused on the cars approaching us and also need to be alert for cars pulling over unexpectedly.

Concentration is hard to gain and easy to lose. Learning how to gain it, keep it and shift it appropriately is a major advantage for your adolescent in their learning. It is hard for an adolescent to succeed in school if their mind wanders during class time. This would mean that they can’t focus on what is to be learned.

Concentration is a skill like any other, and you can help your adolescent develop it. Anyone who has ever learned to play a musical instrument or juggle multiple demands in a day knows that we often improve after some practice. Concentration is a skill we can improve at.

Activities to help your adolescent to develop their ability to concentrate:

One of the strongest predictors of your adolescent’s academic success is intelligence. One of the strongest indicators of their intelligence is their memory.

Memory is the basis of learning. You can’t use information that you can’t recall, and you can’t recall what you haven’t focused on.

Building your adolescent’s memory capacity is important. It increases their ability to hold key ideas in their mind, arrange, sort, link or process those ideas in different and creative ways. It helps them to recall key pieces of information when needed. As the complexity of information learned by your adolescent increases, memory is a vital skill for success.

You can support your adolescent to strengthen their memory. Use activities that include comparing, sequencing, summarizing, filtering out irrelevant information, reading and solving problems.

Activities to help your adolescent to develop their memory:

As your adolescent’s brain develops, they are capable of more sophisticated levels of thinking.

The complexity of the ideas they learn and use increases during the transition from primary to secondary school. There will be times they will need to deal with confusion, ambiguity and the frustration that they haven’t quite understood a new concept yet.

A mindset is a set of beliefs and attitudes your adolescent has about themself as a learner.

Your adolescent has 3 main mindsets:

The resilient mindset is where they can learn new ideas and overcome difficulties and challenges. It is a little like the childhood story of Goldilocks and the Three Bears, not too hot, not too cold, but just right.

The importance of a resilient mindset:

The neurochemical called dopamine plays an important role in motivation. It gives your adolescent that pumped up ‘I-can-take-on-the-world’ feeling. When their levels of dopamine decrease, they feel listless and sluggish.

Early teenagers have lower levels of dopamine than children do. They are often harder to motivate. The things they found motivating when they were younger no longer engage or interest them as much. You might notice that they are less interested in pleasing you or hanging out with you.

It gets more complicated because they become incredibly sensitively attuned to what their peers might think of them. Anxiety and fear can sabotage motivation. The neurochemicals associated with these feelings are adrenaline and cortisol.

Motivated vs unmotivated

The most important thing to know is that not feeling motivated hasn’t really got much to do with motivation. It has more to do with feeling anxious and worried. In fact, this is a useful formula to keep in mind: fear of failure + worry = loss of motivation.

Motivation has more to do with your adolescent overcoming their fears than anything else. During the transition years, it feels much easier not to attempt something rather than to risk failing. To make matters worse, their fears loom larger if they try to avoid them.

You can help your adolescent increase their dopamine and increase motivation by:

Increasing motivation

The transition years are a time when your adolescent learns more about themselves and their capabilities. When we focus on what they can do and what they are interested in, we build their sense of competence and increase the likelihood of success.

There are several ways this knowledge can benefit your child:

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Updated 27 March 2026

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