How To Raise Humble Kids

Three scientific insights that could make your kids a wee bit less arrogant.

A few months ago, I wrote about the fascinating reasons why kids are annoyingly overconfident. Some of it is due to differences in perspective — kids see bragging very differently than we do — and some of it is because arrogance can be, for children, at least, evolutionarily adaptive. In that post, talked a little bit about how parents can respond to kids’ arrogance, but today I want to unpack in more detail some of the recent science on fostering humility in children.

Humility, as it turns out, is a pretty useful trait. I mean, yes, arrogant people can be extremely successful (hello, 45th U.S. president). But research suggests humble people learn more and are more empathetic and generous and less judgmental than arrogant people are.

There’s still a lot we don’t know about how humility develops, but recent studies highlight three strategies that could help kids become more humble.