How Reading Struggles Kill Your Child's Confidence and How To Rebuild It!

For many children, reading doesn’t just feel difficult; it's a punishment. When reading is a daily struggle, it quietly affects more than academic progress. It impacts confidence, motivation, and a child’s belief in their own abilities. Over time, what should be a window into fantastical worlds or the answer to their curiosity about their own world can instead become a source of stress, anxiety, and embarrassment. Children begin to internalize their struggles, often long before adults realize what’s happening beneath the surface.

Children are highly aware of how they compare to others. They notice when classmates read more fluently, finish faster, or are called on more often. They notice when reading time consistently feels harder for them than for everyone else. These experiences send a powerful message: something must be wrong with me. As confidence erodes, many struggling readers begin to avoid reading aloud, disengage or misbehave during instruction, rush through work to hide mistakes, or label themselves as “bad readers” or “not smart.” At this point, reading difficulties are no longer just about the skill but have become tied to the emotion. 

In many cases, reading unintentionally becomes a punishment to children. Parents and teachers are almost always trying to help, but certain well-meaning responses can have the opposite effect. When a child falls behind, they may be assigned extra reading. Practice sessions may focus too heavily on errors and be absent of any positive feedback. More difficult text may be pushed in the hope that the child will catch up when it is clearly beyond their instructional level. Over time, reading becomes associated with pressure, correction, and failure rather than growth. Instead of seeing practice as a path to improvement, children begin to see it as something they have to do because of their poor performance.

By Colin Campbell, President of Great Leaps

One of the most effective ways to rebuild confidence is also one of the most overlooked: starting below a student’s instructional level. While it may seem counterintuitive, confidence grows through success, not struggle. When children begin reading material that feels manageable, accuracy improves, fluency increases, and mistakes decrease. These early wins matter. They send a new internal message that reading is something the child can do successfully. Then instructors have many opportunities to praise students for that success and can slowly ease them into instructional level material. At Great Leaps Tutoring, this occurs over approximately the first two weeks, or six to ten lessons. 

Positive reinforcement plays a critical role in this process. True reinforcement is not about empty praise or exaggeration. It is about noticing real effort, real improvement, and real progress, even when growth happens in small steps. When children hear specific, meaningful feedback about what they are doing well, their internal narrative begins to shift. Instead of focusing on mistakes, they begin to recognize improvement. Over time, this consistent reinforcement helps replace the belief of “I always mess up” with “I’m getting better.” Errors are then reframed into learning opportunities instead of their own failure or shortcomings. 

Confidence and skill develop together, but confidence often needs to come first. When students feel safe, supported, and successful, they are more willing to give their full effort and tackle more challenging material head-on. A supportive reading routine prioritizes success before difficulty and progress over perfection. You'll note in Great Leaps Reading, we allow for up to two errors on a passage, as well as finishing it within one minute to make a Leap and move on to the next exercise. By building a strong foundation of confidence, students are better prepared to handle more complex reading tasks later.

Every child wants to feel capable. When reading struggles undermine confidence, even capable students can begin to doubt themselves and disengage from learning. By removing the sense of punishment, starting below instructional level, and using consistent positive reinforcement, we give children the opportunity to rebuild trust in themselves as readers. Reading does not have to be a source of stress or frustration, but often times it requires bringing in some outside support to give your child a fresh start without the baggage of previous fights with mom and dad or even their teacher around reading. 

Confidence isn’t built by fighting through tears and overcoming frustration. It's built through engineered successes that lead to persistence as the material becomes more challenging because they know a win is right around the corner.