I was eleven years old when I first noticed it happening to another girl in my class.
She had come into training that autumn loud, funny, impossible to ignore: the kind of child who fills a room without trying. By the following spring, she barely spoke in the breaks between exercises. She still performed well. Technically, she was better than ever. But something had gone out in her.
I didn’t have the language for it then. I just knew something was wrong.
I spent years training in elite performing arts environments in London, and they gave me a great deal: discipline, resilience, experiences I wouldn’t trade. But they also gave me a front-row seat to something that troubled me far more than I admitted at the time. Talented children (genuinely, naturally talented children) slowly shrinking. Not because they were failing, but because they were constantly being measured. Against each other, against some invisible standard, against whoever had been cast above them that term.
Comparison, when it runs underneath everything, is extraordinarily corrosive. Children absorb it before they can name it. They start to perform not from joy but from anxiety. They become very good at hiding uncertainty, which is its own kind of damage.
What nobody talks about in the conversation around performing arts and children is how passive the confidence-building actually is in most settings. A child attends classes. A child gets onstage. The assumption follows that confidence will naturally result. Because they act as expected and receive the approval from success, they learn that is love and this is the bill for that. Without saying anything, they keep winning on the outside yet get quieter by day inside.
Confidence in children isn’t a byproduct of activity. It’s the result of specific, repeated experiences: of feeling seen, of being encouraged without condition, of belonging somewhere that isn’t contingent on their performance. That sounds straightforward, but it requires real intentionality to build. It doesn’t happen because children are in the same room as other children doing something creative.
The quietest child in a group is not necessarily the least confident child. They may simply be the most cautious: the one who needs the most evidence, before they trust that it’s safe to be themselves. When those children are given that evidence, consistently and over time, the transformation can be startling.
I also think we underestimate how much the language adults use shapes a child’s inner world.
Children don’t just hear what we say. They internalise it. The way an adult talks about mistakes, about nerves, about not being good enough: these become the private voice children use on themselves. It works in both directions. An adult who praises bravery rather than outcome, who normalises nervousness rather than dismissing it, is quietly building something in a child that lasts.
There’s a difference between telling a child “you were brilliant” and telling them “I noticed how hard you tried with that.” The first is a verdict. The second is a witness. Children need witnesses more than they need verdicts.
Practical independence matters too, in ways we sometimes underestimate. The child who orders their own food, who introduces themselves, who answers a question without a parent stepping in: these moments accumulate. They are, in small ways, evidence to a child that they can navigate the world on their own terms. Confidence is essentially the sum of those moments.
We live in a strange time to be a child. The pressures that once arrived in adolescence now arrive earlier, and they arrive constantly, through screens and feeds that are specifically designed to generate comparison and inadequacy. Creative spaces (real ones, not performative ones) matter more now than they ever have.
Not because performing arts produces performers. Most children who sing and dance and act will never work in the industry, and that’s exactly as it should be. The point was never the industry. The point is what happens to a child who is given regular, sustained permission to imagine, to express, to be strange and loud and uncertain in a room where that is welcomed.
The girl I watched go quiet that spring: I’ve thought about her a lot over the years. I’ve wondered what a different environment might have done. Not less rigorous, necessarily. Rigour isn’t the problem. But rigour built on safety rather than fear. On acknowledgment rather than comparison. On the belief that a child’s worth is not conditional on how they perform today.
That’s a harder thing to build than a good show. But it’s the thing that actually lasts.