What self-efficacy is, where it comes from, and why a caregiver’s confidence matters this much.
I say “confidence creates change” constantly. It’s on my website, it’s in my sessions, and it might be the phrase I use most in my work. I want to show you it isn’t a slogan. It’s built on decades of research, and once you see where it comes from, I think you’ll trust it the way I do.
Most caregivers have never considered their own confidence as part of the treatment equation for their child. This post is about why that needs to change.
I want to introduce you to Albert Bandura, because everything I do with caregivers is built on his work.
Bandura was a psychologist who spent decades studying self-efficacy: the belief that you’re capable of doing the thing in front of you. Not that you’ll enjoy it or that it’ll be easy. Just that you can do it.
Here’s why this matters so much in parenting. What you believe about your own capability doesn’t sit quietly in the background while you parent. It shapes what you do. Two parents can hear the exact same guidance from the exact same treatment team and act completely differently, because one believes she can hold the line and the other doesn’t quite believe it yet. That gap in belief, not the gap in knowledge, is usually what separates the parent who follows through from the parent who backs down.
This is why I don’t treat your confidence as a soft, secondary outcome of this work. It’s the mechanism.
The four places confidence actually comes from
Bandura identified four specific sources that build self-efficacy, and I use all four with the families I work with.
Mastery experiences. Confidence is built by doing the thing, succeeding even in a small way, and then having that success register instead of getting skipped past. This is why I don’t just hand caregivers a script and send them off. We try something in real life, then come back and talk about what happened. That’s where the mastery experience actually lands.
Social persuasion. Credible encouragement from someone who knows what they’re talking about changes behavior. Part of my role is to be that voice for you until your own internal one is loud enough to do the job on its own. Twenty-five years of watching this work gives me a certain authority to say “you can do this,” and I don’t say it lightly.
Physiological and emotional states. This one surprises people. Your nervous system’s baseline affects your belief in your own capability. If you’re flooded, your body will tell you a boundary is unbearable whether or not it actually is. That’s part of why I spend real time on regulation with caregivers. It’s how you get access to the skills you already have, in the moment you need them.
Vicarious learning. Watching someone like you succeed builds belief that you can too. I co-facilitate a group for moms supporting a child through this with the National Alliance for Eating Disorders. Watching each other come out the other side of the same terrifying moments does something information alone can’t.
Why guilt is the thing standing in the way
Guilt, shame and self-blame are remarkably efficient at blocking mastery experiences before they ever happen. If you believe, even quietly, that you caused this or that you don’t have the right to hold a firm line, you’ll hesitate. You’ll over-explain a decision that didn’t need explaining. You’ll let the moment pass. Each time that happens, you lose the evidence of capability that would have made the next moment easier.
This is why my work with caregivers starts with releasing guilt before it moves into skill-building. You can’t build self-efficacy on top of unexamined shame. The shame has to move first. And to be clear, parents do not cause eating disorders.
Borrowing confidence until you can build your own
I say some version of this to almost every caregiver I work with: when you can’t yet believe in your own capacity, I will hold that belief for you. That’s not a metaphor. It’s Bandura’s social persuasion, put to clinical use.
A parent walks in convinced she’s the least equipped person in the room to help her own child. We work through a mastery experience or two. We name what actually happened, honestly, without inflating it. Slowly, the belief starts to shift from mine to hers. I’ve watched that shift happen for twenty-five years now, and it’s the research doing exactly what it says it should do.
What this means for you
You don’t need to feel confident before you act. That order is backwards, and it’s the trap most caregivers fall into: waiting to feel ready before they’ll try. Confidence follows action, not the other way around. Every hard conversation, every boundary you hold even imperfectly, every meal you get through, is building the evidence your own brain will use to believe you can do the next one too.
Releasing guilt clears the runway. Self-efficacy is what gets you off the ground. And every piece of it is buildable, skill by skill, moment by moment, the same way any caregiver learns any hard thing.
A note for clinicians
Caregiver confidence is not a soft, secondary outcome. It’s a mechanism. A parent’s belief in their own capability shapes whether the guidance you give actually gets carried out at home, which makes it worth paying attention to in its own right, alongside the medical and nutritional picture.
If you want to see where this fits in the bigger picture, this post is part of Pillar II · Reframe of The Confident Caregiver Approach™. You can read the full framework in my plain-language guide here.
If you’d like support building this confidence for your specific situation, a free 20-minute discovery call is a good place to start. You can learn more and book one at akchaseconsulting.com.
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