Open your eyes kid

My son forwards me this email this morning with the caption Bruh.

Hello B*****
Congratulations!
You have placed in the District Science and
Engineering Fair and are advancing to the State Fair in March. There will be an informational meeting on February 16th for all students participating in the State Fair.
You have also been selected to move on to the 2nd
round of judging for the District Fair which
will be held this Saturday. There were only 7 projects from the district that were selected to move on to the 2nd round and the top 3 projects out of the 7 will be able to participate in the International Science and
Engineering Fair (ISEF) in May.

so I’m like wow that’s really awesome great job.
He’s like no bc someone else who actually wants to do it could’ve been picked.
He doesn’t think his project is good. (It was awesome) and doesn’t want to have it move on. He’s so frustrating to me sometimes. He doesn’t ever seem to realize that he’s really great. He always thinks someone else deserves it, never him. I’ve always tried to encourage him and brag on him and let him know he’s doing a great job but he’s always like no, no and no. I think the whole college rejection thing really made it even worse!

His science fair project he coded a whole little educational video game. He created the pixel art himself and coded the whole game (using unity which he thought himself to use on YouTube, last year he did this same  project but with a program called game maker but it had a lot of problems) himself. It’s a game to teach you about the importance of watersheds. Then he had people take a quiz about watersheds before playing the game, play the game and then take the quiz again to determine is the game was able to teach people. I’m constantly blown away by this kid. I just wish I knew how to get it through to him that he’s amazing and he deserves this credit for his work. This is the same kid that last week at the grocery store picks up the brown bananas (I won’t eat them once they have spots so i us usually buy green ones) and when I was like oh not those, they’re too ripe, he was like well someone has to buy them. Well that doesn’t mean us. Someone who likes ripe bananas or wants to make bread or something will get them but us buying them doesn’t make sense because they’ll be rotten before we eat them.
Parenting is hard man. I don’t know how to do this 😳🙈 I definitely don’t think I’m doing that good of a job, the kid always thinks he deserves the worst and should always be overlooked.

so, I’ll just be screaming inside my head all day, again, like every other day. If you have any advice on how I can build his confidence I’ll take it. I’ve been trying for 17.5 years now and have not succeeded yet. 😳😒