To do so, though, you have to learn to step back and let your child take risks, make choices, solve problems and stick with what they start. Self-esteem comes from feeling loved and secure, and from developing competence , Taylor says, and although parents often shower their kids with the first two ingredients, competence—becoming good at things—takes time and effort.
But confidence comes from doing, from trying and failing and trying again—from practise. Samantha MacLeod, who has four boys, ages one to nine, believes constant complimenting can actually erode self-esteem. And inaccurate praise confuses them, she says. He also learns that praise is just flat-out lying. She sees too many parents trying to rescue their kids from failure all the time. Sopik remembers staring from across the room as her two-year-old son, Fraser, lifted a huge jug of orange pop at a fancy party.
Rather than trying to save her son before he had a chance to try, Sopik watched as Fraser spilled the pop all over the floor. Then came the best part: Fraser found a waitress, asked for a paper towel and cleaned up his own mess. When kids make their own age-appropriate choices, they feel more powerful, says Sopik, pointing out that kids as young as two can start considering the consequences of their decisions.
More important, having a positive self-image helps a child feel happy and capable of maintaining personal relationships. Building children's self-esteem is an ongoing part of parenting. Letting children do things for themselves helps them acquire needed skills.
When parents respect their children, the children learn to respect themselves. And when parents show affection, kids learn how to share their feelings with others.
Parents' actions influence the way children feel about themselves. When a parent holds a child, the child can feel how important he or she is. Parents who can't be with their kids on a daily basis can call them, write them notes or send e-mails.
Parents should talk to their kids, listen to what they have to say and show them that their opinions count. Children need their parents' unconditional love and support.
The love of a parent should not depend on the good behavior of a child. Even as they set limits and enforce discipline, parents should reassure their kids that they love them. Withholding love from kids when they misbehave will make them feel bad about themselves. Instead, parents should explain to the child what he or she did was wrong and then impose a consequence.
Self-esteem comes from learning to accept who we are by seeing the insufficiencies and still choosing to like ourselves. According to Madelyn Swift, our emotional health depends on our self-esteem. Liking ourselves and feeling capable are the foundations on which emotional health rests.
You may ask yourself how you can help a child, your child, have positive self-esteem. Rather it fluctuates around a core, relatively stable level. When getting dressed in the morning, finds just the shirt he wants to wear and puts it on without needing help. His self-esteem may rise. But when having breakfast, he spills the milk he is trying to pour into his cereal bowl. This may lower his circumstantial or temporary self-esteem.
These happenings only temporarily increase or decrease self-esteem. Ultimately, self-esteem will return to its core or base level.
How do children with healthy self-esteem act and feel? The concept of self-esteem is a relatively new field of research. In these early years of the self-esteem movement, the experts emphasized how a child feels over what the child does. The concern was that children should feel good about themselves by believing that they are loved and special. Parents thought they were doing the right thing by rescuing their children from any mistakes or hard work so that the children would presumably feel good about themselves.
Actually, what was taking place in these families was that children were learning that they could not solve their own problems or cope with difficulties. By avoiding feelings of failure and the need to persist and achieve mastery, the self-esteem movement actually made it more difficult for children to feel competent and capable. Children need to fail and to feel disappointed, frustrated, worried and angry so they can learn to deal with these inevitable life experiences when they are young and still within the safety of a loving family.
They need to be held to certain realistic standards, have expectations placed on them that they strive to meet and be held accountable for their behavior. Through handling challenges with persistence, they will begin to see obstacles as challenges to overcome and develop into strong problem solvers. Children are not born into this world with a picture of themselves. Rather they develop an image of themselves and how valuable and lovable they are over time based upon their interactions with their primary caregiver.
How you respond to their needs, to their requests, and to their attempts to grow tell your children what you think of them. You can be aware of letting them know you love them see below for details , that you willingly will meet their needs, that you believe in them, and that you are excited to see them grow and explore and mature. Another important way to develop self-esteem in children is to create a dependable, trustworthy relationship with your children in which they feel safe, accepted, and cherished.
Having this model in their minds gives them the courage to take risks, grow, and explore the world, knowing that if they run into trouble, they have that relationship with you to come back to. Your 2 year-old wanders to the other side of the room, but comes back to you to literally touch base.
Your 13 year-old is being excluded from her social circle by some of the girls, and she feels safe enough to talk to you about it. Your college-age student is able to go away to school because she knows that you will let her come home to visit touch base when she needs to and that she can keep in touch electronically as much as she needs to. There are two different kinds of messages that we can communicate to children that will directly help to support their self-esteem.
Just as a ladder needs its two legs in order to be strong and stable, you need to provide both Being and Doing Messages for your children to have a strong internal foundation.
This refers to the lovable part of the self-esteem equation. They communicate unconditional love. It is valuing our children for who they are and embracing all of the things that make them unique, even some of the traits that make them challenging to raise.
It is one of the ways we let them know we cherish them. We can also convey Being Messages through our actions, such as a hug, sitting next to them, giving a back rub, smiling when they enter a room, or giving them the greatest gift — our time and positive attention.
All of these words and actions tell our children that we consider them a joy, not a burden, and that they are worthy of being loved. Over-doing the Being Messages can cause children to become self-centered, demanding, entitled, without an effective work ethic which would help them realize they need to put forth effort to achieve a goal.
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