Happy Holidays and Holy Days to all our Kartini Clinic friends. This blog is a quote from one of my “most admired” pediatricians and another doctor named Joshua Sparrow on the subject of “self esteem”, a term I have come to hate for its over-use. As usual, Dr Brazelton has something useful and instructive to say on the subject. I would encourage you to google him for other pearls of wisdom.
I am blogging on self-esteem today because our patients, although they do have eating disorders, are otherwise normal teens and children, and non-eating-disorder issues are as relevant for them and their parents as they are for anyone. So here it goes:
I would like to hear your thoughts on how to raise a child to have a strong sense of self-esteem. ? Tim S.
Dr. Brazelton and Dr. Sparrow respond: The word “self-esteem” has been so overused that its meaning has been lost and sometimes confused with “selfishness.” But these are entirely different. Thank you for your question and this opportunity to clear up the confusion.
Self-esteem does not refer to an inflated view of one’s self. Instead, it is the capacity to hold onto a basically hopeful view of one’s self while facing and integrating experiences that challenge this view. The development of healthy self-esteem in a child allows her to confront her mistakes without taking apart her positive feelings about herself, so that she can mobilize these positive feelings (confidence, faith in her potential, etc.) to find the courage to learn from and overcome her mistakes. The result is not a skewed view of one’s self, but a realistic one in which both strengths and weaknesses can be acknowledged and accepted.
How to help a young child develop healthy self-esteem? Here, too, there’s been a great deal of misunderstanding. Overpraising a child (“Yay!” for every least little utterance or gesture) can interfere with a child’s learning to motivate herself, to praise herself when she deserves it, and to face her failures so that she can work to overcome them. I have seen five-year-olds in Kenya care competently for younger siblings without anybody cheering them on, yet radiating a quiet confidence in their own abilities. In some upper-middle-class communities in this country, I have seen some children who seem to lack the inner motivation to challenge themselves, and who have become dependent on external sources of praise — over which they have a different kind of control.
Abundant opportunities for small successes and an environment rich with developmentally calibrated challenges are important, but total protection from small failures deprives a child of the experience of facing mistakes, feeling the feelings that go with this, getting these feelings under control, and then developing the resolve to try again. Perhaps most important of all for the development of healthy self-esteem in a child is a parent’s unconditional acceptance — entirely independent of performance — of a child not for what she does, but for who she is. Feeling loved no matter what does not fill us with illusions about how wonderful we are, but helps us to tolerate our imperfections. When we can do this, we are more likely to learn to live with the imperfections of others. This is why self-esteem is such an important first step in learning to get along with others.
Excerpted from NYTimes.com
