How to raise a child self esteem

Your Child's Self-Esteem (for Parents)

Sometimes it's easy to notice when kids seem to feel good about themselves — and when they don't. We often describe this idea of feeling good about ourselves as "self-esteem."

Kids with self-esteem:

• feel liked and accepted
• feel confident
• feel proud of what they can do
• think good things about themselves
• believe in themselves

Kids with low self-esteem:

• are self-critical and hard on themselves
• feel they're not as good as other kids
• think of the times they fail rather than when they succeed
• lack confidence
• doubt they can do things well

Why Self-Esteem Matters

Kids who feel good about themselves have the confidence to try new things. They are more likely to try their best. They feel proud of what they can do. Self-esteem helps kids cope with mistakes. It helps kids try again, even if they fail at first. As a result, self-esteem helps kids do better at school, at home, and with friends.

Kids with low self-esteem feel unsure of themselves. If they think others won't accept them, they may not join in. They may let others treat them poorly. They may have a hard time standing up for themselves. They may give up easily, or not try at all. Kids with low self-esteem find it hard to cope when they make a mistake, lose, or fail. As a result, they may not do as well as they could.

How Self-Esteem Develops

Self-esteem can start as early as babyhood. It develops slowly over time. It can start just because a child feels safe, loved, and accepted. It can start when a baby gets positive attention and loving care.

As babies become toddlers and young children, they're able to do some things all by themselves. They feel good about themselves when they can use their new skills. Their self-esteem grows when parents pay attention, let a child try, give smiles, and show they're proud.

As kids grow, self-esteem can grow too. Any time kids try things, do things, and learn things can be a chance for self-esteem to grow. This can happen when kids:

• make progress toward a goal
• learn things at school
• make friends and get along
• learn skills — music, sports, art, cooking, tech skills
• practice favorite activities
• help, give, or be kind 
• get praise for good behaviors
• try hard at something
• do things they're good at and enjoy
• are included by others
• feel understood and accepted
• get a prize or a good grade they know they've earned

When kids have self-esteem, they feel confident, capable, and accepted for who they are.

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How Parents Can Build Self-Esteem

Every child is different. Self-esteem may come easier to some kids than others. And some kids face things that can lower their self-esteem. But even if a child's self-esteem is low, it can be raised.

Here are things parents can do to help kids feel good about themselves: 

Help your child learn to do things. At every age, there are new things for kids to learn. Even during babyhood, learning to hold a cup or take first steps sparks a sense of mastery and delight. As your child grows, things like learning to dress, read, or ride a bike are chances for self-esteem to grow.

When teaching kids how to do things, show and help them at first. Then let them do what they can, even if they make mistakes. Be sure your child gets a chance to learn, try, and feel proud. Don't make new challenges too easy — or too hard.

Praise your child, but do it wisely. Of course, it's good to praise kids. Your praise is a way to show that you're proud. But some ways of praising kids can actually backfire.

Here's how to do it right:

• Don't overpraise. Praise that doesn't feel earned doesn't ring true. For example, telling a child he played a great game when he knows he didn't feels hollow and fake. It's better to say, "I know that wasn't your best game, but we all have off days. I'm proud of you for not giving up." Add a vote of confidence: "Tomorrow, you'll be back on your game."
• Praise effort. Avoid focusing praise only on results (such as getting an A) or fixed qualities (such as being smart or athletic).

  Instead, offer most of your praise for effort, progress, and attitude. For example: "You're working hard on that project," "You're getting better and better at these spelling tests," or, "I'm proud of you for practicing piano — you've really stuck with it." With this kind of praise, kids put effort into things, work toward goals, and try. When kids do that, they're more likely to succeed.

Be a good role model. When you put effort into everyday tasks (like raking the leaves, making a meal, cleaning up the dishes, or washing the car), you're setting a good example. Your child learns to put effort into doing homework, cleaning up toys, or making the bed.

Modeling the right attitude counts too. When you do tasks cheerfully (or at least without grumbling or complaining), you teach your child to do the same. When you avoid rushing through chores and take pride in a job well done, you teach your child to do that too.

Ban harsh criticism. The messages kids hear about themselves from others easily translate into how they feel about themselves. Harsh words ("You're so lazy!") are harmful, not motivating. When kids hear negative messages about themselves, it harms their self-esteem. Correct kids with patience. Focus on what you want them to do next time. When needed, show them how.

Focus on strengths. Pay attention to what your child does well and enjoys. Make sure your child has chances to develop these strengths. Focus more on strengths than weaknesses if you want to help kids feel good about themselves. This improves behavior too.

Let kids help and give. Self-esteem grows when kids get to see that what they do matters to others. Kids can help out at home, do a service project at school, or do a favor for a sibling. Helping and kind acts build self-esteem and other good feelings.

Reviewed by: D'Arcy Lyness, PhD

Date reviewed: July 2018

11 tips on building self-esteem in children

Simply praising your child can actually do more harm than good. Here's a comprehensive guide on how to build self confidence in a child.

Photo by Brand New Images/Getty Images

Last week, my son Aaron made the school soccer team. Boy, was I proud. And I couldn’t stop saying so. “Good job, buddy! You’re the best!” I beamed, he beamed, and all seemed right with the world.

It’s not the first time my kids have heard me shout their praises. I’m the resident cheering section, their biggest fan, a back-patter extraordinaire. These days, you can find me handing out compliments as if they’re sticks of gum—when my kids practise guitar, score a goal, help with dishes. The mom logic goes like this: The kid does good (or good enough for me), so I make him feel great about himself. It’s called boosting self-esteem. Or so I thought. Here are some things you may not have considered about building self-esteem in children.

As it turns out, there are better ways to build self-esteem than heaping on praise for everything kids do—starting with helping them become competent in the world, says Jim Taylor, author of the book Your Kids Are Listening: Nine Messages They Need to Hear from You. 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. “As much as we may want to, we can’t praise our kids into competence,” he says.

In fact, by over-praising kids, we’re doing more harm than good. “We’re lowering the bar for them,” Taylor says. “If you keep telling your child she is already doing a fantastic job, you’re saying she no longer needs to push herself. 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. Either kids start thinking they’re perfect or they try to be perfect all the time—an impossible standard. And inaccurate praise confuses them, she says. “If my son can’t spell and I tell him he’s doing terrific, he learns not to trust his own instincts. He also learns that praise is just flat-out lying.”

Plus, Taylor adds, telling your child he’s the best, the smartest or the most talented is setting him up for some very bad news down the road. You’re creating an egomaniac who thinks his scribbles are Rothkos but, sooner or later, he’ll discover he’s not all that after all.

Start by forcing yourself to stand back while your child takes healthy risks, says Victoria Sopik, CEO of Kids & Company, a corporate childcare service in Toronto, and a mother of eight. “To build confidence in the world, kids have to take chances, make choices and take responsibility for them,” Sopik says. 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. “He was about to pour it into a glass, and I just stood there, holding my breath,” Sopik recalls.  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. “He solved his own problem—just like we do as successful adults,” Sopik says.

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. Sopik always let her kids decide on their own whether to wear a coat, hat and mittens in winter. “Once they knew the difference between warm and cold, it was up to them. They should have control over their bodies and take responsibility for their choices,” she says.

In building self-esteem, kids also need opportunities to demonstrate their competence and feel that their contribution is valuable, says Taylor. At home, that means asking them, even when they’re toddlers, to help with cooking, setting the table and making beds.

Another surefire way to boost confidence in kids is to encourage them to take on tasks they show interest in, then make sure they follow through to completion. It doesn’t matter what the task—it could be anything from swimming laps to beating levels in video games. The point is for them to stick with what they start, so they feel that hit of accomplishment at the end.

What if your child’s self-esteem plummets when she gets cut from the gymnastics team or can’t memorize multiplication tables?

“So many parents have it backward,” Taylor says. “They think struggles and failure will hurt their kids’ self-esteem, but it’s actually a golden opportunity to help build it.”

Let your child know you love her even when she fails or makes bad decisions. If all you talk about is performance, Sopik points out, she will think you only love her for her report card or the lead she got in the play.

That may mean suggesting he join house league, where he can feel like a star rather than being the last one picked on the AA team. MacLeod learned this lesson when her son, Alex, was in grade two. Feeling like a failure at reading, Alex was ready to give up when MacLeod brought home some Magic Tree House books, which were slightly below Alex’s level. “He read one every two days and was so proud of himself that he went on to read the Goosebumps series, no problem,” she recalls. Afterward, mother and son talked about how Alex’s choice to practise paid off, and she praised his perseverance.

Although praise is often misused, when it’s specific and earned, it is a valuable self-esteem builder, Taylor says.

Lorna Crosse, a former music teacher, remembers asking her choir students to keep a “brag file” full of praise they earned. Any time they saw their names in a program or newspaper article or received a complimentary note, they were to put it inside. “When the kids had a bad day, they would take out those words of praise and read all the neat things they had done, and it would make them feel better about themselves. ”

The brag file works because it shows kids specific ways they’re special and teaches them that practise reaps rewards, Taylor says. And it’s the practise—the effort—that should be the focus of praise, Sopik says. “Don’t just say ‘great play’. Tell him it was awesome how he passed the ball to his teammate.”

And keep in mind that a little indirect praise, such as stars on a chore chart, can work wonders. Mom Nancy Botelho gets even more inventive. She makes sure her kids “overhear” a little boasting. “I’ll tell my friends how the teacher said Margaret is so kind, or how I saw Bridget working so hard at tying her shoes. The kids just shine. Since they were spying, they know I mean it and I’m not just trying to make them feel good.”

Here are some of the things that the Canadian Mental Health Association says you can do to help raise confident—not coddled—kids:

Feel special. It’s imporant for you to help your children discover their own unique talents and qualities, and to value their own strengths. But also teach them that feeling special doesn’t mean feeling better than others.

Set goals. Teach your kids to work towards a goal and to have pride in their accomplishments. Provide them with opportunities for success.

Try, try again. Encourage your children to try things their own way, face challenges and take risks.

This article was originally published in July 2013. 

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A simple technique that will help raise your child's self-esteem

To instill confidence in a child, it is not necessary to undertake something global - the most "modest" ways that we sometimes forget about also work. Here's an example: tell your child stories from his own past more often! How exactly to do this, we will learn from the bestseller of the Norwegian psychologist Gyru Eyestad “Self-esteem in children and adolescents. A book for parents.

Gyuru Øyestad, psychologist, lecturer at the Institute of Psychology (University of Oslo)

Real life example

Stories can inspire and give rise to new achievements. I will give an example illustrating this process.

Seven-year-old Anya is terribly shy, so much so that it interferes with her life. In particular, she does not dare to go to friends' birthday parties if she has not yet properly met their parents. She is afraid to greet strangers and refuses to attend circles and sections with her peers. One evening, she watches a family videotape. There is an episode where the six-month-old Anya sits on the lap of one or another adult. All this happens in the park, where the parents had a picnic with friends. Baby Anya smiles at those around her and mumbles cheerfully. She lets adults kiss her on the cheek, she laughs when she is amused. On the screen, Anya sees a confident and sociable baby, and the most interesting thing is that this baby is Anya. When the recording comes to an end, Anya sits thoughtfully on the sofa for some more time. “When I was little, I wasn’t shy at all,” she tells her parents. “That’s right,” Mom replies. — You have so much confidence and openness, Anya!

This seemingly unremarkable incident greatly affected Anya. The video, demonstrating Anya's confidence, courage and openness in infancy, apparently expanded the boundaries of the girl's self-awareness. Anya slowly began to act more boldly, less shy, and a few days after watching the recording, she expressed a desire to accept the invitation and go on her own to a birthday party, where she had been afraid to go before. Her parents waved after her in amazement and joy when she slowly walked away from the house.

When a child (and, for that matter, an adult too) discovers something in himself that reveals other aspects of his personality, a kind of psychological mood may arise, a willingness to strengthen what you already have, but which is probably some kind of time was dormant. Anya and her parents lived for several years with the idea of ​​Anya as a very timid girl. The video recording of Anya the baby stimulated in the seven-year-old girl the willingness to take advantage of the openness that lies in it. So alternative stories about ourselves often trigger patterns of action that are different from those that we are used to.

It is important for parents to remember this. We can contribute to the development and strengthening of the structure of the "I" of the child, his self-esteem, consciously suggesting certain stories from his life.

A lot of opportunities are hidden in a child, and a short childhood life already contains a wide variety of experiences, multifaceted and ambiguous: a shy person was brave at some moments, a brave man was scared, an accommodating one did not obey, and a fidget was quieter than water below the grass . As adults, we can consciously choose stories that help a child develop what we feel they need to develop.

“Tell me little about me!”

Children love to hear stories about themselves, about when they were younger, and this is no coincidence. "Tell me little about me!" - a common request with which a child addresses his parents, a request that we are obliged to fulfill.
Tell your child how wonderful and charming he was. Describe his current habits or unusual sounds he made in infancy. Tell us about his first words and how he surprised you with funny sayings at only two years of age.
Choose stories that make both you and your child feel good, and be prepared to tell over and over those that you think he enjoys listening to. My youngest daughter loves stories about how, as a baby, she got terribly angry if she couldn’t cope with something, and about the incredible joy that lit up her when she did succeed. I think she likes stories that tell about wanting, achieving and getting what you want.

Try to tell stories about different things, not about the same thing. To strengthen self-esteem, it is useful for children to hear what a wealth of qualities they possess. In this way, you will support in the child the ability to address various aspects of his personality.

Eeystad. “Self-esteem in children and adolescents. A book for parents”

How is healthy self-esteem formed? What words and actions of parents will help the child feel their importance and value, teach them how to cope with difficulties and make the right choice? The book provides important guidelines for moms and dads who are not only ready to love a child without looking back, but also want to realize the impact they have on him every day. Examples from life provide an opportunity to think, draw parallels, and, perhaps, see yourself from the outside.

Read also:

What to say to a child instead of "Well done!" 5 really useful praises

11 things that should not be forbidden to children

How to stop comparing your child with others

Photo: My Good Images, fizkes / Shutterstock self-assessment