Helping Children Develop Self Esteem

A healthy self-esteem can be an important factor in a child's ability to learn and grow. Negative self-assessments often bring with them a loss of motivation, deep sadness, and pessimism.

Here are some suggestions that may help parents in the important effort to foster positive self-esteem.

Students crave true praise from the important adults in their lives. They are entitled to such positive feedback on a regular basis no matter how poor their grades in school, their behavior, or their athletic abilities.

Kids need to overhear their parents boasting about them to other adults.

Adults need to be careful of their wording when they criticize a student. Devastating, fatalistic comments, such as "You'll never amount to anything," are lethal to self-esteem and they seem to stick for an eternity - if you call someone bad often enough, he's certain to turn bad.

Students should not be compared to their siblings. Parents should make sure that different students in a family have their own unique ways of demonstrating their strengths and earning kudos.

When a student has learning difficulties and low self-esteem, adults should strive to help that student feel optimistic about the future. They should help the student appreciate his own strengths and how they will one day enable him to succeed. When kids are struggling, they need to know there is plenty of light at the end of the tunnel. Pessimism about the future goes hand in hand with low self-esteem, and it can lead to serious behavioral and motivational problems.

--adapted from Barely a Gleam of Self-Esteem by Dr. Mel Levine