We know good self-esteem is critical to a child’s well-being, but what does it look like and how does it work? We’ll take you through the inner workings of child self-esteem with this guide that could help parents better understand their children.
Psychologists have found some surprising and universal things about self-esteem, according to an article in Psychology Today:
1. There are different kinds of self-esteem. We generally divide self-esteem between how we think about ourselves in global terms and how we see ourselves in specific roles.
2. The impact of specific self-esteem on global self-esteem varies. The more important a given domain of self-esteem is to you, the more impact it has on your overall, global self-esteem.
3. Our self-esteem fluctuates day to day and hour to hour. “Much like a bad hair day, we might wake up feeling great about ourselves one day and totally insecure the next.”
4. Higher self-esteem is not necessarily better. “Ideally, your self-esteem should be high but not too high. Narcissists tend to have high feelings of self-worth but their self-esteem is also brittle and unstable. Even small ‘insults’ can make a narcissist crash and feel terribly ‘wounded’.”
5. Self-esteem is unrelated to physical attractiveness. “Studies found that people with low self-esteem were judged to be just as attractive as people with high self-esteem. What makes the difference is how we present ourselves”
6. People with low self-esteem are resistant to positive feedback. “Unfortunately, having low self-esteem makes us resistant to the very compliments and positive feedback that could improve our feelings of self-worth. When our self-esteem is low we feel unworthy of praise and we actually get stressed out by the heightened expectations we believe the praise will bring.”
7. Positive affirmations make people with low self-esteem feel worse. Sadly, the very people who need positive affirmations most, those with low self-esteem, tend to feel worse about themselves when they recite them. Here’s why: When a statement falls too far outside our belief system we tend to reject it.
8. Most programs to boost self-esteem don’t work. “Studies show most people’s self-esteem doesn’t change at all after using products or completing programs and workshops that are aimed at boosting it. So why is self-esteem such a thriving industry nonetheless? It turns out that after going through a self-esteem program, we tend to distort our memories of how we felt before, and recall our self-esteem as being lower than it was.”
9. Higher self-esteem functions like an emotional immune system. “When our self-esteem is higher, we are less affected by stress and anxiety, we experience rejections and failures as less hurtful and we recover from them more quickly.”
10. Higher self-esteem functions like an emotional immune system. “When our self-esteem is higher, we are less affected by stress and anxiety, we experience rejections and failures as less hurtful and we recover from them more quickly.”
