Building blocks for healthy self-esteem in kids

There is no doubt that a child’s confidence levels contribute to her school achievements and ability to fit in easily to different social situations. Feeling good about yourself is a powerful motivator to tackle the challenges offered by school and life in general.

Self-esteem has to do with a child’s own beliefs about their ability to meet expectations and achieve in ways important to them. We all have a sense of an ‘ideal self’ and having a positive self-esteem helps us to become closer to that ideal goal.

A child’s self-esteem is shaped by the way they feel about themselves but a large part relies on the perceptions and expectations of significant people in their lives, such as their parents, family members, teachers and friends.

Susan Buttross, MD, FAAP, a Developmental and Behavioural Pediatrician, describes some of the elements of a healthy self-esteem.

A sense of security and belonging. A child must feel secure about themselves and their future. Your child also needs to feel accepted and loved by others, beginning with their family and extending to groups that they view as important to them, such as friends, schoolmates, sports teams, houses of worship and even their neighbourhood or community. Without this feeling of acceptance or group identity, they may feel rejected, lonely and adrift.

A sense of purpose. Your child should have goals that give them purpose and direction. Goals can provide an avenue for channeling their energy toward achievement and self-expression. If they lack a sense of purpose, they may feel bored, aimless, or resent being pushed in certain directions by you or others.

A sense of personal competence and pride. Your child should feel confident in their ability to meet challenges in their life. A sense of personal power evolves when your child has successful experiences with solving problems independently and being creative and seeing results for their efforts.

It’s important to set appropriate expectations for your child. This helps them develop competence and confidence. If you hover or overprotect them, they will likely become too dependent on you; if expectations are so high that they never succeed, they may feel powerless, defeated and incapable.

A sense of trust. Your child needs to feel trust in you and in himself or herself. To build trust with them, you should keep promises, be supportive and give your child opportunities to be trustworthy. This means treating your child as an honest and truthful person.

A sense of responsibility and contribution. Your child needs to develop a sense of importance and commitment. Give your child a chance to show what they are capable of doing. Allow them to take on tasks without being checked on all the time. This shows trust on your part, a sort of “letting go” with a sense of faith. Help them by providing opportunities to participate and contribute in a meaningful way to activities. Let your child know that they really count.

A sense of self-discipline and self-control. As your child strives to gain more independence, they need and want to feel that they can make it on their own. Give them expectations, guidelines and opportunities to test themselves. This lets them reflect, reason and problem-solve. It also lets them consider the consequences of the actions they may choose.

A sense of encouragement, support and reward. Beyond achieving goals, your child also needs positive feedback and recognition. This sends a message that they are doing well, pleasing others and “making it.”

Encourage and praise your child not only for achieving a set goal, but also for their efforts. Be sure to recognize even small changes and improvements. Give them feedback as soon as possible. This will promote a continued effort and reinforce their self-esteem and help them connect your comments to the activity involved.

A sense of accepting mistakes and failures. Your child needs to feel comfortable and supported, not defeated, when they make mistakes or fail. Explain that these setbacks are a normal part of living and learning, and that they can learn from them. Use examples from everyday life to model these skills — when you yourself make a mistake, when appropriate, share what happened with your child so they can see you move beyond it.

A sense of family self-esteem. Your child’s self-esteem first develops within the family and is influenced greatly by the feelings and perceptions that a family has of itself. Families that fare better focus on each member’s strengths. They avoid excessive criticism and stick up for each other outside the family setting. They believe in and trust each other and respect their individual differences. And they show their affection for each other and make time to be together, whether to share holidays, special events or just to have fun.

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Martin Doherty, writing for The Conversation, says that at the age of about four, children reach important milestones in brain development.

One of these is a huge improvement in understanding others’ thoughts and feelings. This is the start of empathy. Another is in spatial thinking—understanding how objects are positioned and related. This is the beginning of the ability to read maps.

Martin and his colleague, Catherine Sayer, conducted a study with 175 two to five-year-olds to explore how children are able to use scale models to figure out where something is in the real world. At about four, children are able to use a scale model of a room to work out where something is. We thought that this might result from children’s understanding of how one thing can represent something else. But we actually found that four-year-olds’ ability to use scale models came from their spatial abilities.

At the same age, children start to understand that someone’s behaviour is due to what that person believes, not necessarily what is really the case. This has interesting consequences.

If you’ve played hide-and-seek with young children, you may have noticed that they aren’t always very good at it. They love the ritual of looking in all the wrong places first, but beforehand they may tell you where they are going to hide, hide in the same place every time, or not be especially hidden.

After their fourth birthday, they get much better at hide and seek. They understand that the seeker looks in the wrong places because they don’t know where the hider is.

At about three to four children also start to tell lies. They realize they can make someone believe something that isn’t true.

Understanding symbols

Martin’s earlier research with fellow psychologist Josef Perner suggests that four-year-olds don’t just start to understand how others’ minds work. Figuring this out is part of the development of an understanding of “representation”—that symbols, like thoughts, words, or pictures, can be used to stand for something else.

Children start to think about how words relate to objects. This means, for instance, knowing that “animal” can refer to something you already have a name for, such as “rabbit”. This might help children learn the new word.

Their ability to use a understand the components of pictures also improves around this age. Very young children use a lot of trial and error to complete a jigsaw, picking up random pieces to see if they fit. By the time they are about four years old, they start to use the picture as a guide, trying to connect lines and match bits of colour, while checking the guide picture on the box lid.

Developmental experiments

Another ability children develop at around four is using scale models. A classic set of developmental experiments involved a model of a regular household room. The real room had typical furniture—sofa, table, cupboard and so on—and the model had miniature versions laid out in the same way.

Children were shown where something was hidden in the model and told to find an object hidden in “the same place” in the room. Children of around four can find the object using the identical layouts. If shown a sticker under a particular chair in the model room, for example, they can go straight to the “same” chair in the other room. This is the fundamental understanding required to read maps.

Adults see scale models and maps as representations. Maps represent a town or a country. A scale model of, say, the Eiffel Tower represents the real thing. At first, Martin suspected children’s ability to use scale models is more evidence of understanding representation at this age.

He was wrong. Instead, the researchers found that this ability is based on a development in children’s spatial abilities that also occurs at about four. This is the ability to think about spaces and where objects are within them. Spatial abilities help with maths skills, and good spatial ability is linked to an interest in science, technology, engineering and mathematics.

Their experiment was simple. They compared the model room task with a test of understanding how representation works. The two abilities develop around the same age, but they found they were not related. Children who could do one task couldn’t necessarily do the other.

They also had a test of purely spatial ability. Children who passed the model room task also passed the spatial task. So it looks like the model room task relied on children‘s spatial thinking.

They don’t yet know why two important but apparently unrelated abilities arise at the same time. Perhaps it’s related to changes in the growing brain at this interesting age.

Provided by The Conversation.

Image supplied by Freepik.