BOLD explores… Children's self-esteem

My name is Eddie Brummelman. I am a developmental scientist, and I am the director of KiDLAB. And at KiDLAB we study the development of children’s self-views. And the ability to develop self-views is what separates us from other animals.

So we have this unique ability to conceive of who we are, what we are capable of, and how we are seen and evaluated by others. And these self-views have really profound consequences. So when they are realistic and grounded in reality, then they help children flourish. But when they are unrealistic or fragile, they might prevent kids from actually reaching their full potential. So by studying how self-views develop and what we can do to change them, we try to identify new ways to help children flourish, and especially children who grew up in disadvantaged backgrounds, like children growing up in poverty. Self-esteem is our overall sense of worth as a person. So children who have high self-esteem, they are satisfied with who they are intrinsically, and you can’t really have too much self-esteem.

People often think that if you have too much self-esteem it means you’re narcissistic. But that’s not true. Narcissism is something very different. So, children who have narcissistic traits, they believe they’re better than others. They feel entitled to privileges. They crave respect and admiration, but they are not necessarily happy with who they are as a person. And those with high self-esteem are. Yeah, what fascinates me about self-esteem is really how it develops. Of course, there is no objective index of how worthy a person is, but for some reason, as a society, we seem to convey that some people matter more than others or have more worth than others. And I’m interested in why that is and how children develop a sense of worth, and also why some kids, and especially those from disadvantaged backgrounds, are more likely to think they’re not worthy, and how it holds them back.

Children with high self-esteem tend to be more active and visible in a classroom. They take on more challenges. They bounce back from failures more quickly. They ask for attention, assistance and accommodation from the teachers more often. And also they are better liked by teachers and their classmates. And perhaps unsurprisingly, children with high self-esteem also tend to perform better, they get higher grades and higher test scores, regardless of their actual abilities. So if you have two kids with the exact same level of intelligence, the one with higher self-esteem tends to perform better. And that might seem like good news, because self-esteem is something you can change. However, it is also something that reinforces inequality, because children from disadvantaged backgrounds are more likely to have lower self-esteem. So regardless of their actual abilities, they tend to underperform. So a child from a disadvantaged background, who is very smart and hardworking but has low self-esteem, might struggle in school, even if they’re very capable, and hard working.

Self-esteem also impacts children outside of school. Children with high self-esteem, are generally happier. They are less likely to develop anxiety or depression, and are also better able to forge friendships and other types of intimate relationships. Our research has identified a few critical ingredients of self-esteem, and by offering these ingredients, parents and teachers can instil self-esteem without breeding narcissism. So the first ingredient is unconditional regard. By conveying to children that they matter, that they are valuable, unconditionally regardless of whether they live up to your expectations, parents and teachers can instil in children the sense that they are worthy intrinsically for who they are. The second ingredient is realistic feedback. By providing children realistic feedback rather than inflated praise, parents and teachers provide children with a solid foundation for the development of realistic self-views and therefore self-esteem. And the third ingredient is a focus on growth and improvement. So by helping children see failure and struggles as opportunities for learning rather than evidence of low ability, they prevent children from feeling ashamed when they don’t do well, allowing them to bounce back and improve.

The biggest misconception about raising self-esteem is that praise is a critical ingredient. So in Western society, we often think that when we tell children over and over again that they’re amazing, that they will develop higher self-esteem. But that’s not true. Praise and especially inflated praise might actually lead children to develop lower self-esteem. Because if we tell children that they did amazingly well, they think that we expect them to do amazingly well all the time. And childhood, of course, is full of struggles and setbacks, and when children encounter those, they might feel like they’ve disappointed you.

So Alfie Kohn, who’s an American educator and author, once said that the most salient feature of praise or of a positive judgement is not that it is positive, but that it is a judgement. And it’s perfectly possible to raise children self-esteem, without giving praise. So, for instance, if a child shows you a drawing that they’ve made, don’t just provide blanket praise, but show interest in the drawing. Ask questions about it and share joy about what they’ve created. So in the end, self-esteem is a judgement that children have of themselves and of their worth as a person. But it doesn’t mean that those judgements can be imposed from the outside. As parents and teachers, the best things we can do is to provide children with the opportunity, to love themselves and appreciate themselves for who they are as a person.