Developing Self-Esteem

October 15, 2001

It seems that it is almost impossible to discuss education these days without referring to the concept of self-esteem. Probably because of its overuse, it has become a very misunderstood concept. I'd like to share with you some of the history of the development of this concept and some recent relevant research.

In the sixties, Stanley Coopersmith, a psychologist at the University of California, Davis, devised a scale for self-esteem in which children would answer true and false to such statements as I am pretty happy, Its pretty tough to be me, and I often wish I were someone else. Coopersmith then assessed the child rearing practices of parents whose children had high self-esteem according to his scale. He came up with a finding that some might find surprisingly old fashioned. He discovered that the clearer the rules the parents set and the more consistently they were enforced, the higher a child's self-esteem. The more freedom a child had, on the other hand, the lower the self-esteem. Since then the idea of self-esteem has become an ever more widely embraced goal of child-rearing. Many schools have been urged to make self-esteem a goal of the curriculum. Unfortunately, Coopersmith's conclusions about the origins of self-esteem have been largely ignored in the myriad programs developed with the goal of promoting self-esteem.

There is no effective technology for teaching feeling good that does not first teach doing well. Feelings of self-esteem develop as side effects of mastering challenges, working successfully, overcoming frustration and boredom, and winning. Trying to achieve the feeling side of self-esteem directly confuses the means and the end and can result in long term harm to a child. In one study researchers found that students, whose self-esteem had been artificially raised, became more angry and violent when frustrated or criticized than students who had not been artificially praised. More recently, a controlled study by psychologists at Columbia University has lent support to the notion that certain types of praise may hurt children in the long run. In the study students were asked to do a series of math problems. After completing the problems successfully, some were praised as being intelligent and others were praised for their hard work. Then they continued to assign problems of greater difficulty and noted how each child responded to the challenges. They found that the children praised for hard work focused on learning something new and new approaches to solving the problems. On the other hand, students who had been praised as being intelligent tended to worry about failure, choose tasks that validated their intelligence, and displayed less determination when faced with difficult problems.

What should we do? Martin Seligman, a professor of psychology at the University of Pennsylvania suggests the following as the right way to raise kids self-esteem: To raise children who approach life with energy, optimism, and self-assurance, you must teach them how to tolerate frustration, not avoid it, and to view adversity as a challenge, not a forerunner of failure. Follow these three simple guidelines:

1. Pay attention to how your child explains problems and setbacks. Help him identify factors that contribute to the problem, particularly ones that he can control. Then select one controllable factor and help him develop a plan of action.
2. Teach your child the difference between behavior and character. Behaviors are changeable (I didn't study enough; I told a lie). Character traits are less so (I'm lazy; I'm bad). Some years ago a study was conducted in California that investigated whether or not there were any significant cultural differences that could account for the fact that, on average, Asian American students performed significantly higher on math exams than any other grouping of American students. One of the major differences found in this study is that the general population tended to attribute good performance to a personal characteristic or aptitude (he's good in math because he is smart), whereas Asian Americans tended to attribute good performance to hard work (he has done well because he has worked hard). If your child says things that denigrate his aptitude or character, help him identify the behavior with which he is unhappy and generate some ideas for changing it.
3. Teach your child to persevere in the face of frustration. Children who cannot tolerate frustration learn to become helpless and give up. Help your child set manageable goals and select activities that are neither too hard nor too easy. Encourage persistence and offer guidance. The mastery that a child experiences when accomplishing a goal teaches him most effectively that he can surmount adversity.