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Talking about self-esteem in the current political climate is difficult. These days, the term has come to be associated with social programs or attitudes that try to make excuses for poor or even outrageous behavior and then blame that behavior on difficult home circumstances. As a society, we're tired of hearing how a person's troubled home life is the cause of the high crime rate, the skyrocketing number of births to teenage mothers, and the brutal violence we see all around us. So when we hear anyone mention the offending person's lack of self-esteem, there is impatience and even outrage. We cry: “Of course the kid has no self-esteem! Look at his behavior! He should feel poorly about himself for doing what he's done!” But that attitude puts the proverbial cart before the horse.

The reality is that poor self-esteem is not caused by poor behavior. Poor behavior is caused by lack of self-esteem. Parents everywhere can easily spot the most obvious and dramatic causes of damaged self-worth-cases of nauseating physical, sexual, or emotional abuse or neglect. It's obvious to everyone how that kind of treatment of children results in troubled or ruined psyches. We all know that no one can really love another unless he or she can love himself or herself. Self-esteem is, at its core, self love and acceptance. A lack of self-worth creates a chasm of deprivation in people so profound that they never learn how to love others, never take responsibility for their own actions, and spend their lives trying to fill the void they feel with destructive behavior that gives them a temporary sense of power and a brief but superficial feeling of worth.

Happily, most children don't live in the kinds of horrible conditions that we have all seen so much of on the news. So why, then, do so many children become adults who feel lousy about themselves? Perhaps it's because the most common and pervasive assault on a child's self-esteem is the more subtle erosion of self-worth that goes on every day in most of our homes. As well-meaning but unaware parents, we all chip away at our child's sense of self in a multitude of little ways: the criticism and disparaging comments, our impatience, the times we hurry our children through tasks they are enjoying to do something we deem more important. It's the way we casually dismiss their interest or curiosity with things vaguely odd or seemingly inappropriate. It's when our children live through years of constant nagging, discouragement, or disrespect. Ironically, we often treat our children in ways we would never consider treating another adult and certainly wouldn't tolerate ourselves.

Those are the conditions that erode our children's sense of themselves as strong, capable, and resilient individuals. And the price they pay for our criticism is that they begin to see themselves as we keep telling them we see them-as inherently flawed and in need of major overhauling, rather than innately perfect, capable, and divine. When the measure of a child's worth is tied to how she compares to our estimation of what's good or valuable, we undermine her confidence. When we gauge a child's value by how he may meet our expectations, we cause him to doubt himself and doubt his true nature. Instead, as parents, we need to consciously accept and love our children for exactly who they are, naturally. That's how we encourage real self-esteem.

But how we do we really accomplish this? By tailoring our parenting to match our child, rather than expecting our child to match our parenting.

© 1997 by Paul D. Tieger and Barbara Barron-Tieger

Tags: Parenting and Families, Self-Esteem

About the Author

Paul D. Tieger and Barbara Barron-Tieger have been married for many years, and are internationally recognized experts in the application of Personality Type. Their other books include the bestselling Do What You Are, Nurture by Nature, and, most recently, The Art of SpeedReading People. They live in West Hartford, Connecticut.

About the Author

Paul D. Tieger and Barbara Barron-Tieger have been married for many years, and are internationally recognized experts in the application of Personality Type. Their other books include the bestselling Do What You Are, Nurture by Nature, and, most recently, The Art of SpeedReading People. They live in West Hartford, Connecticut.