Helping Children Recognize Their Self-Worth

Eleanor Roosevelt once said, “No one can make you feel inferior without your consent.” We know that our self-talks and much of our low self-esteem comes not from what is said to us, but what we say to ourselves.

 

Have you ever had that experience where something someone says to you during the course of the day seems to repeat itself in your mind? Does it affect you as you go about your everyday business and make you feel unworthy and perhaps even interfere with your relationships? 

 

 Most of us have this experience on a regular basis and it’s not easy to forget the comments because our mind plays the words and eventually, we believe it ourselves. We may even convince ourselves of something that was not intended by the person who spoke the words to us.

 

We may not like to admit it, but we allow the words of others to affect us. We recite the child’s poem “sticks and stones may break my bones, but names will never hurt me.” Yet we know they do! Most people would agree that long after broken bones heal, the pain of negative words lingers on. 

 

As children, we were often hurt by the negative talk of those who were the significant people in our lives. Even if we didn’t realize how those words affect us, we carried these negative thoughts into our adult years. We tend to filter what others say to us through the filer of our experiences. It is difficult to change our own perceptions, but for our children, it’s not too late. 

 

As parents and adults, we can help our children to develop strong self-esteem by thinking about the words we use when we talk to them. Teaching them to recognize their own self-worth is essential to helping them develop a strong self-esteem. Significant adults in children’s lives must give them lots of praise and help them to recognize their achievements. However, it is equally important to ensure that a child can recognize their own self-worth and to maintain strong self-esteem even when may need to be disciplined for things they do which may not be praiseworthy. 

 

As adults, we learn to hear praise and reject it consciously or subconsciously. When we learn to praise ourselves appropriately, we own the praise. Teaching a child to praise its own accomplishment teaches a child an important resource that will greatly help them in the future. 

 

What Language Do You Speak?

We live in a time of ever-increasing uncertainty and anxiety levels are on the increase. Adults and children alike are experiencing a sense of bewilderment as they try to balance the many things happening in their personal lives and in a world that is experiencing turmoil and disaster on unprecedented levels. 

 

In such a world, it is easy to slip into a language of negativity, yet it doesn’t need to be this way. We can learn to speak the language of optimism and help those around to learn it too. When you learn the language of optimism, you are learning to experience life by embracing and acknowledging the things that go right and shrugging your shoulders, and moving on from the things that go wrong. 

 

Teaching this essential skill to our children is extremely important for all parents, teachers and caregivers to understand and appreciate. As we practice recognizing our own achievements and acknowledging them in the home, we are role modeling to our children the importance of doing their best and then having the pleasure of others and ourselves showing appreciation for the things achieved. A pessimistic perspective however would look at the situation surrounding the achievements and focus attention on them, rather than on the people attaining them. 

 

When a child (or an adult) leans to speak with optimism, they are able to take failure and turn it into potential for growth. Instead of seeing failure pessimistically and dwelling in grief on the cause of the failure, the optimistic person can focus on the failure being a learning curve and will use the opportunity to turn this failure into an opportunity to learn new skills or to develop a new understanding of the way things work. 

 

The optimistic thinker is able to see the problem as a temporary setback, it doesn’t affect their self-worth or self-confidence and they keep trying until they achieve their goals. The pessimistic approach would see this problem as more of a permanent problem Over time, as all problems become “bad or big”, the person eventually begins to see them all in a pessimistic way, gradually losing all sense of self-esteem and self-wealth.

 

Children learn from their parents. They often mimic their parent’s behavior. As you teach your children to become successful and well educated, they will display optimism in their own lives. They will learn to see life from the perspective of self-worth and self-esteem and even if this over exaggerated, it gives them the hidden courage to say" no" to peer pressure.