Dr Judith Locke: How to improve your child’s self esteem

Many parents try to take short cuts in building their child’s self esteem, by excessive praise and giving them a perfectly happy childhood. But Dr Judith Locke says this can backfire.

A few years ago, in a sweet-smelling shop I found something really on the nose.

It was some sort of lovely floral oil and it did smell lovely, but the advertising was the thing that really stunk. They claimed that its use would improve a child self-esteem.

Using an aroma to improve their self-esteem. Yeah, right.

Self-esteem has certainly become a buzzword these days, particularly in parenting, and that’s completely understandable. You want your child to think well of themselves and broadly have confidence in their skills. So, it makes sense that many parents want their child to have a positive sense of self.

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The self-esteem movement really took off out of a bit of a misunderstanding of the strong link between doing well and feeling good. Even though you really have to do broadly well in life to feel good about yourself, we put the cart before the horse and decided that if all our effort went into building people’s self-esteem, they’d do well in life.

Of course you want your child to think well of themselves. But is excessive praise the answer? Picture: iStock

But there is something tricky about the creation of self-esteem and that is that it is a somewhat elusive beast that takes some time. Despite this, many parents try to take short cuts in building it, by excessive praise, engineering their child’s social and academic success, and giving them a perfectly happy childhood.

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This is all with the best of intentions and it certainly does make children feel wonderful in the short term. But unfortunately, it is a temporary fix that doesn’t do a lot to make them feel good in the long term. If anything, these attempts can totally backfire and make children less confident and capable over time.

Trouble is, when you praise your child excessively then their self-esteem becomes

dependent on being applauded constantly. Life doesn’t work that way, and it is likely that when they do get some constructive criticism to improve their performance, then they’re not going to cope with it at all. High levels of praise also risk making them somewhat narcissistic and even more dependent on constant admiration to get by.

When you praise your child excessively, their self esteem becomes dependent on being applauded constantly. Picture: iStock

Likewise, parents engineering constant success means that their children’s wellbeing

depends on the reassurance of always being number one and life going exactly the way they think it should. These children are less prepared to go with the flow and are much more impacted by the normal challenges of life such as not getting on the soccer team, or not getting their way in the playground.

More importantly, if it is only parental actions that make their offspring successful, then children are more likely to be highly reliant on others all of the time. Psychologists call this learned helplessness – the belief that you cannot effect change in your life and that your happiness is purely contingent on others’ actions. Research shows these people to be more likely to experience depression because they have the mistaken belief that there is nothing that they can do to improve things themselves – this makes them feel helpless and hopeless.

Children with good self-esteem are relatively confident about facing every day and the challenges that might occur. They can face the ups and downs of life and this gives them even more self-assurance for the next day.

These children broadly do well in life – not by constant success – but by generally coping with their circumstances. Most importantly, their parents have allowed them to experience all aspects of life – not just success and happiness.

Originally published as Dr Judith Locke: How to improve your child’s self esteem