What if you have a kid who just won’t tolerate failure? I was like that. Nobody knew what the hell to do with me, and it got to a point where nobody cared. I came out of childhood thinking that however much crap I’d been through, it wasn’t enough. It was never going to be enough.
Well there you go. Somebody should have taught you that the goal is not to avoid mistakes (that’s impossible) but to learn from them. Failure is a teacher not a judge.
I think this is a little misleading. If you’re teaching a child a new skill and they don’t feel they’re making progress, they’ll lose self-esteem. One of the ways you build self-esteem is to teach the ability to appreciate finer details about oneself. You’re not going to learn how to hit a home run in one day, but you will be developing subskills along the way. Young learners are often not capable of seeing those intermediate goals being achieved.
Building ego with praise and appropriate setting of the bar can absolutely build self-esteem.
I don’t think this is true. For one thing, if they persevere, they almost always will make some progress, but for another thing it’s easy enough to teach them (as I do with my kids), that it’s perfectly acceptable to decide something isn’t for them after trying it. I just ask them to give something an honest chance first, but they don’t have to be good at everything. It’s just a question of finding what they are good at.
I agree with this. I’m just saying the praise has to be for something real, something they actually did - even if it’s just for hustle, or for giving a pitch a good rip on a strike out.
Too high? It’s not high enough! I’m winning all the time and nobody is gonna keep me down. They can’t even understand how much I win. My wins will make you pee blood and your mom pregnant. How’s that for self-esteem?
Just like nearly everything else in life, self-esteem is something that requires moderation. People need to feel good about themselves, but not so good that they become dicks. It’s all about balance.
I grew up learning that there would always be someone better than me and someone worse than me at any given endeavor. As long as that message remains consistent, and no one is punished for failing rather than being rewarded for winning, everything should be fine.
The gist is, that praise should be for effort (which the kid can influence) and not for smarts/intelligence, which is supposed to be there or not.
Praising kids for smarts instead of praising them for trying and persevering has the opposite effect of what parents want to achieve.
Observation: I love the thought of getting advice on managing self-esteem from someone who has chosen to put the title “Expert” underneath their username.
Where are these schools that have all those goofy self-esteem programs? I’ve been teaching since 1985 in two states and three districts and never seen anything like that. I’ve never even heard about it first hand from another teacher at state and national level conventions. I expect that this is one of those things that rare in the real world, but electronic media and the internet make it seem like it is much more common than it actually is.
If you ask me, it was a strawman from the word go. Pull a few silly quotes, fill in the context with your imagination and presto, you have a great new way to polarize the anti-intellectuals against the intellectuals. (BTW, you’re one of the intellectuals.)
It doesn’t hurt that a lot of the antis were raised with a crummy sense of self-worth and think they turned out jim dandy. Issues like this are like catnip to them.
