How Do I Build Self-Esteem in My Child?

Posted by Brad Reedy, Ph.D., Owner & Clinical Director of Evoke Therapy Programs on July 09, 2015

The relationship between communication, connection and self-worth

I had the wonderful experience of being trained in Marriage and Family Therapy [MFT] at Loma Linda University. Part of that training included observation from a one-way mirror or reviewing video recordings of my therapy sessions with professors and supervisors. Often, my professor and I would watch clients on the video recordings addressing a variety of complaints and life problems, and my professor would pause the tape and ask me what I saw. In peeling back the layers, I always seemed to arrive at the conclusion that the origin of their struggles stemmed from poor or low self-esteem. He would follow with this challenge: “How do you raise esteem in a client?” His idea was that a relationship with an unconditional source, such as God, was the key. The question about how to engender self-esteem in others and especially in our children has been at the forefront of my mind ever since.

Towards the end of my Ph.D. in MFT, I was hired for an internship at a Wilderness Program. The pay was good, and I was amazed at the quality of people employed by the program. I was assigned to be a therapist for adolescent boys and girls who had been sent by their parents as a “wake-up call.” Almost all of my clients struggled with drugs, poor family relationships, school problems, and/or mood disorders. I was to assess them and to create individual treatment plans.

The students were expected to deal with the earth’s elements in a primitive living setting. Most of the students came from high-income homes with many privileges and comforts, and I saw them accept and even thrive during their stay with us. They entered the program with an “I can’t” philosophy. “It’s too cold,” they lamented. “It’s too hard.” “I can’t be without my girlfriend or boyfriend.” “I miss my friends and family.” Parents were equally pessimistic regarding their child’s ability to cope with the challenge of our intervention. Worries about the cold, the hiking, and the primitive living plagued and haunted parents. They had a lot of evidence for their child’s lack of coping and resiliency. Drug use, tantrums, outbursts of anger, and school refusals all suggested to the parents that their child did not have the resources to deal with the difficulties that adolescence presented. Yet by the end of their time at the program, they were reading and enjoying books, making fires with primitive bow drills to cook and keep warm at night, and generally thriving in a very challenging environment. Students from San Diego, California, who insisted they could not bear the challenges out there, had to be reminded to put on a coat in a winter snowstorm.

For many of them, returning home was not an option. The referring professional (the educational consultant or home therapist), saw Wilderness Therapy as the beginning of treatment, and returning to the same environment, at home and at school, as not a viable option. In those days, the length of stay in these extended care programs was twelve to thirty months, and during the course of treatment, I was to deliver this news to the 14 through 17-year-old students. When they were informed that this intervention would continue even after their stay with us for as many as thirty more months, they adjusted. Sure, there were tantrums and threats and bouts of crying, but usually within one week, they had accepted this. Many of them would make statements like, “It’s a good thing I’m not going home after this. It would be hard to maintain these gains. Going to a therapy school will help me. Given the choice, I would rather go home, but I see the wisdom in having more support and structure in my life.” I was truly amazed at this process. This kind of adjustment was the norm. I started to realize something; children are much more resilient than they or their parents think they are. They convinced themselves and others of their fragility, but it was a lie.

Students would ultimately graduate from our program, and they would be tearful and sad to leave a place where they had grown so much. They had “done it.” They had gone through something difficult and challenging, and although they complained to their parents early in their stay about their inability to make it through, they came out on the other end feeling better about themselves.

The first thing I surmised during my time with that program is that self-esteem, in part, comes from meeting a great challenge and making it through. We often talk about having a “sense of accomplishment.” We talk about “the pride of working for something.” And at times, our parental heart cannot weather the cries from our children in order to let them struggle. I was once told the story of the ostrich egg. It is a formidable task for the ostrich chick to free itself from the egg. A compassionate onlooker may watch the chick struggle for hours and be tempted to “help” the chick to free itself from the shell. Yet in freeing the chick, we would doom it to death. Working out of that shell is what the chick needs to develop its strength in order to survive. As loving parents, we must develop and practice enough healthy detachment to let our children struggle in order to build their own strength and resources. At times, we rescue, we enable, and we compensate, all in the name of love. We are wired to care for our young; preventing them from pain is instinctive. To resist that often means that we tell ourselves (and our children, in turn, might tell us as well) that we are “bad parents.” When we don’t resist, we rob our children of lessons necessary for their survival. A sense of self-efficacy—the “I can do it”—and shifting from that external locus of control—“the things that happen to me determine my happiness”—to an internal locus of control—“what I do makes the biggest difference in determining my happiness and success in life”—are the rewarding fruits of this struggle.

The essence of all of this is the ability to “see” the child and it is one if the greatest contributions to esteem in the child. We have to learn to remove all of the noise (what others think) and our projections that blur our vision of the other. In order to see the child, the parent must do the work necessary to more authentically know themselves and the more one knows oneself, the greater the capacity to see the other.

I also want to connect this discussion of self-esteem to another theme. The cause-effect thinking error is of particular importance. Believing you can cause or assure self-esteem for your child suggests that you are making it about you. There are principles that encourage, discourage, promote, and engender healthy self-esteem. You control how much you love, care for, listen, and nurture, but you don't control how much they feel loved, cared for, heard, and nurtured. So while it may seem like splitting hairs to distinguish between the word “cause” and the word “facilitate,” it reminds the parent to do what they can to the best they can without trying to control how the child feels. This is a different sensibility. One learns to search inward rather than controlling others. By doing this, you see the child as a subject, rather than as an object that merely mirrors oneself. This interpersonal differentiation shows respect for your child’s choices. It is revealed in the subtlest of cues. Cause robs your child of the ability to make choices.

When I tell people in casual circumstances—at a dinner party, for instance—what I do for a living, they postulate, “So, you work with kids that wealthy parents discard? They are uninvolved and don't have time for their kids, so they send them away to have you deal with or fix them.” In reality, this is far from the truth. I work with kids whose parents love them too much. They are often very involved or even overly involved in the lives of their children. They struggle to let go and to let their children struggle. Many of the parents with whom we work have struggled to achieve success. And they refer to the lessons offered by their struggle. Often, later as parents they then turn around and want to remove challenges and difficulty from their children’s lives. Guilt is often at the center of this dynamic. This guilt might come from thinking that they have not done enough. “I work too much,” they might think, or something subtler such as “I sometimes lose my temper.” And while these circumstances in life can cause stress, a parent’s guilt will block the parent’s willingness to hold their child accountable or to require them to behave well. In essence, this guilt says, “Life has been hard, and I may have caused it, so I can’t expect my child to deal with it in a healthy way and to pay for my mistakes.” And the result of that parenting gives the exact opposite effect of what the parent is striving for and unfortunately may subconsciously tell the child they are not resilient.

Having remorse or insight into our mistakes is a part of healthy parenting. It is a part of personal growth. It is a sensitivity and accountability for our own life. But connecting what we have or haven’t done directly to what our children have or have not done is limiting them to merely being an outcome of our actions. The difference between an object and a subject is choice. The light in my bedroom turns on when I flip it on; it doesn’t have a choice. As humans, we always have the ability to choose, no matter how deep that choice may be buried. And as our children grow up, it is our job to let them own their choices, and for us to let them go.

Conversely, after sharing with a group of parents at a workshop, a parent congratulated me on my son’s success at his acceptance to the prestigious School of the Art Institute in Chicago. “Kudos to you,” she said. I was confused and told her I had little to do with it. In fact, if his acceptance were based on my talents, and me then he would not have made it into that school. The achievements of our children are often tied too closely with our own sense of worth. “Researchers concluded that continued [focus on] self-esteem is largely tied to parents pride in their children's achievements: it’s so strong that when they praise their kids, it's not that far from praising themselves.” ¹ “I am proud of you” is a common parental encouragement that is laden with messages about the parent’s worth rather than that of the child. Replacing such a phrase with “You can be proud of yourself, “ or, “I am happy for you” may serve to offer reinforcement without relating it to your sense of value as a parent.

^{1 Bronson & Merryman, 2009}

Watch Dr. Reedy's video about Self Esteem