017: Don’t bother trying to increase your child’s self-esteem

  Self-Esteem When I first started researching this episode I thought it would be a bit of a slam-dunk.  Self-esteem is a good thing, right? I was really surprised to find that there’s little evidence that self-esteem helps children to do better in school, or even be happier, so there’s a good deal of disagreement among psychologists about whether encouraging self-esteem is necessarily a good thing. This episode digs into these issues to understand (as much as scientists currently can) the benefits of self-esteem – and what qualities parents might want to encourage in their children in place of self-esteem to enable better outcomes.  It also touches on our self-esteem as parents – because don’t we all want to think that our child is just a little bit special, so we know we’re good parents?   Jump to highlights 00:31 Introduction of episode 01:45 What research says about self-esteem 03:41 Stages on how children develop self-esteem 06:01 3 Conditions that children experience social success when outside the family 10:06 The link between violence and self-esteem 13:23 The link between self-esteem and school performance 16:04 Role of self-esteem in interpersonal relationships 18:17 What conclusion can parents make in this episode 23:46 Self-compassion affects self-esteem   References Bachman, J.G. & O’Malley, P.M. (1986). Self-concepts, self-esteem, and educational experiences: The frog pond revisited (again). Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 50, 35-46. Baumeister, R.F., Campbell, J.D., Krueger, J.I., & Vohs, K.D. (2003). Does high self-esteem cause better performance, interpersonal success, happiness, or healthier lifestyles? Psychological Science in the Public Interest 4(1), 1-44. DOI: 10.1111/1529-1006.01431 Beggan, J.K. (1992). On the social nature of nonsocial perception: The mere ownership effect. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 62(2), 229-237. DOI: 10.1037/0022-3514.62.2.229 Bretherton, I. (1992). The origins of attachment theory: John Bowlby and Mary Ainsworth. Developmental Psychology 28(5), 759-775. Retrieved from: http://cmapspublic2.ihmc.us/rid=1LQX400NM-RBVKH9-1KL6/the%20origins%20of%20attachment%20theory%20john%20bowlby%20and_mary_ainsworth.pdf Brummelman, E., Thomaes, S., Orobio de Castro, B., Overbeek, G., & Bushman, B.J. (2014). “That’s not just beautiful – that’s incredibly beautiful!”: The adverse impact of inflated praise on children with low self-esteem. Psychological Science Online, 1-8. DOI: 10.1177/0956797613514251 California State Department of Education (1990). Toward a state of esteem: The final report of the California task force to promote self-esteem and personal and social responsibility. Full report available at: http://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED321170.pdf Coleman, P.K. & Karraker, K.H. (1997). Self-efficacy and parenting quality: Findings and future applications. Developmental Review 18, 47-85. DOI: 10.1006/drev.1997.0448 Cvencek, D., Greenwald, A.G., & Meltzoff, A.N. (2016). Implicit measures for preschool children confirm self-esteem’s role in maintaining a balanced identity. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology 62, 50-57. DOI: 10.1016/j.jesp.2015.09.015 Dweck, C. (2007). Mindset: The new psychology of success. New York: Ballantine. Forsyth, D.R., & Kerr, N.A. (1999, August). Are adaptive illusions adaptive? Poster presented at the annual meeting of the American Psychological Association, Boston, MA. Guindon, M.H. (2010). Self-esteem across the lifespan. New York: Routledge. Harter, S. (1993). Causes and consequences of low self-esteem in children and adolescents. In R.F. Baumeister (Ed.), Self-esteem: The puzzle of low self-regard. New York: Plenum. James, W. (1983). The principles of psychology. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. (Original work published 1890) Joslin, K.R. (1994). Positive parenting from A to Z. New York: Ballantine. Kutob, R.M., Senf, J.H., Crago, M., & Shisslak, C.M. (2010). Concurrent and longitudinal predictors of self-esteem in elementary and middle school girls. Journal of School Health 80(5), 240-248. DOI: 10.1111/j.1746-1561.2010.00496.x Mruk, C.J. (2006). Self-esteem, research, theory, and practice (3rd Ed.). New York: Springer. Neff, K.D. (2011). Self-compassion, self-esteem, and well-being. Social and Personality Psychology Compass 5(1), 1-12. DOI: 10.1111/j.1751-9004.2010.00330.x Neff, K.D., & McGehee, P. (2010). Self-compassion and psychological resilience among adolescents and young adults. Self and Identity 9, 225-240. DOI: 10.1080/15298860902979307 Vohs, K.D., Bardone, A.M., Joiner, T.E., Abramson, L.Y., & Heatherton, T.F. (1999). Perfectionism, perceived weight status, and self-esteem interact to predict bulimic symptoms: A model of bulimic symptom development. Journal of Abnormal Psychology 108, 695-700. DOI: 10.1037/0021-843X.108.4.695   Read Full Transcript Transcript Hello and welcome to the Your Parenting Mojo podcast – today’s episode is about self-esteem.  Now I have to say that when I first started researching this episode I thought it would be a bit of a slam-dunk.  Self-esteem is a good thing, right?  So I could find some studies talking about the detrimental effects of not having self-esteem, and some others talking about the benefits of having it, and conclude with studies on how to get more of it. But, you know, I actually enjoy these episodes a lot more when the findings are counter-intuitive.  It turns out that the concept of self-esteem has been very well studied – I saw an estimate of 23,215 articles, chapters, and books on this topic, and that was a decade ago– and the reason for that is it’s actually a bit of a hard topic for us to get our arms around.  It’s difficult to even get a definition of what self-esteem is – you can try this yourself by defining it and then asking someone else to define it, and by trying to rationalize the two definitions into one statement – it’s very difficult to incorporate different opinions into one defensible definition.  It’s also hard to study, because people tend to fib when you ask them about their self-esteem.  And I was really surprised to find that there’s disagreement among psychologists about whether encouraging self-esteem is necessarily a good thing.  So let’s see what the research says… It seems like virtually every article I found on this topic begins by citing an essay that the psychologist William James wrote in 1890 that purportedly describes what self-esteem is, and it is a bit dense: “So our self-feeling in this world depends entirely on what we back ourselves to be and do.  It is determined by the ratio of our actualities to our supposed potentialities; a fraction of which our pretensions are the denominator and the numerator our success, thus: self-esteem = successes/pretentions.  Such a fraction may be increased as well by diminishing the denominator as by increasing the numerator” – in other words, self-esteem increases when your successes are greater than your pretentions, and you can increase your successes or decrease your pretentions – or both – to increase your self-esteem.  And it’s important that those successes be successes that are important to you – if you have “pretensions” of being good at something then it’ll be more important to you that you be successful in that arena than in a field that you know you don’t know much about.  So for James, self-esteem is fundamentally related to competence, but other researchers see it as being related to worth, or value as a person, which introduces new things that can help us (for example, if self-esteem is an attitude then it can be measured) as well as things that make the definition more difficult (for example, it may be different in different cultures and we’d need to find out if any of the factors that make it up are found across all cultures).  The most recent work puts these two together and say it’s about both competence and worthiness – we have a need to feel worthy and we achieve that need by feeling competent, so that’s the definition we’re going to go with for now, and we’ll have to live with some of the squishiness around self-esteem being related to two qualities, like the fact that it can be higher from one moment to the next or when the person thinks about one specific trait rather than another. So how do children develop self-esteem?  An influential psychologist named Erik Erikson developed what he called a series of psychosocial stages that all people pass through as they go through their lives.  It’s kind of like Freud’s psychosexual stages except Erickson focuses on our interactions with culture and society rather than Freud’s emphasis on the conflict between the id and the superego within the individual’s brain.  Erikson says that our ego develops as it resolves crises that it goes through.  The first stage runs from birth to about 18 months and is concerned with developing a trusting relationship with parents as the child resolves the trust vs. mistrust crisis – two other prominent psychologists, John Bowlby and Mary Ainsworth would call this the attachment...