My nine-year-old daughter lacks self-confidence and self-respect. What can I do to help her acquire these qualities?
One of the most effective means of developing self-confidence is to teach the child methods of compensating for influences that are unfavorable to his self-esteem. Compensation can be achieved by balancing the losses caused by the child’s lack of ability at the expense of his strengths. The task of parents is to help the child discover these strengths in himself and teach him how to use them, and in such a way that they bring him satisfaction. The issue of compensation brings us to a very important point that needs to be well understood. Awareness of one’s own shortcomings can destroy and paralyze a person, but on the contrary, it can give her a huge emotional charge that will contribute to achieving success in various fields. Remember that in the same boiling water, the carrot becomes soft, and the egg is boiled hard. In a person, it all depends on the individual reaction to circumstances that sometimes cause a stressful state.
The question is: Will your daughter break under the weight of feelings of inferiority, or will she be able to use her emotional strength to gather all her initiative, directing her to achieve in those areas of life in which she is strong? The answer to this question depends on how successfully you choose the direction of the search, so that, having mastered a particular skill, she could compensate for her failures. Maybe music will become such a sphere for her? She saves a lot of people. Maybe the girl will be able to develop her artistic talent or will she cultivate technical skills? What if she learns how to cook delicious meals or breed rabbits for fun, in order to earn some extra money? Regardless of her choice, the key point in this situation is the immediate start of any of these cases. And the sooner the better! There is nothing more risky than giving a teenager the opportunity to “sail the stormy sea of adolescence” without equipping him with the skills and knowledge of various ways to compensate for external failures and disappointments. If your daughter finds herself without such protection, then her own self will be suppressed. Then she won’t be able to say, “I may not be the most popular person in school, but I’m the best tu.e. in the orchestra! Your girl’s main source of self-esteem will be the recognition of her success by other children. However, their love is known to be so fickle!
Can you explain the essence of the «compensation process» in more detail? What does it have to do with underestimating one’s own worth?
Reflections that could arise in a person who decided to develop the ability to compensate can be represented as follows.
“I don’t want to be drowned in a sea of my feelings of inferiority. I can achieve my fitness for the requirements of life if I work hard and achieve success in my chosen business. Therefore, I need to use all my energy to learn how to play basketball well (or draw, or sew, or understand politics, or finish school, or care for the garden, or do good household chores, or learn to trade). And a small child might decide to do well in school (play the piano or play football).
This form of compensation provides a person with sufficient internal energy to achieve success in any chosen field. Victor and Mildred Goertzel’s famous study, The Origins of Great Achievement, examined the childhood conditions of four hundred highly successful people. All these people were personalities who reached the top in their field. These were men and women recognized as brilliant, outstanding people in their field of activity. Among them were W. Churchill, M. Gandhi, F. Roosevelt, A. Schweitzer, A. Einstein, Z. Freud and others. Intense research into the circumstances of their family life at an early age has yielded some surprising discoveries.
- Three-quarters of them experienced adversity in childhood. Some because of poverty or family breakdown, others were rejected by their parents, some in the family were suppressed, humiliated, tormented by excessive demands. Some in the family constantly changed their financial situation — from excellent to disastrous. Others suffered because of their physical disabilities or because of parental dissatisfaction caused by failures in school, as well as in other areas of life.
- Of the eighty-five writers who worked in the genre of adventure literature or drama, seventy-four people came from families in which, as a child, they had to know the intense human dramas played out between their parents. Among the twenty poets, sixteen had such impressions from their childhood.
- A quarter of those surveyed had physical disabilities, such as blindness, deafness, lameness, chronic illness, and also suffered from other problems, such as nondescript appearance, short stature, overweight, or childhood speech defects.
Obviously, the need of most of these people to compensate for their imperfections, life failures and misfortunes turned out to be an important factor in their lives. Perhaps even decisive.
Thousands, and maybe millions of people suffering from various shortcomings and imperfections, in their desire to compensate for them, have achieved great recognition in life. As a classic example, one can perhaps cite the life story of Eleanor Roosevelt, the former First Lady of the United States — the wife of President F. D. Roosevelt. She was orphaned at the age of ten. All her childhood was spent in terrible suffering. She was outwardly very nondescript, in childhood she did not have a chance to feel that she was needed by anyone. Victor Wilson wrote: “She was an introvert (- a psychological characteristic of a person focused on the inner world of thoughts and experiences), did not have a sense of humor. She was a young woman, incredibly shy, unable to overcome her feelings of insecurity, convinced that she was no good for anything. But everyone in the world knows, however, that Mrs. Roosevelt has broken free of her emotional shackles. As Wilson noted, “…from some inner deep source, Mrs. Roosevelt was able to draw inflexible, inexhaustible courage, which was tempered only by an amazing ability of self-control and internal discipline ..” This “internal source” has a suitable name — compensation!
Obviously, a person’s attitude to his own imperfections and flaws determines the degree of their influence on his life. Many people like to place the blame for their sometimes irresponsible behavior on some unfavorable circumstance. For example, it is said that poverty forced this or that person to commit a crime, that young people with deviations in behavior come out of broken families, that a sick society forces young people to turn to drugs. Such erroneous reasoning removes from the individual any responsibility for his actions. Such an excuse is false. Each person must decide for himself how to compensate for his internal imperfections or external difficulties.
It must be recognized that much is required to overcome all the difficulties of one’s life. Courage is needed to compensate for their influence, and some people need it much more than others. There is, of course, an easier way — to wallow in self-pity, cloud your head with pills, hate the whole world, run away from home, compromise your conscience. Regardless of the ultimate goal of actions, the choice must be made by the person himself, and no one is able to free him from this task. The difficulties we face do not predetermine our behavior, but they certainly influence it.
Parents not only can, but have a responsibility to help their children approach and make that responsible choice. They should help the child find ways to seek compensation for his shortcomings, and this process should begin already in middle childhood.
You state that a middle-aged child among children in the family has more problems associated with low self-esteem than other family members. Maybe that’s why my second son was never able to become a self-confident person?
The problem associated with low self-esteem can occur in any person, regardless of how old he is and by whom he was born. However, sometimes the child, «average in the family», really finds it difficult to find his place in it. He does not have such a responsible position as the elder, but he is not given as much attention as the younger. Moreover, it often happens that he is born at a time when his parents are going through the most active, troublesome period in their lives. This is especially true for his mother. Later, when he reaches the age of learning to walk and talk, his precious territory is suddenly invaded by an adorable baby who kidnaps his mother from him. And then? .. Is it any wonder that a child often asks the question: “Who am I and where is my place in this life?”
How to help a child of average age among children in the family if he suffers from low self-esteem?
I advise parents to make every effort to provide each of their children with a worthy place in the life of the family, but special attention should still be paid to the middle-aged child. Every boy and every girl must always, under any circumstances, be treated as an individual, and not just as a member of a family group. Let me give you two pieces of advice that can serve as examples illustrating my considerations.
- I recommend that fathers have “dates” with each of their children once every four or five weeks, and separately from other children, who do not need to be brought up to date. Let this be clarified later, from the words of the boy or girl himself. A father and child can go to play basketball, go to the cinema, go out for pizza or ice cream, maybe go to the ice rink. The choice must be made by the child himself, whose turn it is to go on a “date”.
- Ask each of your children to come up with their own pennant, the image of which is desirable to embroider on their clothes or other things. Such a pennant can be raised in the front yard on special days solemn only for this child, for example, on a birthday, in connection with an excellent mark in school, a successful goal scored in a football game or winning a baseball competition, etc.
There are other ways to achieve the goal. The task of parents is to be able to plan the life of children in such a way that, along with belonging to the family team, the individuality of each child is also taken into account.
My son is a great gymnast. The coach at the school says that he has such natural gifts for gymnastics that he has never met with anyone else. But when the son competes, he does everything terribly! Why is he lost at the most crucial moments?
Perhaps your son thinks he is a failure, so his performance in competitions is quite consistent with the idea of uXNUMXbuXNUMXbhis own inability. This is what happens to many great golfers who do well in all of the preliminary games but never finish in the tournament. They hold steady in second, third, sixth or tenth place. Whenever it seems that such an athlete will finally be the first, he “runs out of steam” and at the last moment allows himself to be defeated by another participant. This does not mean that athletes with a similar destiny do not aspire to become winners. Unsuccessful performances reflect their idea of their capabilities.
I recently spoke with a concert pianist known for her outstanding talent. Suddenly, she made the decision to never perform in public again. She understands that nature has endowed her with a wonderful talent, but believes that in everything else in life she is a failure. As a result, she gets lost on stage during a performance due to any mistake and the slightest mistake, after which she plays like a beginning schoolgirl. Experiencing such deadly situations, she began to think that she was not capable of anything at all in all areas of life. And now she has retired to a quiet, secluded world where talent is absolutely not needed.
There can be no doubt about this issue: the lack of self-confidence can completely paralyze, deprive the ability to act only because of the fear of failing another very talented person.
My twelve-year-old son was asked to prepare for the recitation of a poem at a school party the next day. When he went out to read it, standing in front of the crowd of listeners, he could not utter a single word. But I know that he learned the poem perfectly, because he repeated it at home twenty times without hesitation. He is a capable child, but he has had similar misfortunes before. Why does his mind turn off when he finds himself in such tense situations?
To understand what is happening to your son, it is useful to understand one important feature of the functioning of the intellect. The possibilities of the child really depend on how self-confident he is in a given situation. We all sometimes experience the state that you described, when our thoughts become as if blocked, and the necessary name, fact or thought cannot be brought to the surface of consciousness, although we know for sure that this information is in our memory. Sometimes it happens that when we are about to say something to a person who is unfriendly to us or who sharply disagrees with us, we suddenly feel that all thoughts and phrases seem to disappear from our memory. Blocking thoughts of this kind usually happens when, firstly, a person is under strong pressure of a social nature, or, secondly, he has little self-confidence. Why?
Because the emotional state of the individual and the efficiency of the functioning of the human brain are interrelated. Unlike a computer, the human mental apparatus can function properly when a biochemical balance between nerve cells is maintained, which can be easily disturbed. It is known that a sudden emotional reaction can block this process at one moment. As a result, there is no thought generation. This mechanism has profound implications for human behavior. For example, a child who feels inferior and underestimates his intellectual abilities often does not even try to use the mental abilities he is naturally endowed with to the full extent. And self-doubt disrupts the process of his mental activity. A vicious circle of failures and defeats is formed, to which there is no end in sight. The incident that happened to your son, when he forgot the poem, most likely refers to the phenomena of the type described.
What can I do to help him?
Indeed, it is not unusual for a boy of twelve to take his breath away in front of a crowd of spectators. I once had a chance to stand in front of three hundred of my teenage peers. The words also got stuck in my throat, and my thoughts fled without a trace. It was an unpleasant sensation, but time gradually wore away its effects. As your child matures, he will probably gradually overcome this problem if he manages to build his self-confidence by achieving at least a few successes in some other field. Any situation that raises the level of self-esteem helps to reduce the blocking of thought and memory in both children and adults. Then, over time, such situations will happen less and less.
What relationships in the family are more successful in building self-confidence and self-confidence in children? Are there any features in healthy families that would be worth borrowing?
Dr. Stanley Coopersmith, a psychologist at the University of California, studied 1738 middle-class boys and their families. He observed them from the period before the boys entered adolescence, and continued to observe them until the time when they became young men. First, the psychologist determined which of the boys had the highest level of self-esteem. Then he compared data showing the influence of family and living conditions in childhood on the formation of these boys with the corresponding factors in the lives of children with low self-esteem. Stanley Coopersmith discovered three important characteristics in which these children differed:
- Boys with high self-esteem were clearly more loved and understood by their families than boys with low self-esteem.
- The guys who fell into the group with high self-esteem came from families where parents were much stricter in matters of discipline and order. On the contrary, children from the group with low self-esteem had parents who, adhering to the principles of permissiveness, created in the child a feeling of insecurity, insecurity and dependence. Most likely, the children of these parents understood that the rules of discipline and order in their families were not observed due to the fact that no one wanted to deal with them. Moreover, in the last period of observation, it was found that young people who achieved success in life and showed the greatest independence were brought up in families in which they were most consistently and strictly required to take responsibility for their actions and the fulfillment of their duties. As you might expect, family ties remain strong not in those families where everything goes somehow, but in homes where discipline, order and self-control have become a way of life.
- Families in which children grew up with a developed sense of their own dignity were democratic and open. Once established, the boundaries that define the limits of permissibility in behavior allowed the individual qualities of children to develop freely. The boys had the opportunity to express themselves without fear of being ridiculed. The whole atmosphere in the families was distinguished by benevolence and carried a sense of emotional security.
My child is often mocked by the children of our quarter, they offend him, and I do not know what to do. This makes a depressing impression on the son, he often comes home in tears. How should I respond to such incidents?
See the article What to do if your child is being bullied by other children
Your son absolutely needs to find a friend so that it is easier for him to endure situations when his peers push him away from him, mock him. And there is definitely only one choice — you. After your son comes home in tears, let him talk. There is no need to prove to him that there is nothing offensive in the behavior of children, that it is stupid to pay serious attention to this and react to their words in this way. Ask the boy if he understands what the guys don’t like about him? Perhaps their reaction is due to manifestations on his part of arrogance, selfishness or dishonesty? Try to express to him your understanding of his condition and sympathy for him, but do not bring the situation to a joint whimpering and crying. Switch at the first opportunity his attention to some game or other activities that could entertain and please him. But, in the end, try to figure out the reasons for his conflict with other children.
I suggest that you invite your son to invite one of his school friends to go to the zoo together on Saturday or do some other exciting “program” so that then this boy will stay with you overnight. After such joint events, real friendship often begins. Even the most hostile children who tortured your child can become much kinder when they are invited to visit one by one. You will not only be able to help your son make friends, but you will be able to observe his behavior during communication in order to detect the mistakes that he makes in this process and help him get rid of them. The information that you will have as a result of your observations will later be useful to you in your efforts to help the child improve his relationship with other children.
Building self-confidence and self-respect
If we treat children with love, then they are sure that we love them. If we treat them badly, then they are convinced that they deserve it. Children who are not treated as valuable and necessary people believe that something is wrong with them. They believe that «it’s because of them» and do not assume that anything can be wrong in their treatment. How we treat children determines whether they develop healthy or unhealthy self-esteem and develop self-esteem.