Low self esteem and children
Throughout your child’s life you need to be on their side. It can be tough being a child in today’s society. Your child may have better living conditions, education and nourishment than many children several hundred years ago, but children are also exposed to many less obvious pressures today. Being part of a loving and supportive family may not be enough to protect today’s child. The good news is that healthy self esteem coupled with a strong set of values will provide a good foundation for you and your child.
By working on your own self esteem you can directly help your child because children will absorb good self esteem from parents in the same way that they will unerringly find mud and puddles to play in!
You can also help by trying to give as much unconditional acceptance as possible. By this I mean that you keep firm boundaries about not tolerating bad behaviour, but that the child knows that you are only criticising his behaviour and not the core of him.
It is quite normal for children to experience feelings of worthlessness and of being no good or not good enough. It is likely that this is nature’s way of hard-wiring the child with a sense of vulnerability for his own protection. If children felt too confident at an early age they might suffer a lot of accidents because they wouldn’t perceive rivers, traffic, strangers etc as being potentially dangerous.
To give unconditional acceptance the parent has to value himself or herself. In the on-line book Self Esteem Unlocked you will learn how to improve your own self esteem quickly and easily without spending thousands of pounds on therapy and years talking endlessly about the past in a therapist’s chair. Self Esteem Unlocked will unfold the key skills and secrets that will help you and your child enjoy rock solid self confidence as they grow up.
Notes
Learn to distinguish between behaviours e.g. courtesy, politeness, consideration towards others, these you want tp train the child to do, whereas accept the child may have core beliefs and interests that are dissimilar to your own. E.g. child may be gay; this may be beyond your comprehension but this is the core of the child.
Sort yourself out
You accept the core of the child whilst you may need to train the behaviour.
Don’t live through your child
Find things to praise, compliment your child about.
Teaching your child about choices; Jackie used to give them a small sum to spend at the local jumble sale so they could learn to judge quality and pleasure-giving potential of toys.
Take your child clothes shopping and try out colours and learn together which colours and styles look nice.
