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developing-healthy-self-esteem-children Developing healthy self-esteem is important for children and young people, as we established in our last post. As self-esteem depends on the internal ability to feel good about ourselves, it’s helpful to know how we can develop healthy self-esteem in children and young people. This post gives some practical tips.

Ways to Develop Healthy Self-Esteem

Positive Self-Talk

Encourage good self-talk and a focus on the positives, especially when failure happens. If things go wrong, talk about the learning that can be taking from it. It’s good to let them know that no one is good at everything. Show children that we are all fallible and you make mistakes too; when things don’t go well for you, share the experience as appropriate and show them how you are working through it and making changes so it doesn’t happen again. It could be as simple as forgetting an appointment and them showing how you put the rearranged appointment in your diary and put a reminder into your phone.

Focus on a child’s strengths! Notice what they do well and tell them. Give plenty of opportunities to develop these skills, activities and attributes. Nurturing strengths encourages children to feel good about who they are and what they want to achieve. A really good place to start for children over 10 is the free VIA character strengths youth survey. There is a growing body of evidence from positive psychology to suggest that knowing and applying your character strengths in your life is highly beneficial. There is an adult survey too!

Ban harsh criticism. The messages children hear about themselves from others easily translate into how they feel about themselves, so guard against this when you can. Harsh words (e.g. ‘You’re so lazy!’) are harmful, not motivating. Avoid using negative labels and messages – these can too easily become the child’s lifetime view of themselves.

Appropriate Praise

Praising effort helps to ensure that children and young people are aware that reward comes from effort rather than outcome or ability. This in turn, encourages them to challenge themselves rather than limited their achievements.

Praise effort but beware over praising – children are very good at spotting insincerity. Over praising can also foster an ‘I can do no wrong’ attitude or a belief that they are only good if someone else is telling them so.

Be specific with praise so children are aware of what it is you are praising. An alternative to ‘that’s good’, might be ‘I really like the way you’ve shaded that’, or ‘I can see you’ve really thought about the colours you’ve used there’; instead of ‘well done’, you might say ‘thank you for sitting down as soon as I asked you to’ etc. In this way, you are developing their sense of their own abilities and are understanding what the praise is for.

Encouraging Learning

Resist stepping in too soon to make things better. By allowing a child a little time and space to figure it out for themselves, you allow them to achieve independently. You can acknowledge that they have a problem and perhaps how it’s making them feel and it’s helpful to let them know that you believe in them and have faith they can work it out. You can support them by letting them talk through the options and helping them decide what they want to do. Over time this helps to fosters a sense of achievement and ownership and helps children to learn that trying can get them to the other side of a problem.

Help children to learn things! At every age there are new things to learn from using a cup to working a computer to overcoming relationship problems. By modelling the process, allowing them to have a go and encouraging them to try again if they don’t get it right straight-away, you are providing opportunities for children to master skills and allowing self-esteem to take root.

Listen to your child. Listening a better way of developing self-esteem than telling. By asking questions, you are allowing a child time to work things out for themselves, develop their own strategies and consider all the options, encouraging them to make the choices and empowering them to take responsibility for their own decisions.

Other factors

For older children, talk to them about social media. While it’s sensible to monitor the quantity of time that your children and teens spend on social accounts, the quality of the social media activities that they engage in is important too and can clearly impact their self-esteem and well-being. Discussing basics such as how many people accentuate the good in their lives and filter out failures in their social media activity (or recognising that some elements are totally made up!). Talk to them about how images can be manipulated too and how these images are changed to give the impression of perfection and how unrealistic this is.

Encourage healthy habits! Regular exercise is known to make us feel good so it’s great habit to get children into. A good walk can not only give some fresh air and exercise, but a good opportunity to talk. And healthy eating helps to ensure that children have plenty of energy, their brains and bodies work to the best of their abilities and they are more likely to feel good about themselves.

So there you are, some top tips for developing healthy self-esteem in children and young people. If you think we’ve missed anything, do let us know by leaving a comment below.

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the-importance-of-healthy-self-esteem-in-children-young-people Healthy self-esteem in children and young people is the topic of our first blog post to support teachers and parents looking to understand how they can help children with their well-being.

What is self-esteem?

Self-esteem is our opinion of our self and our worth. It’s our perception of our value as a person, particularly in regard to our work and achievements, our purpose in life, how we relate to others and our ability to stand on our own feet. Having healthy self-esteem means being comfortable with how we look and how we feel. It means feeling good about ourselves, our abilities and our thoughts.

Self-esteem is made up of all the experiences and relationships we’ve had in our lives. The people we encounter in our lives add to or, in some instances unforunately, take away from how we see ourselves and our level of self-esteem.

For children and young people, building self-esteem is an ongoing process and starts early. As parents and teachers, we don’t always get it right but as long as we remember to praise, listen and enforce boundaries in a positive way more often than not, we can help children and young people to develop healthy levels of self-esteem. P

What does healthy self-esteem look like?

Someone with positive self-esteem will generally approach things thinking they are a good person who deserves support and love and can succeed in life. Someone will low or negative self-esteem will generally think that they are not good at things, don’t deserve love or support and that situations will work out badly for them.

Children and young people with high self-esteem:

Have a positive view of themselves
Make friends easily and adapt to new situations
Can play on their own or in groups
Will try to work things out for themselves but are willing to ask if unsure
Can be proud of their achievements
Can admit their mistakes and learn from them
Are willing to try new things and adapt to change

A person with healthy self-esteem believes that they are doing the best they can. They accept that life isn’t perfect and rolls with the punches. They are comfortable with who they are and can get through things that don’t turn out the way they expected. Building resilience — the ability to adapt well to adversity, trauma, tragedy, threats or even significant sources of stress — can help our children manage stress and feelings of anxiety and uncertainty. We’ll be writing more on this in the future.

Why is healthy self-esteem particularly important for children and young people?

Young people with low self-esteem can find it very hard to cope with pressures from school, peers and society. The teenage, and increasingly pre-teen yearss can be very stressful as youngsters are expected to achieve good grades, look a certain way and be successful or popular. Children and young people with low self-esteem are more at risk of developing depression, anxiety, self-harming and other mental health problems as they grow up, and will often find the ups and downs of life in general harder to get through.

Most children and young people will have dips in self-esteem as they go through different stages and challenges. Starting or changing school, moving house, changes in the family can all affect a child’s self-esteem but with support they can get through this.

In conclusion, having healthy self-esteem helps children in many areas of their life. They have the courage to try new things, like making new friends. they believe in themselves and know that good things can happen when they try their best. Our next blog post will look at how we can help children and young people to develop healthy self-esteem.

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