Teach Kids, and Their Self-Esteem Will Grow
She’d zipped through her homework and headed outside to play.
I glanced at the work sheet, with its “All About Me” heading, above columns of questions on her hobbies and interests, her favorite foods and music, her feelings on subjects like pollution and cheating.
Spelling homework, I thought. Or maybe reading . . . .
No, my third-grader told me later. This was for her class in self-esteem.
Self-esteem . . . as in feeling good about yourself? It’s a class these days?
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While it goes by various names, most schools today offer lessons aimed at fostering children’s self-esteem . . . that quality loosely defined as “satisfaction with oneself.” Now, I’m all in favor of kids feeling good about themselves. But it seems to me we’re cheating our kids if we let some kind of mindless “I’m great because I’m me” notion supplant the kind of pride that real achievement brings.
And we’re fooling ourselves if we consider affirmation and praise a worthy substitute for loving families and schools that set high standards and offer broad opportunities for every child--not just the most gifted or motivated--to succeed?
I think back now to a remark I heard several years ago, as the Los Angeles School Board debated how much money to spend on curriculum aimed at teaching children self-esteem.
They were interrupted by a teacher in the audience, who strode up to the microphone and scolded them like a bunch of misbehaving kids.
“You folks are talking about self-esteem like it’s something you can give a student . . . like a pencil,” she said. “You can’t give a child self-esteem. Children learn self-esteem when you esteem them.”
In other words, you can’t fake it.
If you cut the art and music classes that children love; jam them onto overcrowded campuses; force them to use filthy, malfunctioning bathrooms; deprive them of the textbooks and supplies they need . . . you can hardly expect them to leave school feeling valued and worthy of being loved.
No matter how many self-esteem work sheets you have them do.
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In the past decade--since we became the first state in the nation to create an official task force promoting self-esteem--California has elevated the concept to an educational philosophy, right up there with whole language and new math. In the process, we spawned a lucrative market for private firms peddling “self-esteem” courses to schools up and down the state.
There were positive effects, to be sure. Children were taught conflict resolution and how to stand up against drugs and gangs. They talked about sharing their feelings and being tolerant of others.
But there were sinister elements, as well, to our preoccupation with guarding children’s fragile egos.
Along came grade inflation and social promotion, in the name of insulating children from feelings of failure. Some high schools stopped selecting valedictorians, because singling out the one best student might hurt the feelings of other high-achieving kids. Elementary schools began giving so many honors and awards that if you stood still long enough in class you’d be praised for something.
The state task force’s theory was simple: People with a positive self-image are more likely to live productive, moral, law-abiding lives. Conversely, low self-esteem can account for a variety of social and economic ills.
The problem is there’s never been any evidence to show that activities aimed at promoting self-esteem in school actually helped kids to feel better about themselves.
In fact, studies showed that focusing on improving their academic performance was the only real way to improve kids’ self-esteem.
What a novel concept. Instead of making children feel good for just “being,” why not give them the means and opportunities to actually achieve . . . to earn the right to feel proud of themselves.
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It’s not a quick fix, like the feel-good version of self-esteem.
Guiding a child toward real accomplishment requires patience, commitment and recognition that every child has talents and strengths that a school or a family can discover and nurture.
It means setting goals and linking sustained effort--not innate ability--with success.
It means encouraging children to reach beyond their grasp. Allowing for inevitable failures. And teaching kids to get up and move on when they fall.
It means praising kids when you catch them doing something right . . . and so making sure they know right from wrong. And teaching them to catch themselves doing good, so they don’t always require outside praise for validation.
At the Jefferson Center for Character Education--a Pasadena organization that has, for 35 years, helped schools teach values to children--they consider “character building” at least as important as self-esteem. It’s embodied in lesson plans that teach kids the core values they need for success: Be on time, be prepared, be a good listener, be a hard worker, be polite, be friendly, be honest, be fair. . . .
“Some people believe if you simply make kids feel good, they’ll study, graduate and get a job. I think that’s wrong,” says B. David Brooks, president of the organization. “We need to teach people to do good. And out of that will follow self-esteem.”
* Sandy Banks’ column is published Mondays and Fridays. Her e-mail address is sandy.banks@latimes.com.
