RECOVERY: Fostering Positive Self-Esteem In Children

Positive Self-Esteem is essential to a happy, healthy life. It gives us the ability to adapt, grow, cope, and survive. It allows us to successfully navigate the frustrations, difficulties, and problems that we will inevitably be faced with along the way. 

Parents are crucial to a child’s positive sense of self.  A parent’s role is to provide stability, security, and love so children will flourish and grow to be self-confident, responsible, and capable. It is of great importance that parents are role models who display a positive view of self so the child will learn by example.

Self-esteem isn’t arrogant, self absorbed, or narcissistic. It’s a healthy understanding of who you are. It is liking yourself for who you are.

When a child (or adult) has a positive self-concept they are empowered, and protected.  Understanding yourself, your beliefs, strengths, and even weaknesses, strengthens a child’s ability to understand, withstand, cope, and handle difficult situations and decisions.

 

Self–Esteem = our self-perceptions

       How we define ourselves - which influences:

·      Motivation

·      Attitude

·      Behavior

·      Emotional adjustment

·      Fluctuates as kids grow

What affects a child’s self-esteem?
 

·      How much they feel loved, wanted, appreciated.

·      The child’s view of himself

·      His/Her sense of achievement

·      How he/she relates to others

A child with good self-esteem learns flexibility, communication, resilience, and problem solving.

These skills help the child adapt and better handle:

·      Stressful situations

·      Negative pressures

·      Conflicts with peers

·      Peer pressure

 A child with low self-esteem will experience: 

·      Difficulty finding solutions to problems

·      Passiveness

·      Withdrawal

·      Depression

·      Fearful of challenges

Patterns of Self-Esteem start early in life.

·      Reaching milestones gives a sense of accomplishment

·      Continued attempts to accomplish after failed attempts teaches “can do” attitude (try, fail, try, fail, try again, succeed. This helps develop positive ideas about their capabilities)

·      Success follows persistence

Parental Involvement = accurate, healthy self-perceptions

·      Feel loved.  

·      Feel capable

·      Feel appreciated (by parents and others)

·      Feel confident in decision making

·      Feel independent

·      Feel that they heard

·      Feel their opinions count

·      Feel encouragement

·      Develop mutual respect

·      Feel successful

Warning signs of Unhealthy Self-Esteem

·      Hesitant to try new things

·      Frequently speaks negatively about self

·      Easily frustrated

·      Gives up self power easily

·      Looks for someone else to take over/lead

·      View temporary situations and set backs as permanent

·      Pessimistic

·      Behavioral problems

Signs of Healthy Self-Esteem

·      Easily interacts with others

·      Enjoy others. Is comfortable in social situations

·      Can separate self from disappointments

·      Can ask for help and admit they don’t understand something

·      Knows and accept their strengths and weaknesses.

·      Optimistic

·      Sense of identity

·      Independence

·      Motivation

·      Persistance

What Parents Can Do

·      Love, unconditionally

·      Start from the time they are born to make them feel safe, secure, loved, and valued.

·      Mind your words. Kids are sensitive to what parents say.

·      Praise your child for both efforts and for jobs well done.

·      Praise frequently

·      Be honest

·      Positively acknowledge their efforts and completion of tasks despite the outcome.

·      Be a role model. Nurture your own self-esteem. Watch what you say in relation to yourself. They’re listening and affected by it.

·      Help develop a healthy self-concept by helping them set more accurate standards for themselves.

·      Be affectionate. Your love will boost their self-esteem.

·      Give positive, accurate feedback.

·      Acknowledge their feelings

·      Reward positive choices (will foster right choices in the future)

·      Give them a safe, loving home environment

·      Be aware of signs of trouble outside of the home

·      Help kids get involved. (Mentoring, volunteering, helping a    younger sibling will boost self-esteem)

·      Encourage them to express themselves (both the good and the bad)

·      Teach them to respect the opinions of others and not let others disrespect them

·      Teach strategies to help them say no to things that go against their values and beliefs.

·      Make them feel special

·      Let them make mistakes

·      Encourage them

Be careful of your thoughts, for your thoughts become your words. Be careful of your words, for your words become your actions. Be careful of your actions, for your actions become your habits. Be careful of your habits, for your habits become your character. Be careful of your character, for your character becomes your destiny. 

Ryan Caffro

See also:   

Body Image and Self-Esteem links

Self-Worth: The Unconditional Love Of Self 

Self Worth Quotes

©Weighing The Facts

Pic source: http://www.flickr.com/photos/pinkpoppyimages/5894557456/sizes/l/in/photostream/

Sources: http://www.more-selfesteem.com/child_self_esteem.htm
http://extension.missouri.edu/bsf/selfesteem/index.htm

Inspirational Recovery Quotes: Choices

 Life's not about expecting, hoping and wishing, it's about doing, being and becoming. It's about the choices you've just made, and the ones you're about to make, it's about the things you choose to say - today. It's about what you're gonna do after you finish reading this.

Mike Dooley

This bright, new day... complete with 24 hours of opportunities, choices, and attitudes… a perfectly matched set of 1440 minutes. This unique gift, this one day, cannot be exchanged, replaced or refunded. Handle with care. Make the most of it. There is only one to a customer.

Unknown

We cannot change the cards we are dealt, just how we play the hand.

Randy Pausch

The doors we open and close each day decide the lives we live. 

Flora Whittemore

It is our choices that show what we truly are, far more than our abilities.

Joanne Kathleen Rowling

Once you have started seeing the beauty of life, ugliness starts disappearing. If you start looking at life with joy, sadness starts disappearing. You cannot have heaven and hell together, you can have only one. It is your choice.

Osho

Every passing minute is another chance to turn it all around.

Cameron Crowe

Every morning when I get up, the first thing I decide is: What do I want? Misery? Blissfulness? What am I going to choose today? And it happens that I always choose blissfulness. It is my choice, it is my life.

Abdullah

Once you make a decision, the universe conspires to make it happen.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

You are a product of your environment. So choose the environment that will best develop you toward your objective. Analyze your life in terms of its environment. Are the things around you helping you toward success - or are they holding you back?

W. Clement Stone

You have many choices. You can choose forgiveness over revenge, joy over despair. You can choose action over apathy.

Stephanie Marston

We can try to avoid making choices by doing nothing, but even that is a decision.

Gary Collins

In a minute there is time for decisions and revisions, which a minute will reverse.  

 T.S. Eliot

It's choice--not chance--that determines your destiny.

Jean Nidetch

Destiny is not a matter of chance. It is a matter of choice: it is not to be waited for; it is a thing to be achieved.

W.J. Bryant

You have a choice. Live or die. Every breath is a choice. Every minute is a choice. To be, or not to be.

Chuck Palahniuk

I discovered I always have choices and sometimes it's only a choice of attitude.

Judith M. Knowlton

The truth of the matter is that you always know the right thing to do. The hard part is doing it.

H. Norman Schwarzkopf

While we are free to choose our actions, we are not free to choose the consequences of our actions.

Stephen R. Covey

Every thought is a seed. If you plant crab apples, don't count on harvesting Golden Delicious.

Bill Meyer

We must make the choices that enable us to fulfill the deepest capacities of our real selves.

Thomas Merton

There are always two choices. Two paths to take. One is easy. And its only reward is that it's easy.

Unknown

Decisions become easier when your will to please God outweighs your will to please the world. 

Anso Coetzer

What we call the secret of happiness is no more a secret than our willingness to choose life.

 Leo F. Buscaglia

Remember, there are no mistakes, only lessons. Love yourself, trust your choices, and everything is possible.

Cherie Carter-Scott

 The artist is the only one who knows that the world is a subjective creation, that there is a choice to be made, a selection of elements

Anais Nin

Until a person can say deeply and honestly, "I am what I am today because of the choices I made yesterday," that person cannot say, "I choose otherwise.”

Stephen R. Covey

In any moment of decision, the best thing you can do is the right thing. The worst thing you can do is nothing.

Theodore Roosevelt

When you have to make a choice and don't make it, that is in itself a choice.

 William James

Every human has four endowments- self-awareness, conscience, independent will and creative imagination. These give us the ultimate human freedom... the power to choose, to respond, to change.

Stephen R. Covey

Good decisions come from experience, and experience comes from bad decisions. 

Unknown

When one bases his life on principle, 99 percent of his decisions are already made. 

Unknown

A true hero is not someone who thinks about doing what is right, but one that simply does what is right without thinking!

Kevin Heath

We can let the circumstances of our lives harden us so that we become increasingly resentful and afraid, or we can let them soften us, and make us kinder. We always have the choice.

Dalai Lama

There is no value in life except what you choose to place upon it and no happiness in any place except what you bring to it yourself.

Henry David Thoreau

Choices are the hinges of destiny. 

Attributed to both Pythagoras and Edwin Markham

If you limit your choices only to what seems possible or reasonable, you disconnect yourself from what you truly want, and all that is left is compromise.

Robert Fritz

Indecision becomes decision with time. 

Unknown

To live is to choose. But to choose well, you must know who you are and what you stand for, where you want to go and why you want to get there.

Kofi Annan

Life is change. Growth is optional. Choose wisely.

Karen Kaiser

You may believe that you are responsible for what you do, but not for what you think. The truth is that you are responsible for what you think, because it is only at this level that you can exercise choice. What you do comes from what you think.

A Course In Miracles

Do not plant your dreams in the field of indecision, where nothing ever grows but the weeds of "what-if."

Dodinsky

Right actions in the future are the best apologies for bad actions in the past.

Tyron Edwards

There are two primary choices in life; to accept conditions as they exist,

or accept the responsibility for changing them.

Denis Waitley

When it snows, you have two choices: shovel or make snow angels.

Unknown

In the long run, we shape our lives, and we shape ourselves. The process never ends until we die. And the choices we make are ultimately our own responsibility.

Eleanor Roosevelt

Using the power of decision gives you the capacity to get past any excuse to change any and every part of your life in an instant. 

Anthony Robbins

We must all suffer from one of two pains: the pain of discipline or the pain of regret. The difference is discipline weighs ounces while regret weighs tons.

Jim Rohn

There comes a time in the spiritual journey when you start making choices from a very different place. And if a choice lines up so that it supports truth, health, happiness, wisdom and love, it’s the right choice.

Angeles Arrien

... everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms … to choose one's attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one's own way.

Viktor Frankl

pic source:http://www.flickr.com/photos/safetylast/3406861702/sizes/l/in/photostream/