Illustration by Davide Bonazzi
Do you praise a child lavishly, to raise self-esteem, or sparingly, to spur effort? Do you refrain from criticism, lest you paralyze a sensitive child, or give constructive criticism, to coach success?
Self-esteem is complicated. It didn’t even exist as an educational buzzword until the late ’60s, yet by the early ’70s, it was touted as the solution to everything. Educators learned to lavish praise and taught the tots affirmations: “I’m lovable! I’m capable! I’m grrreat!” Everybody got a trophy for everything, and just showing up for class was cause for jubilation.
Brilliance did not automatically follow.
Worse, a lot of smart kids lost their drive, while kids with only the vaguest notion of the subject matter felt sure they deserved a high grade.
About 10 years ago, the seesaw of educational theory slammed down on the other side, weighted by a ton of studies that showed self-esteem to be irrelevant to success. Psychologist Roy Baumeister found that self-esteem made little difference in the quality of academic performance, work, or relationships; it didn’t even dissuade kids from risky behavior. An earlier study showed that aggressive bullies and violent adults weren’t exactly short on self-esteem. We’d gotten it all quite wrong.
We’re still getting it wrong, says Dr. Robert Cloninger, a psychiatrist who runs the Center for Well-Being at Washington University. Those aggressive individuals who seem to have high self-esteem? They don’t. “One of the paradoxes of self-esteem is that people who have a lot of it are able to admit their faults,” he says. “On the surface, narcissism can look like self-esteem. A narcissist will say, ‘I’m great; I’m wonderful; I can do a lot of things.’ And that’s true—as long as they are successful. But they just don’t have the resources to cope with failure.”
What is Self-esteem Anyway?
Cloninger did groundbreaking work in the genetics of personality, and he now serves as research director of the Anthropedia Institute, which focuses on well-being. His son, educator Kevin Cloninger, is president of the Anthropedia Foundation and, thus, his father’s boss. The self-esteem of both men has survived, and they spend a great deal of time explaining the quality to parents, teachers, and therapists.
Self-esteem isn’t just one thing, Kevin points out. It’s a feeling about yourself that comes from being self-directed, able to listen to your heart and not chase the approval of others. It’s tied to values and a sense of purpose. It’s also a matter of temperament, linked to resilience, persistence, and resourcefulness. And it’s easy to suffocate—with harsh words or false praise.
Criticism and Coercion
Before self-esteem tied their hands, many teachers and parents felt a righteous duty to point out every flaw and mistake. Those who enjoyed the role often carried it too far. “Being critical and judgmental, putting children down, disempowers them,” Robert says. “If you just criticize people, you rob them of their confidence in themselves. They stop believing in their own ability to correct their behavior.
“But that doesn’t mean parents and teachers can’t express criticism constructively,” he adds, “and this is where people have gone wrong. They don’t criticize at all; they just praise. Children need to feel that their parent or teacher has hope for them, respects them, and will tell them the truth.”
Even more important than what parents and teachers say is what they hear. “You listen to what a child is interested in doing,” Robert says, “so he can use his own passion to work toward things he genuinely values. You encourage the child to think of smart goals that are realistic and attainable so he’ll have a chance of succeeding, rather than putting him in a situation where he’ll feel overwhelmed. You coach and redirect, and his confidence gradually increases.”
A more coercive approach—pushing the child in the direction the parent thinks best—often bombs. “No matter how well-intentioned we are, if we try to force a child in a specific direction, we undermine our real goal,” Kevin says. “If the child doesn’t have the freedom to set her own goals, discover inner resources, and overcome challenges, she’ll always be obliged to follow some formula that’s inauthentic.” Any confidence acquired along the way will settle on the surface; scratch half an inch down, and it’s gone. “By not telling them what to do all the time,” Robert says, “they have to ask themselves, ‘Well, what would I want to do, and how do I get it done?’”
The Perils of Praise
Parents instinctively try to protect their children by not criticizing or by minimizing the criticism of others, Kevin says. “When they are truly challenged and need constructive criticism, they may not be able to handle it. This leads kids to increased stress and anxiety.”
It also leads, Kevin’s father adds, “to a bunch of people who can’t take criticism and have to have everything on a silver platter and don’t want to work very hard.” Kids come to expect praise, and they feel no incentive to try harder because nobody’s saying there’s room for improvement.
Making children dependent on a steady flow of recognition and approval doesn’t make them more confident. Empty flattery just undermines the adults’ credibility, and soon the child discounts even valid tributes.
Nor does an excess of praise help children look inside themselves. Instead, they look more and more eagerly to others. A Stanford University metastudy linked frequent, freely given praise with “shorter task persistence, more eye-checking with the teacher,” and answers given with the hesitant inflection of a question.
Social psychologist Jennifer Crocker of Ohio State University says that even tenderhearted adults who ignore children’s failures, brushing the news aside with the insistence that they’ll do better next time, do more harm than good. Kids begin to think that failure is so terrible it can’t even be talked about, that mistakes must be ignored, not learned from.
The Trials of Temperament
Robert’s pioneering research in temperament revealed two traits—anxiety and a lack of persistence—that indirectly affect self-esteem. “If you’re a worrier, shy, anxious, sensitive to criticism, and overly critical of yourself, it’s harder to accept reality, because it’s so upsetting,” he says. “So it’s difficult to be self-directed.”
At Wash. U., he mapped, for the first time ever, the trait of persistence, showing its location in the human brain. Some of his subjects’ brains showed a great deal of persistence—the ability to keep going when you’re frustrated. Others showed almost none. “If you never get negative feedback, then you never learn how to deal with frustration, and you quit the moment you are no longer rewarded,” he explains.
Robert trained his lab mice to be persistent by not always rewarding them when they made their way through the maze. When rewards aren’t automatic, kids, too, will learn to tolerate frustration, realizing it can be worked through.
Anxiety can be harder to overcome, but with time and guidance, even anxiety-prone kids can learn to live by their own values, no one else’s, and to salt their fears and desires with enough realism that goals become attainable.
The secret is “unconditional positive regard,” Robert says. When parents and teachers fully and warmly accept a child, without keeping a tally of talents or inadequacies, the child can relax and pursue the pleasures of self-discovery and accomplishment for their own sake.
“You Can’t Make Me!”
Self-esteem is a bonus, not an end in itself. You can’t inject it. “When we have kids reciting things like Stuart Smalley from Saturday Night Live—‘I’m good enough. I’m smart enough’—it’s a truly vain exercise,” Kevin remarks. “It doesn’t help kids engage in the kinds of activity that lead them to feel their own worth. It’s a kind of positive brainwashing.”
Ah, well. All that’s over anyway; brainwashing’s out of vogue. “Right now, the major trend is toward accountability, standardization, and competition in the global economy,” Kevin says. Teachers are emphasizing competence and meting out praise more carefully, tying it to specific, concrete accomplishments.
Kevin thinks that’s a mistake, too.
“If we always praise something they do, and never who they are, then self-esteem can be fleeting,” he warns. If a baseball star breaks his leg, his entire sense of self collapses.
To stick, self-esteem has to flow not from individual triumphs but from self-awareness and an understanding of the world. What the grown-ups can do is give kids the tools they need to develop that kind of understanding—and then model the self-directed, value-driven life they want their kids to develop.
“At the end of the day,” Kevin says, “how parents live is more important than anything they will ever say to their child.”
