How To Boost Your Children’s Self-Esteem

Helping children build strong self-esteem is one of the most important tasks for parents.

Parents are the most important people for their children, they are the ones who exert the greatest influence in their lives and in the task of perceiving themselves as individuals. They are also those who are sources of comfort and security for children.

Parents also function as mirrors, they are the ones who help their children to look inside themselves. That’s why it’s so important to cultivate acceptance in your children.

Children are always looking for parental approval to gain acceptance, and this can be experienced so intensely that it can linger over the years and generate frustration in adulthood.

When parents accept their children and truly value and appreciate them, they provide a psychological shield that will make them stronger throughout their lives. If children do not have this recognition from their parents, they will have to obtain this acceptance on their own as adults, but before that happens, they may face many problems with their self-esteem.

Parental attitudes are fundamental

Children learn much more from their parents’ attitudes than just from words. If these attitudes are one of love, caring, and security, the child will learn that he is important and dear, and these will be his first impressions of his worth and esteem. However, if these attitudes are of contempt and indifference, the child will understand that he is not wanted and may have a frustrated and hopeless behavior.

Acceptance does not mean permissiveness, but rather that you accept and love your child as he is, with his virtues and defects, without the requirement of wanting to mold him in your image and likeness. If we impose too much rigidity in education, children withdraw, lie for fear of showing themselves completely, end up hiding traits of their personality and become people without authenticity.

Not acknowledging children’s potential can make us miss an opportunity to boost their self-esteem. It is essential for children to feel heard and for their parents to show an interest in them. When we listen to someone, the message we convey is that the person is important to us and what they say interests us, but the listening must be sincere and participatory.

Recognizing and validating children’s emotions is critical. If we label their feelings “bad” or have them repress and deny them, the result can be destructive to self-esteem: insincere conduct and a loss of connection with their feelings, leaving them speechless.

We must take into account that we can only enjoy good feelings when we also express those that are unpleasant and uncomfortable.

Therefore, telling children how they should feel, comparing them to others, ridiculing them with sarcasm, inducing them to deny their feelings or using threats and punishment as a consequence of what they feel are very common mistakes that parents make. they commit without realizing it, but they can result in denial of their feelings. By denying these feelings, children hide them in places in their minds where they refuse to access them, making it difficult to resolve outstanding issues.

Tips for our children to develop good self-esteem

To help our children express and deal with their intense negative feelings, we can:

• Encourage them to express their feelings in a safe and accepting environment.
• Help them find ways to express themselves.
• Telling a similar situation in which they felt the same way, in order to foster the idea that they are understood.
• Serve as a model in moments of coping with intense feelings.
• Help them feel good in situations of defeat or disappointment.

A key element: the language

We must not forget one of the most powerful elements that parents have to strengthen their children’s self-esteem: language.

In each of our interactions with our children, we leave a little of our identity in them. That’s why it’s so important to pay attention to the words and tone of voice we use when we address them, trying to use a language that encourages self-esteem.

The language of self-esteem boils down to describing behavior without judgment, distinguishing the child’s value from his behavior. Faced with a situation in which the child has behaved badly, we must demonstrate that we no longer approve of his attitude in that situation, but we do not disapprove of him as a person and/or individual, and finally, acknowledge the child’s feelings and validate his experience.

It is important to highlight that, as parents, we also have a duty to be trainers and trainers of emotional skills, so that children can live more securely when achieving autonomy and independence. That’s why discipline is so necessary, but it should not be used in a way to attack the child’s individuality, but as a way to create a safe environment that facilitates learning.