Parents play a crucial role in shaping their children's self-esteem by providing unconditional support and helping them understand that failure is a natural part of learning, says school principal and trainer Cattre Hein.
"Parents are an incredibly important source of support for their children. A parent's role in supporting their child's self-esteem is to be a secure anchor. Parents need to reflect their child's worth back to them and that reflection should not change because of something bad the child has done or a mistake they have made. Nor should it change because of a bad grade at school, for example. A child is valuable and good enough no matter what and it is the parent's job to maintain that image at home. Our self-image begins at home," said school principal and trainer Cattre Hein.
A child's self-image can become more positive when we recognize their positive actions and efforts. "Working in a school, I see every day how easily children give up. What we want is for children to develop intrinsic motivation. Instead of simply telling a child 'good job,' we should praise the effort they have put in," Hein said.
If a child comes to help stack firewood, something they probably don't want to do, parents should acknowledge that the child came to help anyway and ask how they feel about the fact that their help made it possible to finish the job quickly.
"Similarly, we should recognize small achievements along the way. For example, we could praise a child for making an effort and asking their grandparents for advice, which helped them come up with a topic for their research project," Hein said.
According to Hein, everyone needs to experience failure. "Learning begins when things are difficult and we don't know how to do something. We should accept failure as a normal part of life. Some days everything goes really well, while on other days we can't seem to do anything right, everything goes wrong and nothing works out. But that doesn't make me a worse person. We all tend to give up very easily because failure is extremely uncomfortable. We also need to learn how to fail," Hein explained.
We should also learn to be more forgiving of ourselves. "Young children develop their sense of self through the feedback they receive from their families and at home, while teenagers get that feedback from their friends and social media. It's very easy to start feeling that you can't cope or that you're not good enough. But if we explain to young people how personal growth happens and they begin to understand it, they'll be better equipped to cope," the school principal said.
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