Parents' concern for their children should be said to be almost meticulous, but often everyone's focus is more on eating and wearing warm, for the child's mental health, parents pay attention is not enough, every child has self-esteem.
Self-esteem needs to be established and maintained with the help of parents, otherwise, the child is likely to be hurt by the heart and raise a child with low self-esteem.
A child with low self-esteem generally comes from the following categories:
Overly strict parents;
Serious childhood deficiencies, that is, when they were young, they did not get the love of their parents;
Abused by parents. This is not only unloving, but also abusive;
Parental alcohol or substance abuse;
Parental neglect, parental neglect is not to take care of this child, no love;
Rejected by parents, many parents will convey this feeling to their children, thinking that children are superfluous, and you are the same in life, why give birth to you? I've also heard parents say to their children, "If only you were a boy." These are the rejection of parents;
Parents' overprotective, overprotective is also not right;
Parental doting and blind praise.
All of the above can cause a child's low self-esteem.
For example, our clinic recently visited a child who was subjected to varying degrees of "criticism" from teachers and parents because he was at school or at home. This led to the child's fear of going to school.
In fact, "excessive criticism" will also hurt children's self-esteem, and will also make them fall into self-denial and hinder growth.
There is also a child, because her mother Xiaoxiao (pseudonym) has been criticized and beaten by her parents since she was a child, and she is well aware of the pain. So since having a daughter, Xiao Xiao (pseudonym) hopes that her daughter will grow up happily and not repeat her past pain, so she adopts a parenting method of blindly doting on praise.
Baby, you sing so well;
Baby, your paintings are so beautiful;
Baby, your dance is so beautiful;
Baby, you're awesome...
In the beginning, the daughter really felt happy, self-respecting and confident.
This child, who grew up in a coddled compliment, has a strong sense of self-esteem and pursues perfection. However, since entering the junior high school boarding school, the improvement of learning intensity and the handling of relationships with dormitory classmates have caused the child to suffer repeated setbacks, and the praise of the former mother is no longer there. The child's self-esteem was completely hurt. She had no intention of studying, couldn't sleep, lived in fear every day, and finally in March of this year, she asked her mother to go to school and take a leave of absence.
This is blind praise to the child's "limitation" and shackles his self-esteem! Because a child's growth and exploration often begin with curiosity and interest, but there are bound to be difficulties and setbacks in the middle.
At this time, adults need to stand in the perspective of "bystanders" and honestly point out their limitations and blind spots.
Therefore, we must grasp the degree of love. Unloving and overly doting children will lead to "dead ends".
Because people who lack love will have a very low level of self-esteem, they will be particularly sensitive and easily irritated by a word or two from others; because all their sense of dignity comes from how others treat me; because from childhood his judgment comes from his parents' judgment of him, and he himself has no judgment.
The child's "over-friendliness" is actually a "friendly disease" and one of the manifestations of the "low self-esteem" personality.
Manifestations of a "low self-esteem" personality
The so-called low self-esteem is also called "low sense of self-worth".
People with low self-esteem, accustomed to lowering their feelings, easy to echo others, low bottom line, usually think that they are "unworthy" to get better, or even worthy of having the good things they have now, on the contrary, inferior, flawed things make them feel safe and able to possess them with peace of mind. They suffer from gain and loss, are suspicious, and are often in a deep state of self-denial.
Here are the 11 most common manifestations of "low self-esteem" personalities:
5. It's hard to say no to someone
11. Lack of clear self-awareness, define yourself according to what others think.
Top 10 Sources of Low Self-Esteem: The Causes of Low Self-Esteem – How your own experiences and relationships with the people who originally cared for you shaped your perception of yourself, and how other important external factors influenced you.
Only by understanding why you feel this way can you overcome this negative emotion later in life.
1. Authorities who disagree
If you grew up hearing that whatever you did wasn't perfect, how could you grow up to be an adult with a positive image?
If you've been blamed too much, no matter what you do or how hard you try, it will be hard for you to feel confident or comfortable with yourself in the days to come.
The shame that forces you to keep failing will make you feel the pain of the darkness.
2. Caregivers who do not participate/intervene prematurely
When your parents or other people who initially cared for you didn't care about you, it's hard to have the motivation to ask for more, to struggle more, or to think you deserve more — just as your greatest accomplishments aren't worth noticing at all.
Such situations often lead to feelings of being ignored, not being known, and not being important to themselves.
It can also make you feel like you don't matter to anyone, or you may believe that no one is around you and worry about where you are, which is actually the afterglow of your painful past.
Feelings of not being recognized can lead to thinking that you should feel sorry for your existence.
3. Authority figures are arguing
When your parents or other caring givers argue or don't give each other a good look, the children absorb that negative emotion and the distrust that adults have built.
It was scary, unacceptable and unorganized.
This can also happen when one parent is overly frantic or acting abnormally around the child.
For a child who has been fought over by too many adults, they will feel that they have caused an argument or a painful situation for their parents.
Intense friction is really like excessive threats and feelings that drive fear, and children may think they are causing such a situation.
This feeling of being badly affected continues into adulthood.
4, be bullied (parents do not support you)
If you have the support of a relatively safe, agreeable, conscious family, you may have a better chance of regaining your self-esteem from the humiliation and bullying of your childhood.
And if you are insecure and tormented outside the home, this unacceptable loss, abandonment, hopelessness, and self-loathing can invade your daily life.
It will also make you feel like everyone you're friends with is helping you because you think you're so broken.
Or maybe you think that everyone who appears in your life is greedy and unworthy of being trusted.
Without a family that supports you, the effects of being bullied will show up and tragically corrod the quality of life.
5, being bullied (parents are too protective)
Conversely, if your parents are overly supportive regardless of the situation, it can also lead to your inability to face a cruel world.
Without the primitive instinct to build a thick protective film, you will feel challenged and even ashamed to see yourself as someone who cannot accept any challenges outside of home.
In this way, you may feel unprepared or ashamed to admit this dirty and ugly secret of yourself, even to your parents, because you need to protect them from the pain of knowing the truth.
Instead, you hide the painful secret that happened to you.
Such shame can be hard to accept and blind you. In the end, your parents' views on you seem to be the opposite of the world's views on you.
This forces you to cling to the familiar things that are moving forward in your life, doubt the validity of your parents' positive views about you, and acquiesce to being inferior or, like the victim, and deserve to be the object of ridicule.
6. Being bullied (parents did not intervene)
If your initial caregiver didn't step in when you were being bullied, didn't value your experience, or let you down when you needed their shelter.
You may struggle with unnoticed, unworthy of care, and anger from being ignored.
When the whole world can't give you a sense of security, that shame and pain is cruel.
These feelings can also be aroused if your parents are in a state of change and confusion – when no one will perceive what is happening to you.
If there is a quarrel and chaos in the family, it is difficult to get attention or feel that there is room for your struggles.
Instead, you may retreat into hiding and become more isolated and trapped in shame.
7. Academic challenges are not supported by caring people
Nothing can lower your self-esteem more than feeling stupid.
If you feel like you can't understand what's going on in school — like you're getting behind without anyone noticing or no one stepping in to help you figure out how you need to adapt— you may believe in your heart that you may have some part of the flaw.
You may feel absent-minded and overly skeptical of your intellect, and feel embarrassed to share your opinions.
This shame that you are not good enough is difficult to disappear, even if you learn how to adapt your own methods to academic difficulties in the future.
8. Trauma
Physical, sexual, or emotional abuse is perhaps the most devastating and clearly causes low self-esteem.
Being pushed into a physical or emotional position against your will can make it hard to fall in love with the world, to believe that you believe in others, and it can deeply affect your self-esteem.
This may make you feel that this is your own fault, but in fact, whose fault is not your fault.
Obviously, in these situations, there are too many things happening at a time, and you may need to look back, to get out, to leave.
This time it makes you feel like you're nothing. In order to gain control of these situations, you may have made yourself believe in your mind that you were involved or even reproached.
You may have found a way to deal with these abuses, to manage the unhealthy chaos in your understanding, so that even after experiencing a lot of other feelings, you will eventually feel that you are disgusting and shameful.
9. Belief system
If your religious (or other) belief system makes you feel eternally sinful, it may be similar to living in an environment where authority has been subjected to constant opposition.
Whether these judgments come from authoritative figures or from a belief system that has been established in your life, it can cause shame, guilt, contradiction, and self-loathing.
Many well-structured belief systems offer two pathways: one is all good and one is all bad.
When you inevitably fall into the abyss between the two, you end up feeling confused, feeling wrong, misguided, ashamed, fake, and disappointed in yourself over and over again.
10. Social and media
Those in the media are undoubtedly packaged and groomed to unrealistic levels of beauty and slimness. This spreads like an infectious disease, and the situation is getting more and more excessive.
Nowadays, men and women feel that they have no way of knowing what is happening in the outside world.
Maybe the seeds of low self-esteem were planted somewhere, but now society and the media make their imperfections so accessible that they don't leave any comfort for feeling inappropriate.
As the age group exposed to the media gets younger, children are forced to make unfair comparisons with them earlier and earlier.
Self-esteem plays an important role in a child's psychological development. Research shows that children with high self-esteem are generally more likely to succeed in life; unfortunately, children with low self-esteem may have the opposite. As a parent, how to develop your child's self-esteem is largely your responsibility, and there are many things you can do to help your child feel confident and feel capable of completing tasks.
Children with high self-esteem have the confidence to try new activities and are proud of their achievements; while failure is never pleasant, these children have the emotional ability to endure failure and maintain the courage to try again; children with low self-esteem are self-critical and have difficulty maintaining a positive attitude when making mistakes, which can cause the child to be unable or unwilling to try again, or to turn down the next chance that may succeed.
So as a parent, what you do at home is very important, and you can refer to using the following strategies to help your child develop self-esteem:
Love your child unconditionally
Every child should believe that no matter what they do, the outcome is success or failure, their parents still love them and will continue to support them. Consider how this affects a child's self-esteem when they think they only feel loved when they act in a certain way or achieve a specific outcome.
Second, help your child set achievable goals
Few things are more beneficial to self-esteem than success, and building these goals with your child, starting with very easy goals to achieve, giving your child a taste of success, and the confidence boost that comes with it. For example: For young children, a good goal can be to clean their room.
Third, encourage perseverance and never give up attitude
Success and persistence go hand in hand, find the courage to persevere in your child and show them how persistence can be successful. When your child sticks to a difficult challenge and doesn't give up, praise them and one way to help your child is to set a good example and use yourself as an example to prove what persistence is.
Fourth, give your child a choice
When you don't have any control over your life, it's hard to have self-esteem. To provide a "sense of self-control," give your child a choice, which can be as simple as giving them two lunch options, or letting them choose the shoes they want to wear that day.
Fifth, perfection is not beautiful
Stop your child from trying to be perfect because it's a game that no one can win, and when your child realizes they can never be perfect, their self-esteem suffers, so you should show your child that you value effort and progress.
Avoid excessive praise
Your child will know when you're over-praising. Of course, you can praise when you are successful, but in moderation, and you should also praise your child for making good efforts.
Let your child hear you compliment others
When a child hears a parent praise them to another adult, their self-esteem gets a big boost. You can take advantage of this to increase your child's confidence.
There is no doubt that children with strong self-esteem will be happier and more confident. We all want to give our children the best things, so it's our responsibility to help them boost their self-esteem and self-confidence. What we do at home can have a major impact on our children's future, teaching your child to love and believe in themselves and they will benefit for the rest of their lives.