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Merriam-Webster defines self-esteem as a feeling of having respect for yourself and your abilities, or a confidence and satisfaction in oneself. Self-esteem helps children face challenges, try new things, learn well, and develop well in general (Raising Children).
A child with healthy self-esteem is more likely to be successful academically, socially, emotionally, and even physically. Conversely, low self-esteem can contribute to mental illness such as anxiety and depression, and is often a cause of poor physical health. Low self-esteem negatively affects all types of relationships: friendships, work relationships, romantic relationships, to name a few. It also impacts work and job performance, and creates a predisposition toward abusing alcohol and drugs (CMHC).
Read on to learn what self-esteem is, why it is important, and some of its characteristics. Then we’ll share actionable ways that caregivers and teachers can promote healthy self-esteem for kids.
What Self-Esteem Means for Kids
Self-esteem has been called “the mainspring that slates every child for success or failure as a human being” (CHHS). That said, nurturing self-esteem in a child is one of a caregiver’s most important responsibilities.
Children need to feel proud of themselves for what they can do, see the good in themselves, and accurately assess their own strengths and weaknesses. This will help them believe in themselves and be resilient when facing adversity (Kids Health).
Why Self-Esteem Is Important
Mental Health
Research by the American Psychological Association has shown that having good self-esteem is essential for positive mental health and well-being. It also helps children develop empathy and perspective, as well as coping skills and perseverance (Very Well Mind). And, as stated above, having poor self-esteem contributes to a variety of mental health issues (Positive Psychology).
Academic and Life Success
Self-esteem often means that kids hold high standards for themselves. This manifests itself in several different ways. First, these high standards can help kids set goals—in school, and beyond. As a result, they improve their ability to cope with the setbacks and difficulties in reaching their goals. They learn to persistently try until they achieve success, ultimately have more opportunities and broader life experience.
Relationships
Good self-esteem is an essential component of high-quality relationships. When a child sees their own value, it allows them to better see the value in others. This leads to better interactions, which in turn leads to better self-esteem. The result is a cycle of growth that can last a lifetime.
Physical Health
Children who like themselves treat their bodies well. They typically take care of their physical health and are healthier in general. They are more likely to exercise regularly and subsequently recover faster from illnesses (Positive Psychology).
Characteristics of Self-Esteem
Kids with self-esteem often exhibit the following characteristics:
Trying new things, including those that they might not be good at
Facing challenges instead of avoiding them
Persevering in spite of difficulties
Coping with stress, anxiety, and pressure, whether at home or school (Very Well Mind)
It is possible to build self-esteem at any age. While earlier is better, supportive parenting can change the trajectory of a child’s life no matter where they are in their development.
Warm and loving parental relationships are the basis of self-esteem. They make children feel worthy and valued. Here are some specific suggestions for strengthening your relationship with your child and building their self-esteem.
1. Set boundaries and limits.
Set boundaries and limits to help your child feel secure and grow emotionally (Sanford Health).
2. Show interest in what your child values.
If they love music, listen to or play music with them. If they love books, take them to the library. Engaging with your kids shows them they are worth your time and attention (Raising Kids).
3. Have them do chores or help around the house.
This can include helping prepare meals, making their beds, feeding pets, or washing dishes. Contributing to the household makes kids feel accomplished and shows that you trust them to help (Kids Health).
4. Treat each child as a unique individual.
Remember, one size never fits all…so parent each child in a way that works for both of you.
5. Give balanced feedback.
This means praising your child for trying their best or doing something new, not for being the best. This teaches children to value their own efforts, and to be a good teammate (Raising Children).
6. Listen to and acknowledge your child’s thoughts and feelings.
Teach them how to deal with uncomfortable feelings and, ultimately, to self-regulate.
7. Give your child choices.
Give options and allow your child a feeling of reasonable control over their life (CHHS).
8. Make family meals together.
This strengthens family ties and allows everyone to contribute to the meal. Children can set the table, chop vegetables or cut fruit, or wash lettuce for salad. Meals also give everyone a chance to connect as a family (Raising Children).
9. Show love and affection to your children regularly.
Exhibit love and affection including physical affection—hugs, kisses, etc. Do not withhold affection even if they are misbehaving. To be effective, your love must not be conditional. Continue reinforcing that your child is lovable (CHHS).
10. Encourage them to keep trying even when things are hard.
Praise the effort. Reward perseverance. This builds their resilience.
11. Coach children through difficult social situations.
Children can experience difficult social situations at school or elsewhere. Role-play them, talk through them, etc. This helps prepare children for these situations and build confidence (Raising Children).
12. Keep children connected.
Keep children connected to family friends and extended family as much as possible. This helps develop their sense of belonging and identity. Other options include being part of a religious community, sports club, or another group (Raising Children).
13. Allow them to make mistakes.
Do not expect children to be perfect. Instead, let their mistakes be learning opportunities (Sanford Health).
14. Keep realistic expectations of your child.
This helps them meet the expectations or exceed them. Their self-esteem will grow as a result.
15. Focus on the positives.
Notice what your child is doing right, and praise them for those actions. This reinforces positive behaviors and discourages poor choices (Sanford Health).
Conclusion
Self-esteem can be nurtured in children during their childhood development. It is essential in helping them feel worthwhile, secure, and develop self-worth. This affects every area of their life.
Soul Shoppe provides social emotional learning programs for parents, schools and businesses. Soul Shoppe helps children with empathy, emotional literacy, conflict resolution and more.
Coming off a year when classes were largely online, the need for social learning is at an all time high. Online learning has created obstacles for many families. Several parents are left needing to provide some form of home education on top of distance or remote learning for their kids, especially if they have children who need more attention in the classroom already.
So, how can students learn social skills online or in the home? There are many virtual social learning activities that can help students refine their social skills while staying remote. These practices can be modified to fit the needs of any age group and are easy for students, teachers, or parents to participate in. Here are four social-emotional learning activities that can be done from home:
Virtual Social Learning Activities
1. Find A Penpal
A fun way to get students socially involved in others’ lives while staying at home is connecting with a penpal. Some schools and communities have sponsored programs that safely and securely connect students (with parental consent) to penpals around the same age. If your community doesn’t have a program like this, you could ask your student to make a list of friends or family members they want to try to write to. It is important that students do not contact strangers or give out personal information for safety reasons. Fortunately, there are many penpal connection sites, but ensuring your student uses one through a trustworthy program (like a school or government agency) is key for this virtual social learning activity.
Having a penpal not only helps with writing and grammar skills, but also builds social skills. It also helps them learn about another community or culture. Writing is a fun way to practice socializing from afar.
2. Word and Image Association Games
Games designed to build associations between different situations and the emotions they involve have been used by K-12 teachers for decades. There are a few different ways to put them into practice. All forms of these exercises will help students pick up on social and emotional cues from themselves and the people around them.
The most commonly used method involves showing a student an image of a face and asking them to name the emotion the face is expressing. For example, a smiling face might be labeled as “happy” or “excited.” Check our Pinterest boards for social learning worksheets! Once the student becomes comfortable with that portion of the exercise, move on to asking the student how they would express certain emotions. As an example, a teacher or parent could say the word “worried” and see what facial expressions and body language the student expresses. These types of exercises are helpful in regulating social-emotional awareness.
3. Decision Making Scenarios
A step up from the word and image association game are decision making scenarios. These exercises involve having students decide what the morally right thing to do is in a given scenario. Teachers or parents can read the scenario out loud and then ask the student what the “right thing to do” is. Typically, the scenarios in question involve moral decisions such as returning lost items, reporting dangerous situations, and not giving into peer pressure.
To take this a step further, give students scenarios in which someone did something wrong. Then they answer the question “how should the antagonist in this scenario apologize to that person?” or “how could this person voice their feelings to the person that hurt them?”. I Message is a great tool for this. Virtual social learning activities like these give students the opportunity to recognize and practice navigating through challenging social interactions they will likely encounter at some point in their lives.
4. Writing Prompts About Emotions
One of the more common virtual social learning activities practiced is writing. Some behavioral specialists call this method “tracking and unpacking”. It entails writing about one’s emotions as they come up and then taking an inventory of them later. Ask students to turn their feelings into creative projects like songs, poems, or stories for additional excitement. But, if your student prefers traditional journaling, that works just as well and is potentially more straightforward of an approach.
5. Play Social Skill Games Online
There are websites that will provide social skills games when you sign up. However, you could also facilitate group time with video chat through platforms like Zoom to connect to friends and family. Plan social skill games for these times. One easy game that will encourage social behavior, is to throw ideas the student enjoys talking about in a cup and draw them at random to have all participants engage in conversation about the chosen topic. The topic could be anything from a place they like to go, to games they like to play, etc. Be as specific as possible with the topic such as Minecraft, Harry Potter, etc. to encourage detailed discussions and reciprocity.
There are so many virtual social learning activities to try. One of these is bound to help your student thrive.
Organizations That Can Help With Social Learning
Soul Shoppe has been recognized by many educational institutions for bringing students together and effectively training them in social and emotional intelligence. From in-person assemblies and workshops with students of all ages to online learning, staff members are trained in “activating empathy” and encouraging social positivity among students of all walks of life. Soul Shoppe uses research-based and psychologically-backed models of learning to “integrate more love” into everyone’s social inventory.
“The things that make me different are the things that make me.” – Winnie The Pooh
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We’re all different in our own unique ways. We have different appearances, talents, and abilities. We all think, feel, behave, and believe differently. That’s what makes life so interesting!
Sometimes we celebrate these differences. We heap praise on people like Steve Jobs, Serena Williams, and Greta Thunberg who break the mold and challenge the status quo. But sometimes we exclude, judge, or disparage people because we think they aren’t like us.
At Soul Shoppe, we show kids that if we just take the time to look beneath the surface, we’ll find that we have a lot more in common than we think. But how do we learn to really see beyond our outer appearances and get to know someone for what’s inside?
We can play the Same Same Different Game.
Last week, over 350 students joined us to play what we call the Same Same Different Game! How does it work? Well, we asked kids to look at two different people –me and our big-hearted facilitator Arek – and describe the differences and similarities they saw.
They pointed out that I’m a girl and Arek is a boy. They noted that we both have dark hair, though mine’s long and his is short. But our gender and our hair don’t make us who we are! There’s so much more that makes us unique, and these young people know it. They understand how to find the things we all have in common, whether it’s a love of dancing or a distaste for brussel sprouts.
But learning to appreciate and honor our differences takes practice. That’s why we created Respect Differences.
Respect Differences is an online course designed to teach K-6th grade kids how to recognize and appreciate all the things that make us unique. In this on-demand course, kids are guided through lessons that will help them build up their self-esteem so that they can show more empathy toward people with ideas, appearances, likes, and dislikes different from their own.
We show kids how they can play the Same Same Different Game to celebrate differences all the time. Visit our website and learn more. Or, you can click the button below.
Thank you for attending Soul Shoppe’s virtual game show, Kids Say the Smartest Things!
We had a blast sharing superhero trivia and imitating animal sounds, talking about polar bears and playground problems, but more importantly: your kids had a lot of wise insights to share.
They showed us how to navigate tough conversations, how to face overwhelming emotions, how to stand up to peer pressure, and much, much more. All this just goes to show that kids have innate peacemaking and problem solving skills. We adults could probably learn a thing or two!
Thanks to your little ones and their profound kid wisdom, we feel that we have a much brighter future ahead of us.
Now we want to know what you thought of our virtual events this year. Whether you’re a parent, a teacher, or a school administrator, we’d love to hear from you so we can continue to improve our programs to best serve your kids and students.
Simply click the button below to take a very brief survey (only 3 questions!) and give us your feedback.
Soul Shoppe’s virtual holiday celebration – Gifts, Giggles & Goodness – made it an incredible week for us. We hit record numbers of participants with well over 1200 kids joining in over the course of 3 days!
Together we got crafty with homemade holiday gifts, giggled in more ways than we could count, and shared how small acts of kindness can make a big difference. Thanks to all who participated, our days have been a whole lot more joyous and bright.
The Good Goes Around! All it takes is one small act of kindness to turn someone’s day around and light up their face with a smile. Our big-hearted facilitator Ryan taught us to get creative with crazy gifts and how we can practice more kindness to spark joy this season. Our big-hearted facilitator Dara helped us get our giggles out!
Now we want to know what you thought of our virtual events this year. Whether you’re a parent, a teacher, or a school administrator, we’d love to hear from you so we can continue to improve our programs to best serve your kids and students.
Simply click the button below to take a very brief survey (only 3 questions!) and give us your feedback.
Here at Soul Shoppe, we believe that good goes around. That’s why we wanted to keep the good times rolling with more exciting events and innovative programs especially designed to help kids and adults navigate these challenging times.
November’s event was 5 Days of Fun!, a virtual recess series that brought together hundreds of kids every day. We want to express our deepest gratitude to the kids and adults who joined us to throw down some fresh beats, laugh it up, dance out our affirmations, and take an inside look at our emotions. Thank you for helping us spread joy and infuse the school day with more fun!
Recess gives kids the chance to flex their imaginations, develop complex social relationships, and consolidate the lessons they’re learning – not to mention get their wiggles out! But with distance learning, it can be hard to find the time to design activities that will genuinely engage your students.
Our facilitators will drew on kids’ real world skills to ground them in their physical environment and foster genuine connection with their classmates so they can continue to thrive whether they’re in the classroom or at home.
As countless studies show, that 15 minute midday break can mean the difference between academic breakthroughs and mid-lesson meltdowns. Kids aren’t designed to sit still, let alone stare at a computer screen for five hours a day. That’s why recess is more important now than ever! ⠀
Stay tuned for the highlights reel and read on to learn more about how Soul Shoppe is adapting to these uncertain times to help your kids thrive.
