3 Top Tips to Build Your Child’s Self-Esteem
Skills4Parents provides education support and advice for parents, and online maths tutoring. Our core values underpin every piece of advice, and all of the work that we do. Our core value is individuality. From this, we have 4 other values of self-esteem, self-worth, self-belief and self-confidence.
Last week we looked at self-worth, and this week we consider self-esteem and the steps you can take to support your child and improve their self-esteem.
Self esteem comes from external factors and how that makes us feel and think. Here are my top tips to build your child’s self esteem:
Make sure their basic needs are met
Although maybe not fully accurate (what is?!), Maslow’s Hierachy of Needs is a good basis for explaining what we need to have good self esteem. If the needs at the bottom aren’t met our children can’t grow. As we all know, It’s important to feel secure, have a sense of belonging, that life is predictable, and have positive connections.
Teach them to look after themselves, and to know if their needs are met. This provides our children with secure foundations for the rest of their lives. After all, the only person who will ensure their needs are met as an adult will be themselves.
Teach them to label their emotions and share them
Part of building self esteem is being able to tell others how we feel, to recognise our emotions and sticking up for ourselves. Sometimes our children struggle to label their emotions and how they feel.
It helps to have words that they can use when describing their feelings. I love this feelings wheel that ‘Calm’ have developed that you can use to help them.
Challenge inner thinking
Our self-talk has an impact on our self-esteem. If we talk to ourselves negatively, we are creating damage to our self esteem. We need to have compassion for ourselves. Consider reframing. Reframing is a tool that coaches use, where you change words to be positive, and to be compassionate to yourself. Do this for your child, be your child’s coach. To help with this, the Anna Freud Centre has a worksheet that you can use with your child to work through a scenario and reframe it.
Self-esteem is built as a child. Low self-esteem has a negative impact on mental health and anxiety throughout our lives. We need to have a growth mindset, so our children know what they are good at. With a growth mindset, we celebrate with them the positive, and challenge the negative. For more ideas to improve self-esteem, the NHS has a great list here.
Do you need support with building your child’s self-esteem through their education? Book my 15-minute chat. Visit my Get Support page, see below.