Kids Self Esteem and Empathy

How to Build Your Child's Self Esteem Using Empathy

We are often urged to use the basic parenting discipline of re-inforcing "good" behavior with praise, and ignoring "bad" behavior.

The danger with this approach is that it can lead us to ignore one of our childrens' fundamental needs - the need to express all of their emotions and still receive unconditional love from their parents.

It is important that your child is allowed to express his or her anger, frustration and sadness in an accepting environment. OK, you might not like it - wouldn't we all love for our kids to be happy and cheerful 100% of the time? Well humans are not like that, so it's unreasonable to expect our children to be so.

If we force our children, by lack of acceptance or understanding, to suppress so-called "negative" emotions, we only store up emotional trouble for them in the future.

Article on Empathy and Your Child's Self Esteem