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

Parenting: Positive Praise vs Empty Praise

Praising our kids is an essential part of building their self esteem - so it is worth thinking about in a little more depth.
Children are a lot smarter and more perceptive than we realize, so one important part of praise is that it must be HONEST. If you praise your child for a piece of homework that you don't really feel is very good, he will pick up from your tone of voice or your body language that you don't mean it. Save your praise for when you can give it fully and honestly.

Kids don't have the experience that we have and misunderstandings are easy to create. So praise that is SPECIFIC will help your child more than generalizations. Saying that you appreciated your child's help with the chores will mean more to him if you say exactly which bits of what he did were so helpful.
Children have a different perception of time than do adults. Praise is best served warm! When you see your child doing something great - tell him so as soon as you can, and keep your praise TIMELY. On the flip side, beware of giving constant praise when there is no reason for it. Your child will be more motivated if your praise is associated with genuine effort on his part, rather than appearing at random intervals no matter what he does.
Why not watch yourself as you praise your child today and see if you are managing to make your praise:

• Honest
• Specific
• Timely

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Where did the time go?

When I tried growing a garden for the first time I discovered two things about gardening pretty quickly. One, I am not a gardener and two if you let the weeds get out of control they will soon take over your garden. It is pretty easy to use that analogy when it comes to thoughts too. If you keep letting the negative ones in they will choke out the positive ones PDQ. It is not so much that negative thoughts have that much power as they are quite low on the energy scale but enough of them piled up day after day it becomes harder and harder to get through the weeds to the flowers. By flowers I mean the good stuff, the wonderful things about you and your life.

I had to learn that the hard way and try and teach that to my children on a daily basis so that they won't have to wait until they are in their forties to have the same AHA moment.

Apologies on anyone who reads our blogs and has noticed a bit of a lag since the last one. No excuses just life gets the best of you at times and all the good intentions of blogging on a daily basis kind of go to the wayside. Actually for 2007 Cassie and I were pretty good about keeping up on the blogs so I am not going to say too much about this year. We all do what we can and sometimes a break is needed.

Happy Goal Setting,

Monicka