are signs that you have little power over your kid’s self-esteem:
• Your threats have as little impact as your praise
• Finding a punishment or reward that matters is really hard
• You have trouble getting an answer, a laugh, or even a grunt to any invitation
• You can’t find a topic of common interest besides silence
• You can’t get a good suggestion from the kid’s shrink, who hasn’t heard so much as a grunt, either
Among the wishes people express when they want to protect their kids’ self-esteem are:
• To figure out what’s wrong
• To get through to their kids with their love and admiration
• To help her do better and/or get away from bad friends and drugs
• To find a treatment or therapist that will help
Here are three examples:
I know my fifteen-year-old daughter lies because she never wants to admit she hasn’t done her homework, even though it’s obvious she hasn’t. Still, she lies every goddamned time, even though her lying gets her into tons of trouble, and then she feels awful when teachers who have tried to help her just give up and tell her she’s let them down. I’ve punished her and I’ve been understanding, I go to meetings with the teachers and get her tutoring, but nothing works. My goal is to get her out of this cycle of doing poorly, lying, punishment, and feeling like a total failure.
My son has been a mess since his girlfriend dumped him a year ago when he was a high school sophomore, and we just can’t get him out of it. He’s seen a shrink, tried antidepressants, and nothing works. He stopped going to school for a month but he’s been going now; he just isn’t able to learn very much and he won’t answer the phone. I check with him to make sure he’s not suicidal, but beyond that I don’t know what to do. My goal is to help him recover.
Simply put, my daughter is big. My wife and I have tried everything to help her without making it worse—our house only has healthy food, we have her doing physical activities after school, we’ve talked to our pediatrician a million times—but even at her thinnest, she’s still both heavier and taller than the other girls in her class, and the teasing has been terrible from boys and girls alike. She cries all the time and we’re terrified that she’s going to hit puberty and start cutting or starving herself. My goal, with my wife, is to protect her from bullying by helping her become less bully-able.
The best way to help your kid with his self-esteem is to help him limit his responsibilities, just as you must limit your own. This seems like anathema to many parents, who feel the only way to develop their kids’ strengths and gifts is to load them so full of responsibilities and activities that they have to schedule pee breaks. Limiting responsibilities also seems overly permissive to parents and teachers who are trying to help kids manage inner monsters, outer peer pressure, or just hormones.
The fact is, however, that kids and adults often have limits to their self-control, and pushing responsibility across this limit breaks, not creates, confidence.
If you give yourself unlimited responsibility for your kid’s happiness, you can never be successful, and the same applies to him. If he takes full responsibility for finishing his work well, controlling his behavior, being a good kid, being happy, and not being judged or bullied, he may well wind up hating himself for flaws or just situations he can’t control, particularly considering how little it takes to mess up something on that list above.
Your mandate, to him as well as yourself, is to do as well as you can and certainly to recognize your flaws and work on them, but also to understand that certain problems may not be solvable and that doesn’t make you a failure. For kids in particular, certain problems that may not be solvable this year may be solvable in the future as their brains grow and mature. In any case, acknowledging limits is necessary for restricting the damage of caring too much about flaws and failures that can’t be helped.
So don’t look too hard for bad choices, either yours or his. Be careful to note the things he does well and the things you’ve done right as a parent. Don’t assume he’s unhappy or doing poorly because of something you didn’t notice or didn’t take care of. The only thing you may have done wrong is having unprotected sex with your spouse wherein the one wonky egg or gas-huffing sperm won the day, thus transmitting some difficult genes that are hard to live with.
Just because educators are there to help you on your quest to improve your child’s self-esteem doesn’t mean they don’t share your sense of overresponsibility and thus the need to search for what and who’s to blame for whatever’s wrong. Meetings start out friendly, but then get tense as everybody finds faults in the other guy’s performance. Don’t go down that road or react to teachers who are caught up in that negative process.
The best way to team up with teachers, instead of being sucked into polarizing discussions about what should or could have happened, is to note what they’re doing well for a problem that many people haven’t been able to solve. Give them the same protection from blame as you do your child and yourself.
Of course, embrace reasonable responsibility for trying to control whatever you think can be controlled; there are rules for bad behavior that you can enforce with incentives, even if no one knows how your child will respond, and there are procedures you can follow to track homework and provide extra help. There are also procedures for setting limits on bad impulses and eating disorders. If they don’t work, get advice and try something else. In any case, stop frequently to take pride in your efforts, your child’s efforts, and the strengths you take for granted when he’s doing well. For instance, notice what your child does well in spite of obesity, not just what goes wrong because of it.
By recognizing your efforts as a parent, regardless of results, you can prevent frustration and helplessness from poisoning your parenting and your hope for your child’s future. At least until he’s eighteen, when the law says your kid and his self-esteem are no longer your responsibility.
Quick Diagnosis
Here’s what you wish for and can’t have:
• Power to shore up your child’s confidence
• Confidence in your own ability to protect your child from depression and self-dislike
• Access to treatment resources that will do the above
• Knowledge that things won’t go sour tomorrow
Here’s what you can aim for and actually achieve:
• Get to be a pretty good parent
• Know what you can and can’t do for most problems
• Get reasonable professional help and judge whether it’s worthwhile
• Know when pretty good parenting and other help just aren’t enough
• Keep up morale when nothing is working
Here’s how you can do it:
• Through reading, watching others, and/or your experience with your parents, create
