Helping children to build self esteem

There are many techniques you can use to help children build their self-esteem healthily and positively, yet, most of them are going to take a long time and are very demanding, even worse, they are extremely confusing because they were designed to work with adults, and this is what I have found in most self-esteem books sold nowadays.

They do not talk about how to increase self-esteem in children; they only talk about increasing self-esteem in adults.

· How to help your child have and build high self-esteem?

The first prerequisite is to have high self-esteem yourself.

This is the most important part in my opinion for building and helping children increase and improve their self-esteems.

Without it, you will be simply lying to them and to yourself as well, and you will do as most smoking fathers do: telling their children not to smoke while they do it in front of them or even worse, hidden!

Yes, you need to start with yourself first and you need to increase your self-esteem, and this is how to do is:

· Respect yourself and always talk positively to yourself

· Have a list of goals to abide by and to work to achieve

· Take good care of your health and your outer looks

· Read self-help books, especially those written by doctor Nathaniel Branden and the most important book in my opinion is The Power of Now by Eckhart Tolle, this book will change your life.

· Respect your health, respect your body, and always have a smile when it comes to life and taking risks

Of course, these are only some minor steps to improving your self-esteem, if you need more help; you need to take a look in my other articles in this website.

· The second step to helping children build self-esteem is smiling at them.

Children, especially girls, are very sensitive when it comes to body language, especially the one by influential people in their lives, their parents, grandparents, brothers and let’s not forget it, teachers.

By preaching to your children about self-esteem and high morals while having mood swings all the time and being aggressive with them, you are simply going to create passive aggressive kids, the ones that will jump on any occasion to tear you apart or tear a loved one just to make a point!

Yes, body language is very important, and the most crucial one in my opinion and from my experience is smiling, the more you smile at children, the more you help them and the more you are nice to them, the more they are going to love you and have strength and confidence in themselves, in other words, they are going to have high self-esteem.

· Let’s talk now about the third step to help children have high self-esteem: listening to them.

A friend of mine once told me that even though his parents were very rich and spoiled him, he felt miserable because he was lacking the most valuable gift they could give him: attention!

And this is what you need to give your children, whether you are a parent or teacher: attention.

You need to care about them, you need to listen to them whenever they come talk to you, you need to pat them on the back whenever you are walking near them, you need to look them right in the eyes when they are talking to you, and let’s not forget that you should also smile at them and praise them as much as possible.

· The fourth step is to be real with them.

We all know what a hypocrite looks like, and we all know when someone is lying to us, so, don’t do things that are not you, don’t lie to children, and most importantly, give them rules to abide by that you, yourself, will not follow.

When my children misbehave, I punish them, don’t worry, I don’t hit them, I ask them to go to their rooms or to the corner for a limited period of time, then when their punishment is over, I act like nothing has ever happened, no vengeance and no nagging.

My children know that they have done something wrong and they have paid for it, and they know that I will always love them no matter what they did.

· You should also be real with them when it comes to their goals.

I ask my children to write down weekly, monthly and yearly goals, in fact, I’m more strict and serious about goal writing than I am with their French homework!

Not because homework is bad for them, but because goal writing is much more important in my opinion.

Goal setting will make children strive to improve themselves, it will keep them always changing for the better, and most importantly it will wake them up from daydreaming and do what is necessary to change their lives for the better.

Raising self-esteem of preschools

Preschoolers are extremely vulnerable to the way people deal with them and especially to the projections parents have of them.

For example, if preschoolers live in a family where they are treated as highly valuable and respected, then they are going to grow with a strong self-esteem and feeling extremely worthy of success, however, if they are thought of as being a burden and good for nothing by their families, then they are going to face many difficulties especially when it comes to learning because self-esteem is extremely important when it comes to school.

In this post, I’m going to share with you some of the tips you should apply in order to raise the self-esteem of preschoolers very healthy and quickly.

· The first tip is to make them feel they are valuable.

I’ve already talked about this in the previous paragraphs, but I’m going to elaborate this idea much more in this section.

Making preschoolers feel valuable is very challenging, especially if you don’t know a lot about their psychology, however, this tip is very essential and if they do not feel valuable, they are not going to have adequate self-esteem.