Self Esteem

This paper is about the impact of self-esteem on daily life. The more negative thoughts and feelings you have about yourself, the lower your self-esteem. People with low self-esteem often have little confidence in their abilities and question their self-worth.

A common scenario, which exemplifies a lack of self-esteem, features college students who say, "It won't do any good to study. I won't make a good grade anyway." These students think they are doomed to failure because of poor performance in the past or their current fears of failure. Consequently, their lack of self-confidence results in passivity with little or no effort to establish goals. Even when they do make worthwhile accomplishments, these students perceive that the performance of other students looks better in comparison. They let events happen to them instead of making them happen and minimize their successes. As a result, these students feel little control over their lives and often find it difficult to set goals and develop close personal relationships.

On the other hand, high self-esteem consists of the positive thoughts and feelings you have about yourself. In addition, it affects how you think, act, and feel about others, as well as how successful you are in life. The acquisition of high self-esteem involves you becoming the person you want to be, enjoying others more fully, and offering more of yourself to the world. High self-esteem is not competitive or comparative, but rather it is the state where a person is at peace with himself or herself.

Self-esteem is the value we place on what we believe to be true about ourselves. Put simply, our self-esteem is how we feel about ourselves. It's an emotion we hold true about ourselves.

People with high self-esteem consider themselves worthy, and view themselves as equal to others. They do not pretend to be perfect, recognize their limitations, and expect to grow and improve.

Those low in self-esteem generally experience self-rejection, self-dissatisfaction, self-contempt, and self-disparagement.

We all have an inner child and the wounds our inner child received can and do continue to contaminate our adult lives. Our parents helped create this inner child part of us, society also helped with the creation. When this child self is not allowed to be heard or even acknowledged as being real, a false or co-dependent self emerges. We begin to live lives as victims. Then we have situation that a rise in our lives, which develop into, unresolved emotional traumas.

This portion of the paper will be covering development of self-esteem in students and school age children. Self-esteem is an issue that people as well as children develop individually. Teachers play a major role in challenging and assisting the development of self-esteem. This issue has been defined in the Internet article, Developing self-esteem through challenging education experiences by Nancy Holiday. Nancy gives five ways to develop self-esteem in children. The five most used ways to develop self- esteem are; games, trust experiences, communication activities, initiatives, and rope course activities. (Holiday pp.2) "These activities are developed in areas in which children can relate to and if performed by instructors correctly, children can use for a lifetime".

Another way to develop self-esteem in children is to teach them leadership with exercises that make them think critically. These activities have a dual purpose. They not only help children develop self-esteem through leadership roles; they also help children learn to work as a group and become team players.

Self-esteem in children and in adults develops from a need to feel important, a want to belong and a feeling of accomplishment. Team leadership and team player are two words that carry weight in this area. These methods of help, help children learn to take control of situations as a leader and accomplish a difficult task with a group. The action takes on a positive effect of belonging and an idea that they can do anything they set their minds to do.

Children growing into adulthood need to feel they are trusted to make decisions on their own. Individuality plays a major role in this growth area in self-esteem. A good question to ask your self in this area is, how do you feel when you are not trusted? Do you feel you have a high or low self-esteem when faced with distrust? Children do not feel a high sense of self-esteem either when not trusted.

Working with children in sports events gives you a sense of how children develop their self-esteems. Children play sports in most cases harder then adults do. Every event of the games they perform helps them build or damage self-esteem. The best way to make a positive out of this method is to make them feel good on accomplishments and greater on errors. Children need assistance when they do make errors. If all they see is that they failed and blame is left on them then they are failures inside. If they see they failed and words of encouragement are left in their head, they will try harder when faced with same mistake. The best way to develop self-esteem in children is to be an active role in their life for the rest of their lives.

Major depression affects one in fifty school children. Countless others are affected by milder cases of depression, which may also affect school performance. The peak age of depression correlates with the peak years of low self-esteem. Right at the prime period for low self-esteem is early and middle adolescence with a peak period between the ages of thirteen and fourteen.

The suicide rate in teenagers has quadrupled in the last quarter century making it the 3rd leading cause of adolescent death in the nation. In Utah, it is the number one cause of death in for individuals 15 - 44 years old. A high school with a population of 2,000 students can expect 50 attempted suicides per year. And yet depression and other affective disorders continue to be an area primarily ignored by the public schools.

One of the factors that make depression so difficult to diagnose in adolescents is the common behavior change that are normally associated with the hormonal changes of this period. It has only been in recent years that the medical community has acknowledged childhood depression and viewed it as a condition, which requires intervention.

Various therapies have been used with adolescent depression. Psychoanalytical therapies target the unconscious conflicts resulting in the depression. Behavior therapies design reinforcement programs to change behavior patterns. Cognitive therapies look to improve and examine met cognition and increase more positive thought patterns.

Unfortunately it is harder