Self Esteem

How to address Self-Esteem

Self-esteem is an overall opinion of yourself. It involves understanding how a particular child feels about their abilities and limitations.

In order to boost a child’s self-esteem we need to help them see the positives and we need to build their confidence.

Many children with low self-esteem always see the negatives. If they have many negative beliefs we’d need to unravel the reason for these and replace these beliefs with positive new beliefs.

One way to improve a child’s self-esteem would be for their teacher to boost confidence through social praise. A simple question like, ‘what do you think you did well today?’ will go a long way in teaching a child to focus on the positives.

Children with low self-esteem could be bullied. In such a case, we’d want to focus on teaching assertiveness. The teacher could also teach the child to use a rating scale. If I don’t like what this person is saying how can I rate this? Is it true or is it just someone’s opinion and if I don’t like what has been said how can I be assertive?

If a child is constantly getting it wrong, they develop a fear that they always wrong. A teacher can build confidence by not making a child feel silly for giving a particular answer. The child should be acknowledged for attempting to answer and then the teacher can model the correct answer.

Another example to tackle self-esteem, would be to help the child identify 3 things they good at and 3 things they not so good at but could improve on.

We shouldn’t use the word ‘bad’ when speaking to a child with a low self-esteem we’d rather use the words ‘not so good at’.

The point is, that our words are powerful and need to be chosen very carefully, as they have an enormous impact on children with low self-esteem.

Drawing on the principles of ABA we can improve on a child’s self- esteem and teach this important skill.