Self-Esteem Suffers From Low Self-Esteem After New Studies Tell It It's Worthless

Via Crooked Timber

Kevin Drum relays the bad news that high self-esteem is basically good for nothing in terms of tangible outcomes. These findings sound much like the literature on optimism and pessimism, which finds that optimists overvalue their abilities and blame others for their mistakes. People with sunny dispositions are a real menace to society.

This tidbit of news is a perfect opportunity for me to get on one of my parenting soapboxes (a parent's best defense against being endlessly preached to about how best to raise one's child: preaching louder). It's not related to the usual biscuit diet of torture, torture, and more torture, but nicely dovetails with the "pessimism" aspect of the blog.

Max and I have noticed that other upper-middle-class parents (besides enrolling their babies in lots and lots of classes to teach them things like "movement") are always telling their kids "good job!" This is because the parenting experts have told them that they should praise their kids a lot so they'll have high self-esteem. This has driven us crazy ever since we read John Holt on how to turn your children into "praise junkies". Holt basically says that kids, like adults, know perfectly well when they've accomplished something worth praising, because they feel pride about it their ownselves. People are always telling their kids "good job!" (and telling OUR kid "good job") about stuff that is really no big deal. I've had people tell biscuit baby "good standing!", "good sitting!", "good eating!", etc. Of course, when your kid does something he's been working on for a long time, it's appropriate to share his excitement with him. But it doesn't make any sense to praise a kid for something he's not especially impressed about himself. It either causes your kid to lose touch with his own pride in his accomplishments, or else to react with cynicism and contempt when adults praise him. (Did the A's I got in school mean anything to me? Of course not -- I knew they hadn't taken any effort to get, so what did I care about Honor Rolls? )

Refraining from indiscriminate praise is not the same as withholding love. I'm pretty sure our kid knows we love him more than life itself, whether or not he's currently doing anything impressive. But I think most adults find that praise from others is ultimately hollow -- I don't know why we think that kids should experience it some other way. No one can fill the hole at the center of our being -- like humans have always, we must just live with it.

I want my kid to get good at living with that hollow place, because I don't believe anything I do as a mom can make it go away. I want him to not be so afraid of the hollow place, to not spend his whole life in a mad rush to fill it up with accomplishments and awards and things and people. I want him to know the hollow place won't make him crazy (something I am still trying to learn!), that love is possible despite the hollow place. We do not have to say "alas!" that we are hollow men. We can simply lean together, and live.