I always thought that the "self esteem" movement was a lot of hooey. All of the bullies I knew as a kid didn't seem to suffer from lack of self esteem. If anything, they had an unjustified overabundance of it.

It's exactly the kind of untested, unsubstantiated nonsense you'd expect from the education establishment, and unfortunately, too many parents bought into it. Donald Sensing describes some of the effects.

Link goes to the wrong place, though the article is listed on the right side of the page.

I think a lot of this is classic confusion of cause and effect. Often, kids have low self-esteem because they CAN'T do what is expected of them. The school systems often think they can't do it because of low self-esteem.

I have special needs children. My middle son struggled all year in class this year. The teachers, principals, etc. all told us that he struggled because he didn't trust himself to do a good job. He just needed to boost his self-esteem.

After much fit-throwing by us, we finally pushed for a full educational assessment. He suffers from an unusual learning disability that makes it difficult for him to generalize one skill to others.

Problem is that he was learning to fake it, because his self-esteem had been boosted to where he just jumped in, confident that he could solve the problems when he simply lacked the skills to do it.

Cause and effect reversal at its finest.

From the movie, "Fight Club":

Man, I see in fight club the strongest and smartest men who've ever lived. I see all this potential, and I see squandering. God damn it, an entire generation pumping gas, waiting tables; slaves with white collars. Advertising has us chasing cars and clothes, working jobs we hate so we can buy shit we don't need. We're the middle children of history, man. No purpose or place. We have no Great War. No Great Depression. Our Great War's a spiritual war... our Great Depression is our lives. We've all been raised on television to believe that one day we'd all be millionaires, and movie gods, and rock stars. But we won't. And we're slowly learning that fact. And we're very, very pissed off.

It's been my personal experience that much more self-esteem is gained by doing and achieving, than is ever gained as a gift. And I don't care who you are, everyone has some ability to do something well.

Here's the other thing I think that drives this craving for approval. Every kid in this country has been told that to be "successful", means going to college, getting a degree and gaining the corner office. Everyone can't get a corner office. How many corners can an office have? Somebody has to be the worker bee!

Not to mention the fact that plenty, in fact most, of companies are filled with disgruntled miserable workers who are weekend mechanics, carpenters, gardeners, artists, musicians, brewers, appliance repairmen etc. They look forward to their weekend activities to be "validated" as a person because their everyday lives SUCK.

Personally, I've always been the type of person who'd rather be a happy mechanic than a miserable middle manager trying to knife my boss in the back. Hell, I'd rather be a knife sharpener!

Nicely stated Steve. The happy man is the one who does small things well.

A few years ago, Scientific American had an article on self-esteem, written by researchers in the area. They have found that psychopaths and career criminals have the highest self-esteem. They also decried most school efforts to build self-esteem in kids.

I always thought that the "self esteem" movement was a lot of hooey. All of the bullies I knew as a kid didn't seem to suffer from lack of self esteem. If anything, they had an unjustified overabundance of it.

My friend worked with juvenile deliquents and he said the exact same thing.

I'm a twentysomething and seem to have kept just ahead of the self-esteem vector. By high school, people a year younger than me seemed to live in permanent floating bubbles of self-esteem.

Yet these same people couldn't be trusted to get to their classes on time. The school had to use a (very loud) bell system to herd all the little individualists along.

FC,
if your a twentysomething and you grew up as clear headed as you sound, call your parents and thank them. My older son is in his early 30's and the self esteem rules were well out there in the schools by his grade school years.

I'll bet your parents made you do chores and taught you to say yes sir and yes ma'am to. Ah, the good old days.