Positive limits an self-esteem.
It is very easy to honor a child when he/she sleeps or behaves properly but what can we do when he/she doesn’t do his/her homework or does not tidy his/her room or comes back home late. It is of great importance to realize that while creating self-esteem the environment where the child transacts is as important as the emotional security that his environment provides.
The first step towards crating self-esteem is the emotional security of a child. Maslow places security at the base of the pyramid of our needs.
What do children do to create emotional security? They lie. While parents advise/ tell their children “I want you to think without being influenced by others, think for yourself and try to be able to say no” if someone (tells) them “to smoke. Children do not feel safe when they tell you “no” that is why they pretend, they handle the situations they isolated themselves and compromise.
They think “It is better for you not to say no as you are safer when you accept things ”. That is why we can see children who smoke, who get involved with drugs or become sexually active when they are not ready yet.
They think “If I do what you ask me, you will love me more, if I smoke, you’ll be my friend and you will never leave me.” More over, if you are under the influence of drugs, you won’t get hurt , if you don’t care, you don’t get hurt and finally if you are indifferent, you won’t get hurt.
What else do children do? They get involved in gangs. The presence of gangs is an intense phenomenon in a lot of societies these days a
s they cover children’s need to belong somewhere, to have a personal identity , control, power, security, freedom, structure and consistency.
If we cover these needs of children at home an at schools then all these choices might not seem so attractive. We know that children need a framework/ so as to feel safe but that does not need to come from rules and punishment. In a number of schools they call punishment as consequences in order for educators- teachers not to feel so bad for what they do to the child. But that is very punitive. We often hear of teachers saying “ If you do this, we will do that and if you do that twice or for the third or the twentieth time then something is wrong.”
What is the alternative version that we see in this set of rules? Classes without structure, full of anarchy in which teachers in the name of “self-esteem” let the children do whatever they want without restrictions and rules. This again is not an environment in which a child would feel safe. He/she may have fun but it will not have the structure that a child needs. All these incidents may give the wrong impression about self-esteem and that makes a lot of people to think that self esteem means to let children do whatever they like.
In fact, children without restrictions have difficulty in “building” self-esteem. The correct alternative is having limits.
“Children with low self-esteem can easily be identified.”
