Self-Esteem is a Fickle Friend

When kids build their worth on self-esteem, they ride the emotional yo-yo of social comparison. Self-compassion offers something steadier.

Many well-meaning parents try to help their kids develop high self-esteem. But self-esteem can be a fickle friend. It’s there for us when we perform well, and it abandons us when we fall short or are below average.

Instead of self-esteem, we can help our kids grow stable self-worth through self-compassion. Self-compassion helps us to know that we are valuable because we are human beings, and we sometimes succeed and sometimes fall short just like others. Research by Kristin Neff shows that self-compassion provides greater emotional resilience and stability than self-esteem, without the continual self-evaluation and social comparison that make self-esteem so unstable.

Recently, my eighth-grade daughter tried out for the volleyball team and didn’t make the team. Moments like this are often where the stories kids tell themselves about success and failure shape their resilience. (You can read more about that story and the role self-compassion played in it here.) When kids tell themselves they are superior because they have strengths or inferior because they have weaknesses, they ride the emotional yo-yo of self-esteem. When kids instead remind themselves that just like others, they have both strengths and struggles, they enjoy stability and connection that are fruits of self-compassion.

In self-compassion research, this recognition is called common humanity: the understanding that struggle is part of being human, not a personal failure. 

In my workbooks for kids, we explore the universality of strengths and struggles in the Land of Self-Acceptance. One playful way I illustrate this idea with kids is through the math symbols “greater than” and “less than,” which represent the kinds of comparison stories our minds tell.

In the page below from the Mindfulness and Self-Compassion Workbook for Kids, Volume 2, you can see what it looks like when we think we are better than others because of our strengths. Notice how the sharp corner of the greater than sign cuts us off from a sense of connection with others.

In the page below, you see the converse of this: the less than thought. My older daughter, Maya, shares a struggle with dyslexia that she experienced in fourth grade. Her reading disability sometimes led her to feel less than others.

Remembering that, “Everyone has their struggles,” has been Maya’s most helpful thought for coping with her dyslexia.

When we remember that we ALL have strengths and struggles, we reconnect with one another through our shared humanity. Here’s one last excerpt from volume 2, which shows how we can transform greater than and less than thoughts into “equal to” thoughts.

An equal thought does not mean that we pretend that we all have the same skills, which wouldn’t be true. Instead it helps us remember that we are all on the learning team. We have more skills in some areas and fewer skills in others, and we are all equally valuable.

In my workbooks for kids, parent-child self-compassion classes (MSC-CC), and school programs we use a character called Buddy the dog to represent the practice of remembering we are not alone in our struggles. Kids call this the “Buddy habit.”

In the case of Maya’s dyslexia, remembering that “everyone struggles with something” is the Buddy habit in action. (Learn more about Buddy and the five Resilience Habit Animals here.)

When kids fall into “less than” thinking, it can help to gently remind them that everyone has both strengths and struggles. A parent might say, “It sounds like you’re feeling like you’re the worst at this right now. Remember that everyone has things that are hard for them, including you and me. You are not alone.” 

This kind of response doesn’t minimize the child’s struggle or rush them toward positivity. It simply offers the truth that struggle is shared. And that truth, repeated over time, can become the internal voice of self-compassion.

Note: If a child is locked into their self-critical voice, it often works best to simply acknowledge that it must be hard to have those challenging thoughts.

In the race to help kids build self-esteem, we sometimes rob them of the gifts of connection and humility that come from remembering that our worth is not contingent on our failures or successes. The universality of strengths and weaknesses connects us to one another.

Wishing you and the children in your life the gift of connection,

Jamie Lynn

P.S. If you’d like playful, research-based tools to help kids build self-compassion and resilience, you can explore the Mindfulness and Self-Compassion Workbook for Kids, Volumes 1 & 2 here.

Jamie Lynn Tatera, MS, is the author of the award-winning Mindfulness and Self-Compassion Workbooks for Kids (Volumes 1 & 2) and the creator of the Mindfulness and Self-Compassion for Children and Caregivers (MSC-CC) program—an approved adaptation of Kristin Neff and Christopher Germer’s Mindful Self-Compassion program. For more than a decade she has taught mindfulness and self-compassion to children, caregivers, and educators and trains teachers and clinicians to bring these practices into schools and parent-child settings. She lives in Milwaukee with her family.