May 4, 2008...5:02 pm
187. Weans, tweens, and teens #3—The child’s psyche
The following predominant factors are programmed into each child’s subconscious mind: self-esteem, self-image, and self-interest. Whether they intend or not, adults do the programming in the weans; supercharge or deflate it in the tweens; and worry, enjoy, and interfere in the teens.
During and after such programming, self-talk and the self-fulfilling prophecy about successes and failures keep the subconscious up-to-date with the world in which the individual lives as both child and later as an adult.
For simplicity and clarity, I focus on the effects of Nurture and ignore Nature. We know too little about the genetic and parenting mixture, but parents, guardians, teachers, and other childcare givers do have control of Nurture programming.
Each factor will be covered in subsequent posts. But first, let me remove politics from the subject.
Our education system has corrupted the term ‘self-esteem’. Educators use the need for greater student self-esteem to gild professorial pockets, enlarge school budgets, and program teachers to confuse parents or defuse parental interference.
First, the term implies liking oneself. This empowers the educators’ hidden agenda that there’s never enough. All childhood misbehavior, low academic progress, and lack of motivation can be traced to lack of self-esteem. Of course, parents catch the blame. Teachers thus add value to themselves by working to compensate for parental errors.
Second, purposely or ignorantly, educators confuse it with and as a substitute for self-image (or –concept). This keeps the political side alive and jumping.
Therefore, for subsequent posts, I ignore self-esteem and use self-worth to define how individuals love, like, respect, and appreciate themselves as a person.
Self-worth is critical to a child’s well-being, but schools can do little about it. It hardens in the subconscious during the early years of weaning from, hopefully, the mother.
Earlier posts about the mind are 177 and 178.
1 Comment
May 5, 2008 at 2:51 pm
Too true about self-esteem! I remember reading several years ago that U.S. kids rank the highest on self-esteem, although they do the worst on standardized tests (among industrialized nations), while countries like Japan have kids with “low self-esteem,” yet their scores are consistently high.
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