Our children won’t always win, but will that make them into losers? What impact do poor grades or loss in a game have on our children and their self-esteem?

In our culture of sports and, what I call, “competitive skill building” — winning has become important. Naturally, not winning — is the other side of that coin and it comes with lots of unpleasant emotions, for both — the children and the parents. So, it only makes sense that questions like “Will this hurt my child’s self-esteem?” come up and are worth exploring.

It is the direction of emotion that matters…

It’s not event itself that has  the most impact on self-esteem. It’s not even the feelings about it… Lot’s of emotions come up when children lose or don’t perform as well as they wanted to. Is the fact that they are really upset about it, a measure of their sense of self-esteem?

Actually, no. 

Being upset or disappointed about an outcome is a natural reaction. However, being upset at oneself and being disappointed with oneself is what leads to feeling like a complete failure. Strong negative emotions directed at oneself over and over again,  over multiple experiences lead to poor self-esteem.

It’s not the events, it’s the broader context of life

It is the broader context of life, not the isolated events that shape the child’s sense of their trust in themselves, their self-esteem, their sense of inner worth. Although losses our children experience are valid and create potentially unpleasant life scenarios, the answer to a healthy self-esteem is not in figuring out how to respond to each of these isolated situations.  

That’s only part of it. 

Of course we want to process each incident to make sure our child interprets the situation objectively and takes away lessons that help them keep growing. But what matters more for a healthy self-esteem is their broader life experience. It is what happens on a daily basis outside of these scenarios, that helps the child process disappointing life events when they do come up.

Your Parenting Presence has a huge influence

The role of a parent is huge when it comes to that general context of life and they play an important role in shaping a healthy self-esteem for their child. What is it and what can we do to help children process failures? 

How we carry ourselves around our children, and how we come across during challenges like these, has an enormous influence on the child.  

It has a lot to do with our own self-esteem, our own ideas about failures in general and failures as pertains to our child. Only when we are clear on these things, can we be more helpful in shaping our child’s self-esteem.

Tune into the episode to hear more.