{"id":663351,"date":"2026-06-28T21:46:14","date_gmt":"2026-06-28T21:46:14","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/663351\/"},"modified":"2026-06-28T21:46:14","modified_gmt":"2026-06-28T21:46:14","slug":"self-esteem-will-get-you-through","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/663351\/","title":{"rendered":"\u201cSelf-Esteem Will Get You Through\u201d"},"content":{"rendered":"

In a previous post<\/a>\u2014which was itself a follow-up to one<\/a> on the role of social media<\/a> as a resource for self-making\u2014I asked if we\u2019re suffering a \u201cnarcissism epidemic.\u201d I want to continue here with further thoughts on interpreting our pervasive concern with the self.<\/p>\n

If there is a \u201ccapital\u201d that parents hope to transmit to their children, it is confidence<\/a> and lack of trepidation in pursuing opportunities. According to surveys and interviews we have done over the years, parents want their children to see their own life in active not passive, leader<\/a> not follower, terms. They worry that in decisive moments their child will be inhibited or will, as one father put it, \u201csell yourself short.\u201d To flourish in this uncertain world, children need to be sure of themselves, to have high self-esteem<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Your \u201cself-esteem,\u201d stated one mother, \u201cthat\u2019s what\u2019s going to get you through everything.\u201d Added another, \u201cI build them up and let them know \u2026 how special they are.\u201d And that\u2019s important, she said, echoing a common reflection, \u201cBecause I had very low self-esteem. I didn\u2019t give myself full advantage in life because I felt that I wasn\u2019t good enough.\u201d For her children, she wants that mental advantage.<\/p>\n

These parents\u2019 positive comments clash with the criticism now commonly leveled against self-esteem and efforts to promote it. In a 2025 book on What Happened to Millennials, for instance, the author, reporter Charlie Wells, charges the self-esteem movement among parents and schools, which first rose to prominence in the 1980s, with inflating \u201cthe millennial sense of self.\u201d A whole generation, he observes, was getting trophies just for participating and reciting \u201cyou are special\u201d mantras in front of the mirror. So that they would feel less bad about themselves for getting wrong answers, their \u201cteachers stopped using red pens.\u201d Like other detractors, he cites the national campaign to raise self-esteem as a misguided social experiment that has helped produce a lot of fragile, narcissistic<\/a> people who can\u2019t handle failure.1<\/p>\n

The critics are a little fuzzy on why the \u201cobsession with self-esteem\u201d suddenly took hold. Wells faults the blind following of bad science. Research documenting correlation, he claims, got misread as showing causation\u2014feeling bad about yourself doesn\u2019t cause you to do bad things, it results from having done them. Another view comes from a psychologist, who has written extensively on the subject. She suggests that craze began when the \u201cBoomers who now filled the ranks of parents apparently decided that children should always feel good about themselves.\u201d2 Since no reasons are given for this \u201cdecision,\u201d the implication is that it was irrational and so was everything that followed.<\/p>\n

While there is undoubtedly a lot misguided about the methods people have used to foster self-esteem\u2014critics provide many absurd anecdotes\u2014I don\u2019t think the worry itself is irrational. A high value was placed on self-esteem for a reason. To see it, we have to consider the predicament of the self in contemporary life.<\/p>\n

The Society of Individuals<\/p>\n

As the critics observe, our society is now awash in talk of self. We all know this, of course. We encounter it everywhere. It permeates our institutions, our popular culture, our media, and, needless to say, our vast consumer and self-improvement industries, which are all about me, my needs, and my body. Practically everything is.<\/p>\n

Prizing the self in this way comes at the expense of those realities we reference by \u201cwe,\u201d \u201cus,\u201d \u201cours.\u201d No question of that. But the sheer scope of our focus on the self, our enshrining it as a kind of sacred value, indicates that far more than any individual pathology is at stake. We have become a society of individuals, organized for individuals. This is our condition, our shared way of life, and it requires that each of us operate as a self-determining self, with minimal collective support.<\/p>\n

In recent decades, the \u201cindividualization\u201d process, as sociologists call it, has accelerated. The older forms of life and culture that regulated human behavior have further eroded or disappeared, enlarging the space of individual freedom and decision-making<\/a>. While bringing many benefits, greater liberty and more choices leave us to our own devices to make our way in this highly complex and dynamic environment. We are under intensified demands to both regulate and steer ourselves\u2014more decisions and more identity<\/a> options, increased responsibility to create our own social bonds, new obligations to define our own life purposes, and so on.<\/p>\n

What is required of us is not just more knowledge or learned skills but a self\u2014a certain way to be\u2014that can handle the heavy lifting we, as individuals, are now continuously forced to do. Despite what we sometimes hear, we\u2019re not born with this self. We have to acquire it.<\/p>\n

Parenting for Self-Esteem<\/p>\n

Acquisition, as commonly proposed, involves a paradox. On the one hand, we have the demand to be the kind of masterful self that can function in a highly autonomous way, and has, psychologists and self-help<\/a> writers often add, the \u201cability to be self-soothing, self-loving, and self-sufficient.\u201d And, as young people themselves report, the facility to be assertive<\/a>, confident, flexible, and risk-taking<\/a>. However, to develop this type of self, and I\u2019m quoting the psychologist Philip Cushman, \u201cmany psychologists argue that one must have a nurturing early environment that provides a great deal of empathy, attention<\/a>, and mirroring.\u201d3<\/p>\n

Self-Esteem Essential Reads<\/p>\n

In other words, to get the self-determining self that is now needed in our highly individualized society, we first must be immersed in a social environment that is nearly the exact opposite. Developing autonomy, in this view, requires parents and teachers to provide a protective cocoon in which children receive a lot of empathetic<\/a> attention.<\/p>\n

We don\u2019t have to go very far back in our history to see the radical novelty here. A hundred years ago, for instance, an expert on infant care could write: \u201cThe rule that parents should not play with their children may seem hard but it is without doubt a safe one.\u201d4 Rather than a timeless truth of good parenting<\/a>, high levels of emotional nurturance are better seen as a response to our new situation, as an attempt to provide secure ground on which the necessary self can begin to get some footing.<\/p>\n

To be sure, there is a lot of talk of different parenting \u201cstyles,\u201d much criticism of \u201coverparenting,\u201d and the backlash against school-based self-esteem efforts. But in none of this, as far as I know, even with so-called \u201ctiger parenting,\u201d is affection, support, and some prioritizing of children\u2019s individualized needs in question. The points of contention, such as how strict to be or how much direction to give, are really just questions of how best to foster the required self. <\/p>\n

Perhaps we all know, like the parents we interviewed, that love of self<\/a> does not come easily in our society, that, in fact, our worth as persons is often measured by what we accomplish or who we please. Perhaps we recognize that the self we need to navigate the world can be hard to come by, and that many consequential decisions will depend on it. Perhaps, taking stock of our society, we share the worry that our kids are too self-focused, but then, based on the same reflection, tell them they\u2019re special. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"In a previous post\u2014which was itself a follow-up to one on the role of social media as a…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":663352,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[59,57,58,50,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-663351","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-united-kingdom","tag-gb","tag-great-britain","tag-greatbritain","tag-news","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/663351","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=663351"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/663351\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/663352"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=663351"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=663351"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=663351"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}