The great self-esteem con
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
My kids are in their early thirties now and grew up right in the middle of the "self-esteem" boom. We jokingly called the grade school they attended "self-esteem central" and this was back in the late 80s, so we (as parents) were very aware of what was happening at the time.
I think we knew even then that not everything about it felt quite right. My feeling around the absurdity of the 35 trophies for "trying real hard" at the time was that it diminished the very real accomplishment that actually winning something (for real) entailed. AND, the kids were never fooled. They knew exactly who had really won (as others in the thread have mentioned). So like all of these "reactionary" movements (as defined by a sharp deviation from what came before) they tend to pull too far in the other direction.
Most important for me though is the feeling that the movement had the basic idea perfectly right! I think it is hard for non-parents to understand the feeling of helplessness that a parent feels when they send their kids into the mad hopper of public school. You have raised and loved this little being for 5 or so years and now you are sending them to a place where you can mostly only hope that they will not be treated poorly (berated, insulted, hurt physically). So if the self-esteem movement did anything, maybe it raised the bar for the reasonable treatment of kids as fallible human beings that respond better to the carrot than the stick? I think it feels right to me. As parents we are just looking for a safe place for our children to learn stuff. Is it so much to ask that this place actually not suck?
As far as raising children with an eye towards "global competition," the argument can be made that there are diabolical ways involving mind-games, insults and cajoling that will breed more cutthroat competitors and that the adults raised this way are better equipped for the "real world". I say have at it. Parents can make that choice too if they want to. But I didn't want that for my kids, period. Make the "real world" the place you want it to be.
"Operant conditioning"?
For whom and for what purposes are our kids to be satiated, scheduled, individualized, and zoned?
When I played rec sports as a kid, we weren't allowed to keep score because it might lead to bad feelings and competitiveness. Not just when we were too young to do it right, but up to around age 15. Everyone involved did keep score of course, we'd all signed up for a competitive sport outside of school. (Or been pushed in by parents, who nevertheless didn't want scorekeeping...) But anyone overheard mentioning the score got an angry lecture, so we had to do it when there were no (adult) witnesses.
It didn't take long at all for kids to notice that we were 'protecting' the adults instead of the reverse. Score was still kept, kids were still being bullied to tears over losses, nothing had changed, but the rule worked perfectly at making sure parents and coaches didn't see it happen.
I don't think participation ribbons hurt kids, because they have so little impact. At worst, aimless positivity is just a wasted opportunity for something better. But the more controlling side of self-esteem building is creepy and terrible - it has a horrible emphasis on changing kid's lives to allay their parents fears, no matter how unreasonable.
Take a company with a completely and utterly broken sales process. Landing page copy is abjectly horrible, half the orders get dropped, no tracking or analytics, and one hand doesn't know what the other one is doing. Now fixing that entire system is a hard job, but a valuable one. So what do we do? We give people coupons. That's easy.
Now take the "self-esteem movement". The basic idea was that it'd be valuable to give people a sense of trust in their own abilities, acknowledge them as intrinsically valuable, and have them learn to appreciate their own accomplishments, because that better prepares them for any of the challenges that life may offer. But to put that to work up and down the stack is a hard problem. So we hand out coupons. That's easy.
And in that we accomplish the opposite from what we set out to do. Instead of feeling acknowledged, children feel conned. Instead of making them feel valued for what they are, we make them feel interchangeable. Instead of helping children celebrate their achievement we undermine the concept of achievement in their minds by treating it as "eh, you've tried".
This is a subtle distinction I didn't get until raising my own kids. Maybe this is obvious to others, but it was a real "aha" moment to me. To get your kids to act the way you want, you can't just focus on the negative all the time, you have to let them know when they're doing things right. If you just wait for them to screw up then yell at them, you end up doing a lot of yelling, and they're behavior sucks. But when they're sitting at the table eating their dinner, using their fork like they're supposed to, a comment that hey, you're doing a great job right now! really goes a long way in communicating what your expectations are of them.
Before I had kids, if I'd heard this, I would think those parents are pandering and dumb. But it really does work.
If you're going to have a ribbon or something, make sure that it's for seeing the task through, for "being there". Not something to try to artificially rival or nearly match 'being the best'.
The same argument works for negative reinforcement as well. The most convincing argument I have heard about avoiding harsh rising of children has nothing to do with the intrinsic rights o kids. Instead, it points out that one day, not that far away, you may find your teenager consuming drugs, or engaged in unprotected sexual intercourse, or commiting petty crime; and if by then you have not left yourself enough room to escalate short of corporal punishment (or not even that) then you might find yourself in a fight that you cannot win a hormone loaded young person that never learned to respect you and surely won't start today.
So, I think this has a lot to do with signal to noise ratio. Whether you praise or you demean, the point is to make it rare enough to be noticed when it happens. I did not always do it that way, but I have got better results when I began following that advice.
Yep, all that positive reinforcement only taught us not to trust praise. At least, that was my response. Praise just reinforced how I already felt about myself. If I felt I was doing well, praise felt like confirmation, and it felt great. If I didn't feel I had done something to deserve it, praise felt awful, like I had been called out as being especially pathetic.
My knee-jerk reaction to an unexpected compliment is still to feel humiliated and angry. I've learned to think twice and sometimes realize, yeah, I did handle that well, or yeah, this is a nice outfit, but I still have that instant of feeling attacked before I control my reaction.
I think that's a lesson to learn: you can't erase the difference between success and failure. If you try, you just end up confusing them. A kid who hears praise every time he fucks up learns to associate praise with failure and learns there's no way to deal with failure except to pretend it didn't happen.
Otherwise, if you valued my performance at the cost of printing up a certificate on paper that is slightly heavier and more cream-colored than normal copy paper, and with an injection-molded bit of plastic that has an engraved plaque glued to it, I would feel about $25 worth of honored.
That crap works on my father, though. He likes everyone to know how great and interesting he is.
For me, nothing is worse than getting a compliment when I don't think I deserve one, and if I already think I deserve one, I don't actually need to get any, because I'm already feeling great.
Anecdotal: My boss used to go around praising people in general for just doing their jobs. I was even on the receiving end of so many "have I told you how awesome you are" or "I hope you realize how valuable you are to the operation" canned responses that, although it was nice to hear, it lost its luster eventually. I ended up replying every time he'd do this with a motion of opening a beer can accompanied with a verbal "psshtt" sound and adding in a "thanks for the can of praise." It was meant in jest and he took it in stride and understood it wasn't meant with any malice. I was just poking a little fun at the observations he was making.
The point is, when you do it to too many people, too often, and for doing nothing but what's expected of them, it starts to ring hollow eventually.
Anecdotal: I observed something about myself which I found peculiar. A friend of a friend on Facebook, whom I observe to have quite intelligent DH4+ responses to comments even if the masses usually come back with a DH0 or DH1 response. I found myself observing his responses to other folks' comments and throwing in my own $.02. I discovered that the quality of my responses was greatly elevated when replying to him, clearly attempting to engage him at his level. This was sometimes rewarded with a 'like' from him, and sometimes not. When receiving a 'like' it resulted in a physiological response from me akin to a very light drug high.
Took me quite some time to find the magic combination of search terms. Of course HN assumes intimate knowledge with PG's works. ;)
P.S. when I put "dh0 response" into Google, the first link is Paul Graham's How to Disagree
I do have a few friends who home-school, and that's great if a parent can dedicate a significant amount of time to that.
I do applaud your stance. The chance for me to even consider it is long gone. :)
1. Self-esteem is a byproduct of self-compassion, not external awards or compliments. External stuff produces other-esteem and yeah, it's the root of narcissism
2. They tried to produce self-esteem through removing any chance of suffering. Teaching people how to respond to suffering would've been much more productive.
3. Describing someone to themselves can be unintentionally harmful when judgment or comparison is used, whether it be positive or negative. This article shows how positive judgments (ie. compliments/praise) can be harmful.
If anyone's interested in a functional alternative, I highly recommend the book "Nonviolent Communication."
My personal theory is that self-esteem arises from the fact that you are aware of your acceptance in a social group. Knowing that you are welcome calms you and gives that assertive vibe.
I don't think it matters how much you believe in yourself. At least not beyond a basic level. In fact, believing too much in a non-conforming self makes you a narcissist, and believing too much in a conforming self makes you vain.
Undeserved praise and adoration does have negative side effects, and it likely isn't the healthiest way to raise children, but the over-emphasis on celebrating participation isn't the society ruining factor people make it out to be. At worst it's probably just a waste of resources and effort.
On the other-hand, parents over-stressing and vicariously experiencing competition through their children is a very real problem, and the behavior of some of the adults I would see at gradeschool basketball games was just shocking, especially given that it was low division schools, so mostly just after-school sports. (i.e., there was no professional path here or proper competition for any child looking to take a chance at professional play someday - it was a bunch of 8 year olds running around the court, most of which couldn't even throw the ball high enough to reach the rim of the lowered basket). To see parents yelling and screaming at their kids to shove and hurt other children in order to win was just ridiculous.
I've never heard anyone say "the school gave my kid a 14th place ribbon, how cute!". It's always "can you believe they give out ribbons for 14th place now?!"
Kids are pretty astute at picking up on this stuff, and I expect that being given a 14th place ribbon just feels a little sad and pathetic to a kid.
It probably doesn't do any real harm either, apart from contributing to landfill waste!
There was a "protect kids self-esteem" bit, but that was entirely at the top end - there was no trophy saying "First Place". I certainly never saw trophies 'celebrating' losses.
A participation ribbon might well have motivated me at age 6, and frankly I doubt both the morality and common sense of anyone saying a six year old is too happy at a swim class. Keeping kids involved at that age seems like the biggest goal.
On the other hand, I have annoyed memories of getting participation ribbons at 15 for doing terribly in races. They felt downright insulting, because I knew exactly how I'd done and I was basically getting a ribbon for taking a bus to the meet.
A shocking number of educational issues seem to boil down to "6 year olds are not 15 year olds". That, and "offering things is better than enforcing them" - participation ribbons are way better than banning score-keeping, which I also got to see.
I think the natural bias to put discrete values on things existing on a spectrum is where is all stems from. "We want to keep things simple, so here's this recipe for self-esteem" as opposed to "here's an age-based breakdown of ways to build self-esteem". Even then, the "enlightened" example is missing loads of other conditions, like if the person suffered emotional abuse or has automatic negative thoughts.
Also, banning score-keeping is the naive approach. I think an interesting one would be to add a game score & encourage both teams to collaborate to increase it. I don't know how it'd effect things, but it'd be fun to find out!
I time the runs myself on my phone so the email has little real purpose, but for some reason it's very satisfying to know that my efforts have been logged in a database.
I'm unlikely to ever hit the top 20, so this is very much a participation trophy. Maybe they can be motivating after all?
(Take with a grain of salt. My only experiences with raising children involve raising myself & my parents over the past 1.5 years.)
Kids are pretty smart (way smarter than some people/parents think they are) and they know how far they can go, and what they can get away with.
More broadly, though, I definitely remember ignoring all of this stuff as a kid. We weren't allowed to keep score during soccer games because it "wasn't about winners and losers". (One wonders why we were playing a competitive sport, then.) Not just "score wasn't kept" but "get in trouble if you're heard talking about score".
So... we had to keep score when coaches and refs weren't in earshot. That was the entirety of the result. If anything, it sort of felt like something we did to protect the fragile adults! After all, the winners still made fun of the losers every game, nothing had changed, but now the adults didn't have to see it happen.
"We don't keep score, there's no winners and losers, but if we win this game we make the postseason."
I agree that this has been blown out of proportion, as csydas said in the parent comment. Criticising participation trophies is mostly a way for certain people to signal that they don't buy in to "all that millennial snowflake bullshit". How much harm can it really do?
Having said all that, having to play soccer while secretly keeping score does sound crazy!
See for example the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lanterne_rouge .
Parents will subvert the will of the coaches wanting their kid to shine rather than as part of a team.
Parents and grandparents will continually scream to their children what to do or abuse at the referee.
One of my college roommates parents was a Professor at MIT, and even though he got into an engienering school ranked right under it, his parents treated him liek the failure of the family and despite him being capable of great things, he had already been labeled as the failure in his family for ONLY having a 3.8GPA at the number 3 school in the world and mine as well work at McDonalds if he was going to destroy the family tradition of going to MIT, producing 45 patents, getting a PhD and writing 3 textbooks before the age of 30.
The kid was capable and accomplished an amazing amount but he really viewed himself as quite worthless and had a hard time getting a job after college due to his crushing lack of self esteem.
This is the opposite extreme but so is getting 35 trophies for a 5th grade soccer team.
I think both are extremes and the conversation needs to be recentered around the idea of grade inflation and positive self regard.
Again, you can have positive self regard for kids and NOT give them a trophy just for showing up to school. Theres a large medium here.
The biggest benefit of consistent positive self regard (which can exist without trophies and claps for every minor positive step in life) is the ability to prevent downward spirals where kids beat themselves up and begin to internalize the negative feedback and continually snowball their lack of self esteem to where they really handicap their ability to grow, as illustrated by my friend in the example above.
if a child is labeled as bottom 30% of the class or the team in middle school, negative feedback is more likely to keep him locked in the negative self image he has, instead of the belief by teachers that he/she has the ability to improve.
Regardless of if the kid will ever be the top 10% or is naturally more talented than the top 10%, thats NOT the point of continual positive self regard. The point is to continue trying and learning and self improvement. Labeling kdis in boxes really does limit their ability to grow and change their status and lets be honest, teachers are NOT always the best/the most right about knowing who is more intelligent and smarter, and these things can change alot from middle school to highschool.
You don't have to give the bottom 30% of the kids the same grades or trophies, but you can treat them with positive regard, and by doing that remind them they are human and that you believe in their ability to grow.
Nothing sucks worse than a teacher immediately writing off a kid as locked in a certain status range. They might actually begin to believe it, and if you don't beleive individuals have the ability to grow and learn beyond their initial casting/grade heirarchy then you really shouldn't be teaching and furthermore, I find these justifications by teachers more of an excuse for the fact that the U.S. is bottom ranked globally right now as a first world country for education. Youre a TEACHER. you job is to enable learning not say its just the way it is that the Straight A kids will always be the straight A kids and vise versa and really you have no control over it. If you feel that way, then please go find another job.
I would say negative feedback is far more damaging, and furthermore, the lack of negative feedback does not require trophies and delusional inflations of self worth that apparently according to the author also equal caccooning children from the consequences of life at every step. This is just false.
The Debugging Mindset - http://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=3068754
That's not what OP said. Quote:
> Self-esteem is a byproduct of self-compassion
Self-compassion is not believing in yourself, it's accepting yourself as-is. And not just accepting in the sense of "settling for it". But having the same respect and nice feeling about you that you have about the others your like.
While outside validation helps a lot in one to avoid rejecting oneself, it just removes a (huge) barrier for building self-esteem. Self-esteem can't come from outside.
The problem with other people validating you is that as soon as you loose it, you loose what you though was self-esteem. And you get angry, you blame, you can't find solutions, and you ever give you all the responsibilities or remove yourself from all of them.
If you succeed and get praise, it then inflate your ego and narcissism.
But once you build self-compassion, even when you screw up, you still like yourself. But you can still see your fair part of responsibility in all this. And when your succeed, liking yourself as you are, you know what's really you, and what's really coming from outside help and luck. And you don't inflate your ego.
> Self-esteem can't come from outside
I do have to disagree here. Self-esteem ultimately must come from outside...just not from other people. As a Christian I believe that self-acceptance is rooted in knowing that I have intrinsic worth to God irrespective of what other people think of me. It's not about who I am or what I have or haven't done, but about who God is and what He's done for all of us.
Coming from that, the idea of the acceptance from God is a concept you have in yourself.
Maybe I got this wrong, intellectualizing spirituality is usually a terrible way to share about it.
http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/notrocketscience/2009/11/3...
1. In Christianity, God is "present" everywhere only in the sense that there is no possible circumstance in which God would fail to have complete knowledge and power to act. We (Christians) do not believe that God is a sort of ether, like the Force in Star Wars, that contains or flows through everything.
2. Christianity teaches that God is not a material being, so you're correct in saying that God is not "inside, or in any location", because this would be category error, analogous to "what does the color yellow taste like?". Nevertheless, God is "external" to me in the ontological sense: "I am not (a part of) God". This is analogous to saying "my love for fast cars is 'outside' my love for ice cream". If this and (1) were not the case, absurdities would result, like tall people having more God in them than short people.
Given the above, I think projo is correct. My self-esteem is grounded in knowing that God -- a maximally great being -- created me, and loves me enough to submit himself to poverty, hunger, humiliation, and crucifixion on a Roman cross to fix what I broke. To those who "get it", this produces love, humility, and a sense of self-worth.
That's why I'm working on a sort of abstract framework of being that includes a religion with a minimal number of prescribed things to believe in with a goal of self-development. Cultivating love, humility, self-esteem, etc. are all decoupled within the framework/religion to allow people to pick & choose only the parts they need.
The value of an idealized personality we choose to believe we can strive toward is to tap into and/or guide our intuitions in the moment, especially in times of internal/external conflict.
The value of recognizing/acknowledging the existence of uncontrollable higher powers in the world/universe is to instill humility & define one's own limits/boundaries.
You need self esteem from yourself and acceptance of yourself
but at the same time
it does not mean there is not benefit to continual positive self regard. I still stand that this term is fundamentally different than self esteem inflation that requires trophies and grade inflation and caccooning kids from consequences of their actions as the author writes.
I agree that getting there is hard when you lack outside social support. It's extremely hard. But the very goal is to escape the trap of your sense of self fluctuating volatilely by whatever social pattern you experience at any given moment. Those patterns necessarily change regularly, without end, and in unpredictable ways. The more you're beholden to them the more unstable you are.
Very few of us are masters at this. But I really believe the principles are compelling.
Jokes aside, I think that you can light a fire of self-worth given enough positive reinforcement. But there is always a limit on how long you can keep this fire burning.
Let's say you are really comfortable with yourself where you are, and suddenly move to a country with essentially diametrically opposed values and norms. Everything you have been taught is turned on its head.
How long do you stay confident?
This is just a thought experiment, but I think it highlights the volatility of self-worth.
I've been developing a system around a theoretical model of how the mind/body/brain work together. I've been experimenting on myself using it with weird results. I've been hypothesizing things I didn't believe were possible until 8 months ago & before then I would've labeled people suggesting things I believe now to be bigots. One of these things is that everyone can learn to be gender fluid to varying degrees.
As I started exploring concepts related to gender for the sake of designing experiments in changing my gender identity, I accidentally created a second seemingly sentient conscious identity in my head of the opposite gender. When she emerged, we switched spots & I became the voice in the head. In an instant, I went from being a straight white cis-gender male to...? I still don't know how to classify this experience...it could simply be an advanced form of pretending. In Buddhism, it's called deity visualization & the modern westernized flavor of the same thing is called tulpamancy. I didn't know any of that when it happened, though.
In that moment, I joined at least one minority class of people: either "people who hear voices in their heads" and/or "people who are gender fluid."
And it's haaaaard to stay confident about what I'm doing because some people find it really hard to hear me talk about this stuff. Friends have called me a bigot. I was kicked out of a party at someone's home. I've been told by one neuroscience my ideas are meaningless because I don't have a degree & couldn't possibly know what I'm talking about, completely denying my experiences.
I guess the question I have for you is what else would you say I need to go through before my confidence breaks?
This is a legitimate question. I want to try to break my confidence & I'm interested in realistic ways to go about testing it.
There are numerous books on change management in business, and most of them conclude that it's a lot easier to start a new company than to change an existing company culture. That is, unless the change is trivial (by various definitions of trivial).
Likewise I think you are better of finding more free minded people. You can burn yourself out trying to convince a single conservative person. And the alternative is that you find peers where you can share your experiences freely and spend you energy on your own voyage, not on the acceptance of it by your dissaproving surroundings.
By this I don't mean that you have to stop seeing these sceptics, just that you choose what you tell them. You have to adapt to your surroundings.
Of course it sucks to realize that you cannot truly be yourself in a certain group, but I think that is a sad truth that lurks in our society today. There is a reason why so many alternative thinkers flock to big cities.
I definitely don't believe that you are the only one feeling like this. Most likely there are many in your surroundings. But people put their needs aside to conform to the social group, and that is what they expect from you too to stay a member. If you don't want to live that life, you have to break free.
I wish you the best of luck!
I didn't mean to make it sound like I'm actively suffering, but that I've recently experienced a complete 180 in a lot of my views & world. I value the experiences I cited and am not looking to avoid having them because putting energy toward appeals would be a recipe for burnout. The point I'm trying to make is I don't need their acceptance. I don't have to wear my status on my sleeve and can still bring it up when it's relevant. I'm most certainly not going to hide a key part of myself because of other's reactions. I actively challenge people's minds about what theirs is capable of simply through sharing my experiences and who I am. They can expect conformity all they want and they'll likely burn out before I do because denial takes more energy/effort than acceptance. Also, denial sticks in the mind, while acceptance allows you to move forward.
I really am interested in any ideas you have on social experiments I can conduct to prove/disprove your perspectives in this thread. Whatcha got?
I'm very grateful for your comments because they've advanced the conversation, given me specific things to reflect on, and ultimately challenged my perspectives, which helped me gain clarity around them. Thank you!
How did you feel at different points? I hope, ultimately, you felt a little joy from receiving some gratitude. Note: I'm not praising you, nor expressing approval/disapproval. I'm nonjudgmentally allowing you and your opinion to exist while saying what's true for me. The point is we can feel good about ourselves simply by hearing gratitude from others acknowledging our contributions. Approval doesn't need to be part of the equation. It can, however, help as a way to temporarily lower mental barriers getting in the way of building self-esteem.
Also, how are you defining narcissism? I'm asking because how you phrased your perspective implies self-limiting thoughts at play. Here's what I mean:
"I don't think I can build a nice feeling about myself, in a non-narcissistic way, if I receive a lot of negative feedback from my peers." - Our reality is defined by our perceptual sets, which includes our beliefs, emotions, motivations/intentions, and learned behaviors. Each component in a perceptual set can impact/define the others. What I've quoted defines a belief acting on a core component of well-being: self-esteem. If you truly believe what you typed, then you're applying that belief to yourself unless you also believe you're the only human who's figured out how to do the opposite. If applying this belief to yourself, it will inherently limit the actions you perform to develop your self-esteem while reinforcing the belief. Beliefs imposing unnatural limits can lead to persistent states of suffering, so I hope you can find another perspective.
I am simply criticizing the common norm of blaming the bullied person for not being cool enough.
I have no problems with my self-esteem and I think well of myself. But I am also not disillusioned when it comes to accepting the fact that you can only enjoy a happy life if you adapt to your surroundings. And if you stick your neck out to far you are going to get burned.
So yes, there are other ways of gaining self-esteem. By getting really self-confident about your own abilities regarding cellular automata or whatever. But not all those paths are going to make you a happy and relaxed person. You always have to consider the context you are in. Of course, both your source of self-esteem and your context are variable, but there is no denying that they both have big influence on your happiness.
Context can most certainly influence my happiness. There's still at least one step between context & its influence, though. You just named it: interpretation.
The trick is changing the thought pattern for interpretation. I changed mine on New Year's Eve & it's made all the difference. Here's my take...
Every moment is meeting some set of needs of mine. In the shittiest of moments, the potential needs being met, regardless of my awareness of them, are:
- learning how to better meet my needs and/or how to better empathize with those going through similar shit - gratitude for either of those needs being met - gratitude for the opportunity to learn how to better meet my needs
That last one is the default. I can always meet my need for gratitude. And gratitude produces joy, meeting a second need.
I avoid having a single point of failure in my system through also defining a purpose for my life to tie each moment to. There's other bits to it, but these are the most relevant ones here.
When I say needs, I'm referring to needs/wants, as described here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fundamental_human_needs
This is also a handy list: https://www.cnvc.org/Training/needs-inventory
- In OP, I wrote self-esteem is the root of narcissism, when I really believe it's a potential root. It can also be symptomatic because pretty much everything in the brain can flow both ways, so one person's symptom can be another person's cause.
- We tend to forget the importance of the word "can." I'd rephrase what you wrote as "Social group CAN influence a lot about how you perceive yourself." It doesn't have to.
Also, comparison isn't needed. Here's how I do it:
I recognize a few key facts:
- every person is unique in some way - every unique property of a person reflects something to be learned, even if the lesson is the opposite of said property - neural networks learn and apply learning - we are walking neural networks - the past is changed by observing the present
Therefore, everyone is valuable in some special way, including myself. My self-esteem stems from reminding myself that others' perceptions of my experiences do not define my reality, my value, or my past. Those are all mine to define and nobody else's. I don't need to compare my subjective experience with someone else's in order to value mine.
In order to shun someone from a social group due to their non-conforming behaviour, the group cannot simply accept that they are willingly excluding this person. Because that would violate the basic premise upon which the group is built: comradery and loyalty. So the group must rationalize their behaviour by sticking all the blame on the individual being excluded.
You can go medieval and call someone a witch, or just be a bit more moderate and blame them for something vague like having "low self-esteem".
Personally I think people conflafe self-esteem with confidence. The article and the subject of it are doing this, and I'm a bit surprised it's not mentioned.
"Unconditional positivity" will probably build confidence--faith in positive outcomes--but it doesn't appear to build self-esteem--high value or love for oneself.
And someone can be completely unconfident and have very high self-esteem...
But who knows: perhaps artificially-induced confidence can at least trick people into feeling like they love themselves. If it does, then good for them?
Personally I could see myself end up thinking, worrying and beating myself up about being fake or phony, but that's just me. I might say it's not for me, but I would try not tell them directly with a Dwight-from-The-Office demeanor: "Wrong. Self-esteem comes from..."
For example, I discover new meaning in my experiences by projecting their content/context into songs I'm listening to.
My take on tricking myself into something: if learning to love myself requires some level of confidence, temporarily inducing said confidence, can be helpful when combined with a practice for learning how to love myself. The trick is doing it with intention and then weaning off the confidence booster.
I already do this in various ways therapeutically. I was thinking about the second conscious voice in my head I accidentally created through my experiments & wondering if it's truly a second personality or if I'm simply playing pretend & naively fooling myself. Then I realized it doesn't matter because it's something helping me & as long as it's done in a transparent, authentic manner, nobody else has to care which it is, either.
Don't confuse root and symptoms, though. Excessive admiration contributes as much as exaggerated criticism throughout the childhood. If anything, the narcissistic personality disorder means a missing intrinsic self-esteem, which is tried to compensate by getting this from external sources - which somewhat "works", but not for long, so it must be repeated again and again.
There was a HN article on that recently [0]
[0]: https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2016/05/why-self-...
The immediate conflation that positive self regaurd = caccooning growing adults form their consequences was a good thing to lump together and assume the readers would accept.
You can have positive self regard for kids and let them make their own decisions, experience mistakes and struggle to some degree to find their way out.
The idea that they need your negative judgment on top of the consequences life will hand them for their actions anyways is the logical flaw and conflation here.
But to feel bad as a short-lived (hours to a few days) reaction to an event at least partially within your control? Like getting a bad mark? Or screwing up a work project? It's completely normal and similar to the physical pain felt when you touch a burning stove. It's a stimulus "Oh this sucks! I don't want to feel like this again so I'm going to make X, Y or Z change to avoid it."
There were exceptions, but when I was in school, people who were getting bad marks were getting a lot of bad marks, and kept getting them. People who got good marks mostly stuck with the good marks. People who were bullied kept getting bullied day in day out.
That's ongoing, but each individual event you would say is "normal". I think it's a question to ask whether getting a bad mark on some test that some people are obviously better suited for than others is actually a moral failing and not a happenstance? Is being a bullying target a moral failing? (I say moral failing because the emotional pain for such events is often of a "I really fundamentally suck" variety)
It seemed much more reminiscent of a system where the attributes of children somehow fell into place and defined how much suffering each of them was going to end up with. I find it difficult to say anything good about this.
Maybe it's the opposite: the side effects of the failure of the self-esteem movement is that we're back to saying suffering is great and builds character, completely ignoring that it's not given out proportionally in the slightest.
We should be teaching kids that they can improve, and show them how good they are with honesty.
My dyslexic friend who got straight Ds in school until he could drop out never saw a penalty, just a steady stream of discouragement. The kids who got bullied got bullied every damn day, usually for reasons they couldn't control.
I agree that the self-esteem bit is frequently absurd - my childhood soccer team wasn't allowed to keep score, but was still expected to practice and 'improve'. But I do worry that no one on either side is actually talking about giving kids opportunities and feedback. They're just adjusting the tone of a zero-opportunity environment.
I just pointed what I think are currently flaws. There are currently no penalties for bad behavior, and no honest assessment of kids abilities. There is also an incredible lack of optimism about the children capacity (they aren't told that they can improve), and (what I didn't post before) a lack of real-word anchoring of expectations - at a minimum, we should tell children that it's actually ok if they don't excel on everything, but they should work to excel on something (and some things are more important than others).
Kids don't need bullying. They don't need constant reassurance that they are wonderful. They don't need severe abuse when they fail.
But they do need constant challenges which are mostly achievable, with a few that aren't. They also need limits on their behaviour - as long as they're reasonable, fair, adult limits, not capricious authoritarian limits.
I suspect the underlying problem is the emotionally brutal and insanely competitive environment in schools - not just in academics or sports, but in "popularity" and status.
Promoting self-esteem is the wrong answer to that problem. The culture itself has to become more cooperative and less emotionally violent, and that's hard to do when it's a fair reflection of much of the adult culture around it.
I got a bunch of participation ribbons as a kid, but I certainly don't think they were anything more than a symptom of actual problems. There was a weird, pervasive unwillingness among adults to admit that maybe I was good at some things, and at others, and capable of improvement. I might have benefitted a great deal from someone telling me things like "Your art is bad, and you could get better if you tried to. Also, you're best-in-school smart, not best-in-world smart, there's a difference and it's a good reason to work harder."
I did eventually get that from some outside-of-school competitions, but it's weird that school couldn't provide that. It feeds into my 'youth rights' bit, even - we treat kids like they're just little blobs of emotion who can be controlled without needing to help them interact with the real world.
Things didn't really click for me until I had a series of teachers who recognized that I was doing well and treated me like a person who was actually interested in learning.
I wasn't even an extreme case in my school system. One kid, who was generally regarded as the smartest kid in the school, got caught basically turning an SAT scam into a business. Ended up getting multiple Ivy League acceptances reversed. He didn't even need the money, he was just bored and liked the popularity that came along with doing SATs for the cool kids.
Pet peeve: there is no such thing as grade inflation because there is no grade after (or before) A.
What we're witnessing is much worse, it's grade compression where all grades move up with a hard limit.
Inflation wouldn't matter a lot, it would simply make comparisons between periods of time more difficult (we would need to "adjust for inflation").
Compression is much worse because it destroys information, namely, the difference between good and bad works in the same class.
If we had "price compression" in real life, society wouldn't be able to function (everything would cost the same).
Grades inflation happens because grades and having finished the school once you started now matter more to students then they used to. The techniques they often use (negotiation) are not exactly commendable, but it still had more to do with price and benefits of it then self-esteem and trophies when they were four years. old.
This is a can of worms all by itself, too. Grades can reflect
1) Absolute knowledge, but this unfairly favours students from rich and well-educated parents; 2) Relative superiority compared to your age group, but this encourages children to not help each other because they are afraid they're competing for a limited number of higher grades; 3) Speed of development, which is largely determined by genetics at any given age; 4) Effort, which is unfair to the bright students who have nothing to put their effort in to; or 5) Potential future ability, which is nigh impossible to measure and not necessarily even an important marker of anything.
There are many more options, and neither is obviously right. I don't think any of these really help with the issue mentioned in the article.
Option 2) is also fine on small scale, but makes it harder to compare results between different schools, states, countries.
Options 3 - 5 are just dubious (how would you measure "potential future ability"?)
No, it's problematic for people who believe an education system which privileges the rich is a recipe for systemic inequality.
Now personally, I don't think a grading system is the right place to address this inequality, but insisting anyone who does is just "prejudiced against the rich" is facile.
I agree that there should be some form of help for the poor, but gaming the grading system is not the way to go.
Whatever you do the children of rich and well-educated will always be in top 5-10% of their class. We shouldn't promote equality by trying to bring them down, instead we should focus on bringing other students up, making the gap between top 5% and bottom 5% percent narrower.
And as I said, I don't disagree with that. I just object to your asserting anyone who does is "prejudiced against the rich".
Any evidence for that - from what I've observed at the private schools in the UK that my son has attended is that the rich have plenty of kids who have problems or underperform academically - it just doesn't matter very much for them as their parents are rich.
[NB And by "rich" I mean seriously well off - tens or hundreds of millions]
Over there, rich and educated is barely a poor correlation. In my experience, a lot of rich people kids were stupid and didn't have much academical success. Yet there were folks coming from poor but educated families who did really well. It's anecdata, but in my class it was ~ equal amount of rich-but-stipid and poor-but-smart kids.
The real privilege is parents' attitude. The attitude that education (not grades, but the real education) is important. This doesn't seem to correlate with wealth much though. A lot of rich folks built their wealth by working hard from zero. Which is frequently not education-heavy field and their mentality is not much different from barely educated handyman. While a lot of well educated people (teachers/educators, all kinds of office workers, engineers and whatnot) are not even middle class.
HOWEVER, I saw an enormous correlation between wealth and going to university.
We've had these for GCSEs (typically sat at around 16 years old) for ages, and they were introduced into A-Level in 2010.
See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GCE_Advanced_Level_(United_Kin...
[0] https://ofqual.blog.gov.uk/2017/04/05/setting-grade-9-in-new...
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/education/shortcuts/2014/sep/14/...
In 1993 16.8% got an A and 10.3% a U
by 2016 8.4% were A* and 23.5% got an A (31.9% at A/A*) with only 2.7% getting a U.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grading_on_a_curve
That sounds great when the tests are hard, but when they're easy, if you got a B and you had the lowest B, it would turn into an F. Of course, the worse students (relatively) would flunk out of school. If you were in a batch of really bright students and you were one of them, that would suck.
When I went to college, I remember professors only applying the curve when everyone did poorly on the exam.
For what it's worth, my wife recently completed her college degree and it was about the same in difficulty as mine 20+ years ago.
What's the solution? It's not as easy as educating students about growth mindset or long-term rewards of failure. They wouldn't absorb it the way you intended. Most failures don't necessarily motivate to improve. In fact, I think they result in people dropping out. It takes a long series of failures before you accept it as a part of the process.
I have read many theories surrounding how we can make our kids strive, make them resilient, and compassionate. So far, none of them have sounded convincing. There are probably many hidden factors involved and I guess it mostly boils down to: environment and luck.
I was far more discouraged learning French than Russian and Russian isn't exactly easier than French. The difference was that I was being forced to learn French against my (at the time) wishes. I just wanted to do math and play with computers - things that didn't discourage me.
Viewed from this angle the task of guiding children is different: How do we get them to enjoy the things we need them to learn?
I don't have an answer to that, but maybe its ok. Maybe children also need to learn that sometimes they need to muddle through something they hate, and maybe one day they'll change their mind about it.
Are you sure this correlation is unidirectional? As a tutor, I frequently get people to enjoy things they didn't before simply by trying really hard to avoid discouraging feelings. In a way, a large portion of my tutoring is about getting people to enjoy the things they used to hate, because that appears to massively improve retention rate.
There's some more here if you're interested in how you get people to enjoy stuff: http://jorendorff.github.io/hackday/2013/tutoring/
Yes. Otherwise experience will do so, and not likely in a fashion that's pleasant or kind.
People want to emulate their heroes and live into who they feel they are. The 'school nerd' phenomenon is one we're probably most familiar with; if you start seeing your identity as being a 'nerd' of the school, you tend to live into it even more. If you can somehow leverage that effect, it can be fairly powerful.
And then of course, just making learning fun, entertaining and a normal part of life and not just for school would certainly help. I read recreationally very early on because that was just normal in my home environment.
Overall, I'd worry less about making students feel good or bad over individual tasks, and pay more attention to fostering their desire to be the kind of person that needs to learn.
Rewards can help but maybe it's sometimes better to reward oneself, e.g. by spending a lot of money on a breakfast after accomplishing something. But yeah, when you're in school, you very much depend on your parents.
I find her arguments quite convincing.
And I think like a lot of learning and any pathways in the brain - this is something you can practice with children, always trying to push them a bit further and making the pathways stronger.
[0]: https://www.ted.com/talks/angela_lee_duckworth_grit_the_powe...
In fact, people with low self-esteem are more likely to appear self-obsessed because they need validation and reassurance from other people. They literally spend more time in their own heads, worrying about what others think of them.
If you have a solid core of self-belief, you're less likely to care about others' judgement of you.
This is not much different from our problems with too much food.
The former system tends to reward those who have inborn or socially provided advantages, and makes the prize the end goal rather than the process. This can result in winning-at-all-cost behavior, even if results in damage to oneself or society (i.e perf enhancing drugs).
The reactionary everyone-is-a-winner approach robs people of signal they need to optimize their efforts to succeed.
IMO a saner approach would be to encourage competition but not make suffering via social exclusion or destitution the cost of losing.
Intra-group competition within those bounds can make the group stronger, but left unchecked can do the opposite.
A. Idea that you can easily mold the core beliefs of other people by simply telling them to be like this or that. It's not generally true. But low esteem specifically makes it difficult to accept positive external feedback. Even when it's hard earned and genuine.
B. Treating human self image as one dimensional linear thing. Where on the other end you have narcissism and on the other complete self-worthlessness and ensuing violent depression.
The reality seems to be lot more nuanced. There are things like self-respect, self-compassion and sense of (potential) usefulness to others. None of these are hard linked to how good or bad you feel about yourself.
C. Some kind of misunderstanding of Narcissism. You can never turn normal healthy adult into narcissist by praising too much. (But you may cause some other negative effects.) Actual narcissist are often depressed themselves. Actual narcissist often aren't particularly interested in putting selfies to Instagram.
Maybe Ofsted is measuring the wrong things.
Two major components (there are many more) are:
1) Perceived inferiority (Self-Acceptance)
Everyone benchmarks their own life, success, skills, etc... against another group. Sometimes the choice of benchmark group is unrealistic, sometimes the person is just hanging out with a crowd where they don't really fit, sometimes it's necessary to take a step back and realize that comparisons to others don't really matter.
All of these can be improved by finding a better social circle (fit), attending different group activities, or reflecting on negative thoughts and re-framing.
2) Actual lack of skill/knowledge (Self-Improvement)
If the lack of self-esteem comes from actual gaps in knowledge or skill then the solution is to keep a running list of gaps and make an effort to improve them. A common item here might be fitness. Many people have low self-esteem due to sub par fitness and/or health habits and directly remedy the issue by embarking upon a fitness regimen. Another situation might be feeling incompetent in a specific area of domain knowledge and this one can be remedied through an active effort to read/learn/study and become competent in the troublesome areas.
Being honest with yourself (even if it's harsh), assessing your weaknesses, and working to improve them can go a long way to improve self-esteem.
I strongly encourage some kind of fitness routine or activity. I think a lot of cases of low self esteem come from a mind-body disconnect. And that allows for resentment or even hatred of your own body. That hatred may be subconscious or overt.
Actually engaging in a fitness routine undermines that dichotomy, particularly a skill based one. Coupled with the fact that pretty much everyone treats fit, attractive people way better in their daily lives, you rapidly build up a virtuous cycle of self esteem, fitness, and social approval.
The biggest game changer is when you realize that success is not the possession of any characteristic or accomplishment but rather the ability to feel authentically.
When you know on a deep somatic level that all of your emotions are valid and sacred and aren't afraid to feel them it brings with it a deep confidence and connection.
Happy to speak with you directly as well.
Thank you for the recommendation. I will check out the book and may also take you up on your kind offer to speak directly. Should I use the email address in your profile?
This is a topic of fascination for me, because I think low self-esteem has had a profound effect on my life. I'm interested in exploring any possible techniques for improving it.
It's also worth noting that in the 2015 'Inadequate' report, they specify that:
> Standards are improving and are getting closer to those attained nationally by seven- and 11-year-olds as a result of some well-targeted small group teaching, particularly of disadvantaged pupils.
So standards had improved, but they felt the need to lower the report from 'Good' to 'Inadequate'.
It's almost like the Ofsted were punishing them for getting famous.
[0]: https://reports.ofsted.gov.uk/inspection-reports/find-inspec...
You can build "self-esteem" from a variety of things, the most sustainable and healthy of which is from a deep sense that you can handle whatever emotions come up in your system and by extension, whatever life throws at you.
Building "self-esteem" on the fact that you accomplished something -- say, won a tournament or built a company and not on the experience of not abandoning yourself along the way is a recipe for unfulfillment and a string of other ills.
Healthy self-esteem is not built by giving everyone a trophy or protecting them from their own emotions but rather, helping children learn that they are accepted no matter what emotions they are having and thus learn to accept themselves no matter the emotional experience they are having.
As a former World Games Invitee, I can tell you that losing in competition is painful. For me, often debilitatingly so. And it wasn't until I was able to explore the roots of that pain response that I could heal old traumas from my childhood of my father giving us the silent treatment for days at a time after losing as a high school football coach and the unhealthy relationship he had with performance coming from farther upstream in our family system.
Our culture has created a false dichotomy of "positive and negative" emotions where we avoid conflicts, numb out with drugs, sex, TV, accomplishment, religion, food, conflict, drama, criticism and more. Our nervous systems don't feel safe processing anger, sadness, despair, and grief and so we turn to Psychiatry to suppress the symptoms vs. developing the capacity to be with our entire range of emotion and present experience.
In addition, top performers should always be encouraged. Relative to their peers, they have achieved as much as they can, and that should be recognized and lauded as well.
Tell a person that they're stupid every day and then ask them to apply themselves. They're not even going to try. Now call a kid naughty and then ask them to behave themselves.
That sounds like a solid plan to me, and there's no reason to see why it would then be a problem to ask them to behave themselves.
The fact is, the spoiled generation has really lower criminality rates, violence rates, takes less drugs then supposedly better behaved predecessors. People love to compare worst students now with best students of their generation or with their idealized idea of how great they themselves were - ignoring huge amount of people who dropped out of the school knowing pretty much nothing and that was it. Meanwhile, current best students are actually pretty good.
It is not all down to parenting changes only, but given better objective results the nostalgia for good old times is not really fact based.
How did you make the jump from telling a kid they're being/acting naughty to a kid being inherently naughty?
Occasional negative feedback doesn't create an inherent self-image.
"It is not even actionable command"
These are children, not puppies; children are perfectly capable of associating being called "naughty" with specific behavior.
You have very extreme views regarding children.
"These are children, not puppies; children are perfectly capable of associating being called "naughty" with specific behavior."
Their implication about specific behavior being often "playing in sight" or "I wont please teacher so I will make myself funny so other kids like me at least". Or the implication does not matter, because behavior was down to impulsive or unable to control emotions (I am frustrated I act out so it gives me attention and it is already reflex at this point).
"You have very extreme views regarding children."
Nice try.
But, overall upper and middle class kids who are on average more likely to be spoiled have better results then lower classes who are raised to be tougher if they are raised.
If you are argue that current children needs to be insulted etc more because that is how it was done in the past, then bringing in measurable differences between cohorts is perfectly valid argument. There is nothing measurable to support that argument either. The past was not perfect and argument by idealized nostalgia is not facts based.
As much as it feels good to imagine how you got back to that kid and how that kid would behave better, it is as much fantasy as thinking that all behavioral problems can be solved by hugs. I will make one more unsupported claim however: insulting children is and was not about making them behave better - it was about making educator feel better.
Why should I defend the point I never made?
English is not my mother tongue, but obviously it shouldn't be rocket science to tell to your kid that what they did just now was naughty, not that I as a parent hate him for being infested with peccatum originale.
They rule I've always used is to blame the behaviour (you're doing a naughty thing) if it's negative and praise the child (you're so kind) if it's something you want to reinforce.
If someone does not behaves like you expect him to you should tell just that, but adding a label to it(insult) is extremely dangerous.
The reason is because there is something called the ego, that are the beliefs that someone has about herself. Those beliefs get ingrained by repetition memory like artificial learning.
English have a problem in the language not differentiating between being in a temporary state and being forever. In Spanish for example you differentiate between being temporary(estar) and being forever(ser).
In other words whether you tell a kid that she is temporary fat(está gorda) or that she is fat forever(es gorda) makes an enormous difference and impression on her mind. If you repeat so much that she is fat(forever) she will start to identify herself as a fat kid forever and whatever she does.
This is behind so many problems in adults.
https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2016/05/why-self-...
Neff also has a book https://www.amazon.com/dp/B004JN1DBO
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14314958
428 points | 25 days ago | 148 comments
The truth as the Church would describe it is that man is intrinsically sinful but has been redeemed through Christ, and that should fill one's heart with joy and gratitude. No, man does not deserve any good thing, but when good things happen they should be appreciated as gifts, not rejected out of shame. This is true humility.
Some claim that self esteem should instead be replaced with self-compassion. This is a good idea that is in line with Church teaching, since to see yourself as God sees you (with unconditional love in spite of one's faults) is to adopt a perception which is based in truth, rather than the self-esteem movement which is based on convincing yourself of the lie that you are unconditionally good.
Somehow it seems to be one of the most fundamental factors of our well being and the course of our life. Yet we usually don't even try to measure it. Do I have below or above average self-esteem? I couldn't say.
Googling around brought up the "Rosenberg self-esteem scale" questionnaire. I tried it. Scored is 14. Which is considered low. Uh oh :)
Now what?
Also, do keep in mind that there are a lot of losers out there. Changes are your are a loser.
See, this is a silly road to take.
However:
1) It is not the only problem out there; 2) Lying about somebody's achievements is not a good way to raise their self-esteem, in the same way as maxing out your credit card on indulgent purchases is not a great way to achieve happiness. It works, somewhat — just until it doesn't. 3) A better way to achieve genuine self-esteem is to solve objectively difficult problems, successfully. Tests and exams are not problems; they were meant to give you an objective feedback so you could adjust your priorities accordingly. The straightest way to unlink test results from self-esteem is to give them in private and discourage comparison. 4) Like in sport, self-improvement is what counts in life, not the compared results. You are better that you were a year before, and that's all that matters.
Achievement-esteem of course has to do with the trophy stuff and doing things your peers can't do as well. I excelled at this sort of thing and have all sort of Al Bundy-type anecdotes I'm sure no one wants to hear.
The much more important type of self-esteem is the one that forms much earlier in life and is instilled by your parents love and devotion, and is the one that is much more important to your future-self's emotional well being.
My personal experience tells me this one drives addiction and probably many criminal behaviors as we get older.
As a proponent of the Einstein's block universe theory, I often wonder if everything is already baked in and we are just what we are destined to be anyway, so what does it matter how we feel really?
> On the downside, it also included a white man in a turban who predicted the work of the task force would be so powerful, it would cause the sun to rise in the west
White men in Turbans might be Gora Sikhs, who are sincere adherents of their particular faith, and are undeserving of this bigotry if the speaker was a member of the group.
Even if it was just a white man in a turban, so what? There is no minimum melanin requirement for wearing one. And how does that information advance the article's argument at all?
The reality that a large number of Gora Sikhs practice the faith they were raised in undermines the new-agey argument, unless one is singling out their actual religion which is centuries old in it's current form.
The only other explanation for the comment is the appalling idea that a person should be ridiculed for adopting the culture of which they don't share the dominant adherents' physical phenotype.
Funny that they don't really describe who he was or his political position (state senator).
I find it hard to believe that 1 CA state senator is responsible for a syndrome experienced in the U.K.
> Adapted from Selfie: How We Became So Self-Obsessed And What It’s Doing To Us by Will Storr, published by Picador on 15 June...
(Edit: note the author's begging the question in the subtitle.)
Tangentially, this is what the book Frankenstein was all about, the effect of education on different individuals, the most memorable of the monster being educated only formally, presumably by being given 'you showed up ribbons', with no family support structure, and growing up... with a rotten brain.
1. "prioritising their feelings of self-worth, telling them they are special and amazing, and cocooning them from everyday consequences."
This annoys me, when people throw in an entirely new assumption at the end of a sentence "...cocooning them from everyday consequences"
You can entirely regaurd growing adults with positive self regard AND let them experience the consequences of their actions.
The worriesome part about this is the conflation that consequences = lack of positive self regaurd to the growing adult.
If you truly uncaccoon growing adults from consequences and let them experience the results of their mistakes, they don't need your lecture of negative judgment on top of it, life will be there to teach them, and you can positively regard them as humans that make mistakes, and by not caccooning them expect them to solve the problems.
I mean honestly, the parents who believe their kids need a lecture about every mistake they make and judgment are the ones who are known as helicoptor parents and actually those kids end up being the least capable of being their own advocates because their parents never back off and allow them to make their own mistakes and struggle to find their way out.
This is why the Standford admissions office did an article on this, supposed Helicoptor parenting which was basically Stanford having problems with all these kids with 4.9 GPAs, 87 AP exams, science fair admissions with PhD level work put into them, who were held to hardcore high standards all work no play no emotion work work work your life = your GPA and the school you get into, and saying these kids literally could not solve the simplest everyday life problems and their parents called the school everyday trying to micromanage them or argue with Professors if their kids got less than B+s on exams
Its also why after the Gunn highschool suicide incident, highschool kids posted online to the parents to "back off" and quit pushing their kids so hard.
It's hard for me to take the rest of the article seriously, but I read on...
This is to show the other extreme and REAL effect of the opposite of show no compassion, only regard growing adults based on their accomplishments relative to everyone else.
If you take this attitude in life youre not helping your kid grow, you suffocating them, and debilitating their own sense of life navigation. This isn't about them, its about YOU imposing your self worth and narcissism and identify and your own self worth on how far along you can get your kid in life, and you need to back off.
I've witnessed this first hand going to university, and was really disturbed by helicopter parents versus my upbringing which was not helicopter parenting at all. Never seen kids more miserable in their life. I'm not even sure it was their life, they were walking poster children for their parents to show society look what I can do. Very few times did I see the kids who grew up like this get to make any of their own decisions. Very sad.
2. Grade inflation IS NOT there to boost self esteem, its there to allow elite institutions to maintain elitism by getting ivy kids good jobs and preparing them well for exams.
2/3s of all grades made at Brown University are As. It's there so everyone can get good jobs at high end consulting firms if they choose to instead of using their Political Science degree for some less profitable career path where the need is great, and grades/competition/elite ivy names matter less.
GPA grade inflation is about highschools gaining and maintaining status to justify private school tuition, and college does the same equivalent but has the double incentive of increasing competition to admissions for more room to choose the cream of the crop, and increasing the dowry back to the school from happy and financially successful alumni.
Both appeals to the idea that
a. negative judgment from their parents or teachers is the only way to allow growing adults to experience consequences of their actions
b. grade inflation is for the self esteem boost of individuals.
are false and the rest of this article rides on these astounding assumptions the author assumes you will buy into
*Note: I do understand the everyone is a winner, and clapping for every extracurricular club your kid joins, and treating them like little geniuses who Harvard would be at a loss of not having because youve decided thats the case for your baby since he showed his genius capabilities by bring two months early on the growth scale for expected timeline for piecing legos together, and ever since youve just been doing your job by providing the best past of growth for your little genius...yeh yeh yeh I know that happens
but that has nothing to do with needing negative judgment to grow, or the motivation behind grade inflation, which is strictly for the long term financial benefit of the institutions providing it.