Too Much Self-Esteem?

Turns out children are feeling pretty good about themselves lately. Maybe a little too good.

A recent study by researchers at San Diego State University found that high-school seniors are bursting with more self-esteem than a generation or two ago. For example, in 1975, 49 percent of them believed that they would be successful at their jobs. Today 65 percent do.

Instilling that "world, here I come!" attitude is a great thing. Instilling baseless self-congratulation? Less so. Yet I have to admit that I have a hard time figuring out when to say, "What a wonderful letter you wrote for grandma!" and when to go, "Do you think you could possibly put one OUNCE of effort into your thank you note?"

It's not just parents who are busy dealing with praise inflation, either. The other day, I was on a field trip with my fifth-grader at a museum all about the American Revolution. The guide had the class study a painting of Washington and his troops, and then she asked, "What do we see in this picture?"

Up went a hand: "Queen Elizabeth!"

The guide smiled encouragingly. "I don't think the queen was here in America."

She doesn't think so? Jeez — I know so. So should the kids! That's what the field trip was for, right? Learning some history. The queen was NOT in this picture. In fact, there were no WOMEN in the picture. In fact, it was a picture of MEN fighting a WAR in AMERICA against a KING, who, by the way, was NOT married to Queen Elizabeth and who himself was NOT in the picture because he was back home in ENGLAND. God forbid we should roll our eyes and tell the kid, "Back to the history books!"

Fortunately, there are some signs that this is starting to happen.

My sister-in-law lives in a school district to end all school districts in suburban Chicago, and the superintendent there, Eric Twadell, is worried about the same issue: too much praise for too little anything. In an editorial in the high-school magazine (as glossy as Newsweek), he wrote: "For too many years educators have worshipped at the altar of self-esteem theory, wrongly believing that if we simply help students feel better about themselves, their reading, writing and arithmetic will improve. Nothing could be further from the truth."

Oops.

It's not that I'm all for instilling low self-esteem. I don't believe in squashing egos or, God forbid, squelching curiosity. Encouragement is good. But maybe the antidote to meaningless praise is not a surfeit of discouragement but more opportunities for kids to really succeed at something instead of just being told how great they are.

A kid who goes and gets the family's groceries really has done something significant. Ditto a kid who makes the dinner. Ditto a kid who bikes over and hands grandma her card instead of just scribbling a note and having mom drop it in the mail.

There are a whole lot of "real-world" tasks we used to give kids that garnered them the kind of self-esteem we have taken to instilling artificially with gold stars for not-very-special "specialness." Send kids back out with jobs to complete, new situations to navigate and challenges that don't involve a No. 2 pencil or soccer ball, and self-esteem will come as naturally as the mistakes they'll make along the way. That way, when we say, "Good for you!" we'll mean it.

And they'll know it.

Lenore Skenazy is a columnist at Advertising Age. She is the founder of FreeRangeKids.com. To find out more about Lenore Skenazy (lskenazy@yahoo.com) and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate Web page at www.creators.com.

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