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PLEASE DON’T CLAP FOR MY FAILURES: DEVELOPING SELF ESTEEM IN CHILDREN By: Dr. Michael Osit Recently, I was watching a rising comedian doing his standup routine. At one point in his performance he told a joke that did not elicit any laughter from the audience. He smoothly commented on the fact that it did not go over very well, making fun of himself. The audience then laughed and clapped. The comedian responded by saying, “Please don’t clap for my failures,” which elicited even more laughter. I thought about this statement. Please Don’t Clap For My Failures. I related it to the well known high school commencement speech “You’re Not Special” delivered back in 2012. The message delivered by that speech was not to make the graduating class feel badly about themselves, but rather to gently dis- mantle their false sense of success and perhaps even entitlement due to their parents’ misguided treatment of their “specialness.” In our attempt to cultivate positive self esteem in our children, we sometimes go over- board in identifying their accomplish- ments, and either gloss over or try to convert their failures into a positive. Self esteem is both fundamental and foundational for a happy, healthy child and adult. It is important to understand how your view of your- self develops. Self esteem is largely built on successful and unsuccessful experiences underscored by the type of feedback your child receives regarding those experiences. Social Learning Theory applies here in that if you are positively recognized for an accomplishment it makes you feel good about yourself. If your actions or performance receives a negative reaction, it makes you feel badly about yourself. It is the accumulation of thousands of these paradigms that eventually shape our self esteem. Of course, it is far more complicated than that with many other factors coming into play. But for the purpose of this article, let’s keep it simple. In my close to 40 years working with patients I have come to one core conclusion about self esteem. I believe that a healthy self esteem consists of a balanced combination of self recognition of both your strengths as well as an emotional and intellectual acceptance of your weaknesses. Simply providing your child with accolades about their efforts and accomplishments alone will not create a healthy self esteem. They also need to learn to accept their failures both emotionally and intellectually so that they can turn them into learning experiences. Acceptance of weaknesses as part of a healthy self esteem is essential because it prevents defensiveness when they make mistakes, allows them to accept responsibility for their errors, and most importantly, helps them have a realistic schema, or por- trayal of themselves. So, as parents, it is important to appropriately rec- ognize your child’s positive traits, and equally important to realistically point out their limitations to help them accept them, work around them, and feel that it is okay to even have them. Don’t clap for their failures. Help them understand them, learn from them, and create a realistic view of themselves. The result will be a self assuredness with no pretense and an inner acceptance of who they are and who they aren’t. Realistic accept- ance of yourself not only leads to being happy with yourself, it mini- mizes your child’s need to succumb to peer pressure in an effort to gain acceptance. Clap for their successes. Recognize and allow them to own their failures. Dr. Osit is a psychologist and author of “Generation Text: Raising Well Adjusted Kids In An Age Of Instant Everything.” He practices in Warren, NJ and can be contacted at Dr.Michael.Osit@gmail.com.Follow Us On
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