Bringing Up Happy Confident Children: A practical guide to nurturing resilience, self-esteem and emotional well-being

By John Sharry

Bringing Up Happy Confident Children: A practical guide to nurturing resilience, self-esteem and emotional well-being

Based on evidence-based principles, John Sharry presents an innovative model of self-esteem that focuses on building children and teenagers’ resilience and character strengths to ensure they grow up to be well-adjusted, confident and happy adults. Suitable for all ages, each chapter contains powerful and practical principles to help you:
•Promote children’s emotional well-being and sense of security
•Help children and teenagers discover their strengths and talents
•Encourage your children to reach their full potential
•Develop your children’s resilience in the face of challenges

Drawing on his influential columns in the Irish Times, Part Two of the book contains a selection of questions and answers from real parents that not only address the subject of improving confidence and self-esteem but also many related areas such as encouraging friendships, managing school problems, and helping children and teenagers overcome stress, anxiety and depression.

Emphasising a positive approach to caring for children, this book will help you parent with confidence and have more satisfying and enjoyable relationships with your children as they grow up.

Dr John Sharry is a child and family mental health professional with over 27 years’ clinical experience, a bestselling author of 13 positive psychology and parenting books, developer of the award-winning Parents Plus Programmes and a weekly health columnist for the Irish Times. His books have been translated into nine languages, including Spanish, Japanese, Chinese and Arabic. See www.solutiontalk.ie and www.parentsplus.ie for more details.

• Language: English
• Publisher: John Sharry
• Release date: Oct 4, 2017

Book preview

Introduction

Why I wrote this book

Over the last 27 years as a mental health professional, many of the parents I have worked with have been very concerned about their children and teenagers’ lack of self-esteem and confidence. Parents frequently worry that their children are overly self-critical or negative about themselves, which might mean they don’t fully engage with life and can miss out on important things. Sometimes parents’ concerns are localised to a particular area such as a child being shy socially or having trouble making friends or a child struggling at school or in extracurricular activities. In many cases, this lack of self-esteem can present as feelings of depression or low mood and parents can become particularly worried about their children as they head into the teenage years.

I wrote this book to present an innovative model of self-esteem that helps children move from feeling unconfident, self-critical and anxious into being emotionally secure, more content and more engaged in life. The ideas in the book are all designed to be practical principles you can apply with your own family. The ideas represent everything I have learnt from the several thousand families I have had the privilege of working with over my career – they represent their successes and hard-earned wisdom in bringing up their children in difficult circumstances.

How the book works

The purpose of this book is to share some powerful and practical ideas about helping children grow up into happy, well-adjusted adults who are able to care for others and to make a contribution in the world. The book comes in two parts:

Part 1 presents a positive model of self-esteem that is based on helping children discover their talents and character rather than simply feeling good about themselves. It is organised around the seven principles below which form the basis of the seven chapters. Each chapter contains case examples and simple strategies for applying these ideas in your family.

Build Children’s Character and Self-Esteem

Love Your Children Uniquely

Discover Your Children’s Strengths and Talents

Encourage Your Children’s Potential

Teach Skill Mastery and Responsibility

Help Your Children Contribute Socially

Develop Your Children’s Resilience

Part 2 contains a selection of the weekly parenting columns I have been writing in the Irish Times since 2010. Some of the columns directly address the subject of confidence and self-esteem in children and teenagers and others address related areas such as friend-ships, school problems, stress, anxiety and depression. Do visit irishtimes.com to view my weekly columns.

In reading the book you can read through each of the principles in Part 1 and put the ideas into practice in a step-by-step way in your family; alternatively, you may have a specific concern that you want addressed and then you might be best starting in Part 2 and picking the question that most closely matches your own concern, before returning to the principles in Part 1.

What is not covered in this book?

There are many common parenting issues such as behavioural problems and dealing with the specific ‘age-related’ challenges of bringing up pre-schoolers, primary school age and teenage children that are not specifically addressed in this book. However, I would encourage you to consult some of my other books, notably Positive Parenting, Parenting Preschoolers, Parenting Teenagers and Parenting when Separated, where many of these other questions might be answered. In addition, I am currently writing a book on the important subject of tackling anxiety in children and teenagers that builds on many of the ideas in this book.

Finally, do have a look at my website www.solutiontalk.ie for further resources and articles on all aspects of parenting, family life and mental health. If you have a question that you feel is not answered, feel free to email me and I will try and answer it in the pages of the Irish Times on Tuesdays.

PART 1

SEVEN PRINCIPLES

Principle 1 – Build Children’s Character and Self-Esteem

Try not to become a person of success but rather a person of value.

Albert Einstein

The importance of self-esteem and feeling good about oneself is a relatively new concept in the field of psychology. The Positive Psychologist, Martin Seligman,¹ links it to the development of personality psychology, which replaced the notion of virtue and character, which had been the traditional guiding factors in parenting. The goal of traditional parenting was to instil character and to teach children virtue and how to live the good life. Psychologists, nervous about using value-laden terms such as ‘character’, replaced these with more neutral terms such as ‘personality’. The goal of parenting was reset to one of helping children have good self-esteem, with the idea that children who feel good about themselves would invariably act responsibly.

However, by shifting the focus of modern parenting from building character to encouraging self-esteem, the baby may have been thrown out with the bathwater. Paradoxically, it is by leading a life of social responsibility that we gain self-esteem rather than the other way round. Self-esteem and feeling good about yourself is not the goal you should have, but rather the by-product of efforts to build character and to live a good life in the service of others. Good self-esteem is the fruit of a life of hard work, developing one’s strengths and talents and expressing them in the service of others.

Surveying the cross-cultural research literature, Seligman and colleagues went on to identify the most common virtues and character strengths that were associated with happiness and well-being both for the individual and the community in which he/she lives. Given the fact that religions, cultures and traditions can be so different, Seligman expected there to be a big disparity and range of these virtues and values. However, he was surprised at how much cross-cultural agreement there in fact was and how universal these virtues and character strengths. In the table below, we list the six most common virtues and strengths that Seligman and colleagues identified.

Table 1: Six universal strengths/virtues associated with happiness and well-being

Wisdom and Knowledge – Acquiring knowledge and learning good judgement

Courage – Being strong, brave and resilient

Love and Humanity – Being compassionate and kind to others

Justice – Commitment to equality and fairness

Temperance – Moderation/ being able to delay gratification

Spirituality – Being committed to a purpose and meaning beyond ourselves

As you read the list in Table 1, many of these virtues seem self-evident: who would not want to bring up kind and compassionate children who empathise and think of others? Or who would not want their children to strive to be fair and to understand justice and equality? However, some are more surprising: How many of us have thought of teaching our children to be courageous, brave or resilient as a means of ensuring their happiness? In fact courage is a virtue that is hard to teach – it is something that you only know you have when you face adversity or challenge. The best way to teach it to children is by setting them meaningful challenges and by supporting them to reflect and learn as they face the inevitable adversities they encounter growing up.

Some of the other virtues, particularly temperance, are so currently unfamiliar in modern family life that they are missing from the lexicon we use. In our current world of instant gratification, over consumption, and addiction we have lost the ability to delay gratification, to self-regulate, and to enjoy things in moderation. Interestingly, temperance is one of those virtues for which there is substantial evidence – especially in the famous and often repeated ‘marshmallow study’² first conducted by Walter Mischel in Stanford during the 1960s. In this study young children were given the option of consuming one marshmallow placed in front of them or waiting 15 minutes to gain a second one (which they would only receive if they did not eat the first). In follow-up studies, the children who were able to delay gratification and to await the better deal of two marshmallows showed much higher success in school as well as better all-round life skills than those who chose instant gratification.

Universal values in the modern world

The value of feeling good about oneself (rather than being virtuous and making a contribution) is one that is not just limited to the psychology of parenting but rather one that is reflected in the whole of modern society. It is reflected in our obsession with celebrity, where people are famous not because of their talents and contribution but simply because of their attractiveness or confidence. It is evident in the ‘me generation’, who want all their needs satisfied instantly without any notion of merit or having to work hard for their achievements.

Sadly, in the modern world the universal values and character traits in Table 1 are not emphasised and in fact children are often bombarded by the reverse messages as they grow up. Popular culture is more likely to convince children that being ‘attractive’ is more important than being kind or that owning the latest gadget or brand is more important than working hard or making a contribution. In addition, winning or coming first can be seen as the only thing that matters, rather than doing one’s best, sharing with others or contributing to team work. It is only the latter values that lead to enduring happiness.

The easier, popular values that bombard children don’t lead to children being genuinely happy but frequently the reverse. Instant gratification is generally unsatisfying at a deeper level and ironically results in ‘low self-esteem’, while the most rewarding projects are the ones that exercise our talents, that we work hard at, and that allow us to make a meaningful contribution.

Building character and teaching values to our children

So what does this mean concretely for a parent worrying about their child’s low self-esteem? Well there are a number of concrete ways you can build children’s character and to develop the values and character traits associated with happiness and well-being.

Encourage your children to do things for themselves

The first thing to realise is that you can inadvertently support your child’s lack of self-esteem by striving to make them feel good about themselves, by mollycoddling and doing everything for them, by surrounding them with passive activities such as TV that require no talent, effort or commitment. To encourage true self-esteem, children need to be challenged positively and crucially, be encouraged to take responsibility for as much as possible in their lives at an early age. This means not doing anything for a child that they can do for themselves. This starts with allowing your toddler to enjoy the success of getting dressed by himself, ensuring your children take pride in chores and helping out, and giving teenagers responsibility for household projects (such as gardening, cooking or caring for a pet).

Praise your children when they show character strengths

As parents we can inadvertently reinforce modern values that don’t necessarily lead to our children feeling secure and happy. For example, how many times might we comment on a girl being pretty or attractive rather than them being brave or courageous? Or how many times might we comment on a boy winning or coming first rather than playing fair and being a good team player? Remember that winning at all costs is a lonely victory and feeling the most attractive might not win you the best friends. Both might ultimately leave you insecure and dependent on other people’s judgement.

As parents we help our children by focusing our praise mainly on the times our children display the six character strengths in Table 1. We might acknowledge any time our children:

Show good judgement or insight

Display bravery or courage in the face of challenge

Are compassionate and kind to others

Stand up for someone weaker than them and show real fairness

Are able to work hard at something and to wait until they get a just reward

Show values that are beyond themselves and are not self-centred or narrow

Help your children express their talents in meaningful ways

You can encourage your children’s self-esteem by helping them discover their individual passions and talents and helping them express these in a meaningful way. This means noticing what drives and interests your children, and encouraging them to become involved in activities that express this. The best activities are the ones that your child is prepared to put time into, which are challenging and require effort and which they can share with others – activities like sport, dancing, scouts, creative hobbies, caring for a pet all fit this bill. Even solitary activities such as reading or crafts can work in the same way once there is opportunity to share the work with others (e.g. sharing what has been read, using what has been made etc.).

Helping your child express their talents in good activities is not only a boost to their confidence, it is often the best way for them to form meaningful friendships. Doing the things that we love is the best way to connect with others. The lives of ‘shy’ children can