Low Self Esteem, Children and Teenagers, What can you do?

Over the last decade, low self esteem for children and teenagers is growing extremely fast.  If you are like most parents, what you want more for your kids is self-confidence.  They will tell you that academic and athletic come 2nd on their wish list. Without self-confidence, it is extremely hard for children and teenagers to achieve any goals, resist peer pressure and deal with adversity.  Ultimately, without self confidence, it will affect directly their overall happiness and career success.

How can you help?  The most important part of your job as a parent is to provide love and affection every day.  All children and teenagers will benefit as they feel love by their parents.  It is important that you realize that love and affection alone it is not enough to build their self-confidence.  They need 2 more ingredients in order to help them achieve self-confidence. They need People Skills and they need Character.

A lot of people think that either you have people skill or you don’t.  That could not be further from the truth.  If you did a survey and surveyed people with people skills and people without, you would find that the main difference is the way they were raised.  People skill is certainly very difficult to learn if you don’t learn it at a young age.  That is why you should start with your children as soon as you can.  Start with the basic technique.  Teach them how to greet people, to look people in the eyes.  When they become a teenager, you should add a firm handshake to what they should do.  Teaching them how to listen well and not to be afraid to ask question will also be a good for them.  There have been many studies done that shows people skills represent 75% of their success vs. 25% is technical knowledge.  Don’t diminish the importance of your children learning math, read and writing but the emphasizing on their people skills will go a long way towards their overall happiness and career success.

Developing character is an extremely hard thing to do.  It takes a lot of commitment to teach it, be accountable to it.  This is the second item your children and teenagers will need in life.  Start as young as you can to teach them about integrity.  Being honest can only bring good things for them.  Teach how to behave in today’s society.  What is accepted and what is not.  Knowing that will help them both on a personal level and later in life, on a professional level.  Also, you could have self-confident children or teenagers but lack character. This will result with your children to not resist peer pressure, potentially affects their personal relationship and professional life.  

Why is it that more and more children and teenagers lack people skills and character today? It is mainly due to 3 areas.  Today’s technology, the pop culture and academics emphasis are the main reasons.  The technology today, having access to e-mails, test messaging, cell phones, video games create a void in personal human contact which you can only improved by meeting people face to face.  If you look at movies, cartoons, music videos and how it affects our children and teenagers, you will understand why it is another reason why people lack people skills. With the disrespectful gestures and expressions used today. It teaches our kids to behave the same way.  It makes our jobs as parents much harder. Also, in today’s schools system, the emphasis in on academics.  They do not believe people skills and character are priorities and therefore they do not focus on it.   

There are many things you can do to help your children and teenagers to build their people skills and character.  You should emphasis the importance of people skills before they interact with others.  It could be on the way to school, to visit family or friends etc.  Re-emphasizing  greeting, eye contact and a firm handshake every time.  Next, be a good role model.  Remember, your children are always watching and listening so you should always act the part.  Last, look for third party help, children, specially teenagers can tune you out so if you can find material, book, cds, dvds, that way they can teach themselves as they become an adult.

Today’s generation is not learning people skills or character development.  We do not hesitate to get help for our children for any other subject.  So let’s remember what will ultimately help our children and priorities correctly so our children and teenagers never suffer of Low Self Esteem.

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