It doesn’t always equate to self-esteem, but this seems a related area.
A woman on a plane I was on recently was verbally aggressive with her child and cursed at her. I told the cabin staff and told the woman I’d report her if she persisted. She got indignant but eventually went quiet. Part of her defense was my lack of clear legal authority and we had no reference to social care guidelines. So I’ve looked up the NSPCC website which talks about emotional abuse in the following ways. For me it also links to other types of abuse such as bullying and (psychological) domestic violence.
For the purpose of the child protection system, the Department of Health employs the following definition of emotional abuse:
‘Emotional abuse is the persistent emotional ill-treatment of a child such as to cause severe and persistent adverse effects on the child’s emotional development. It may involve conveying to children that they are worthless or unloved, inadequate, or valued only insofar as they meet the needs of another person. It may feature age or developmentally inappropriate expectations being imposed on children. It may involve causing children frequently to feel frightened or in danger, or the exploitation or corruption of children. Some level of emotional abuse is involved in all types of ill treatment of a child, though it may occur alone’. (Department of Health et al, 1999, p.5-6)
Garbarino et al’s influential work defines psychological maltreatment as ‘a concerted attack by an adult on a child’s development of self and social competence’ (Garbarino et al, 1986, cited in Iwaniec, 1997, p.372). They propose five categories of damaging caregiver behaviours:
- rejecting: behaviours which communicate or constitute abandonment of the child;
- isolating: preventing the child from participating in normal social interaction activities;
- terrorising: threatening the child with severe punishment, or deliberately cultivating a climate of fear or threat;
- ignoring: where the caregiver is psychologically unavailable to the child and fails to respond to the child’s behaviour; and
- corrupting: caregiver behaviour which encourages the child to develop false social values that reinforce antisocial or deviant behavioural patterns (Garbarino et al, 1986 cited in Tomison and Tucci, 1997).
Hart et al build on Garbarino et al’s typology above, identifying six categories of adult behaviour towards children considered to be emotionally abusive:
- spurning: both verbal and nonverbal degrading and rejecting of a child;
- exploiting/corrupting: encouraging children to develop behaviours that are self-destructive or mis-socialising;
- terrorising: includes behaviour that threatens or is likely to place the child or child’s loved ones in danger;
- denying emotional responsiveness: ignoring a child’s attempt to interact, or interacting without emotion;
- isolating: involves caregiver behaviours that prevent a child from interacting with children or adults outside the home; and
- mental health, medical and emotional neglect (Hart et al, 1995 cited in Geffner and Rossman, 1998, p.2).
I’ve just seen a lovely post about how to a woman helps her step-grand-daughter to overcome low self esteem. Respecting them like adults helps. Do you interupt children and then wonder why they don’t feel good about themselves?
See the blog post here.
About the Author
Yvonne Perry is a freelance writer, editor, speaker, and the owner of Writers in the Sky Creative Writing Services.
Someone on twitter talked about parents supporting self-esteem in a way that means they ensure all the children get a trophy on sports day. I’ve even heard of a school cancelling its sports day because some children felt sad when they lost.
Overcoming-low-self-esteem.com
While it may be tempting, giving kids stuff just for turning up is different to ensuring their self esteem is high. I’m not against giving them something, just don’t lie to them. Yes, it’s a lie even when it’s well intentioned. I still have medals somewhere for coming second in a two boy swim and finishing a long distance run long after almost everyone else had changed out of their sports gear. They were on different days in case you think I did some kind of Junior Iron Man competition. It helped me feel part of the team, it acknowledged my effort and made me feel cared for. But I never seriously thought it was for sporting achievement and it was partly an embarrassment as it symbolised trying rather than winning.
I’m not convinced you’ll fool the child. You may even deliver the meta-messages that you don’t even think of them as a serious competitor and that you think childish and foolish. Most importantly, you may miss that while self-confidence is about believing you can achieve things, self-esteem is about how you feel about yourself. It’s the bit after they get the medal. If they know they are being shielded, not considered capable of winning and they have no evidence of actual learning or achieving, how are they going to get self-esteem?
Shielding children from most competitions and challenges does not help them develop the skills to deal with challenges when you’re not around. Rich children can be very insecure when they realise they have been shielded.
Reality happens; to you and to your child. Self-esteem comes from acknowledgement of reality, accepting your strengths and having realistic expectations.
Remember the Truman Show film? Would Jim Carey thank the people who altered his reality and made him do all that work to make sense of what reality was?
Piaget: “Every time we teach a child something, we prevent him from inventing it himself.”
Maybe I should have just said that.
