Self-Esteem: It’s Not What You Think It Is

Have you ever wondered what someone means when they refer to ‘healthy self-esteem?’ Does that mean that someone is fearless or confident? To begin our discussion on self-esteem, we must first agree on a definition.

“Self-esteem” can be defined as the value a person places on him or herself. If we say that someone has good self-esteem, we’re basically saying that she sees herself as valuable. In contrast, if a person suffers from low self-esteem, she doesn’t place much value on herself.

Keeping that in mind, let’s move on to the way that poor or healthy self-esteem predicts whether a person will be successful in life. It may surprise you to know that recent research has raised questions about the beliefs that formed the ’self-esteem-based education movement’ of the past twenty five years.

In the early 1980s, California schools launched the first ’self-esteem-based education’ in the U.S. This curriculum was based on the idea that children with healthy self-esteem tend to do better in school, avoid drugs and refrain from teen sex.

Millions of dollars have been invested in self-esteem-based education in the U.S. alone. The hoped-for end result is that the children receiving this instruction will be more responsible and less likely to fail in life.

But recent studies don’t support that notion. They actually found little evidence that people who registered high on the self-esteem scale are any more likely to resist peer pressure or to achieve success.

What I mean by that is that, according to a large study conducted by Brown University, an increase in self-esteem seems to follow successful completion of a goal. Put another way, a person begins to feel better about himself only when he begins to succeed.

The second surprise, from that study, and others since, is that the most important factor in self-esteem seems to be the set of social values in which the person believes. To untangle that statement, let’s define social values as the agreed-upon valuable concepts in a society.

Put another way, their social values, or what their society deems valuable, form the framework for whether they feel they, themselves, have value. For example, if the society in which they live values knowledge, and they are able to study and learn easily, their self-esteem grows as they achieve that social value.

So now, we’ve arrived back to our original question: what exactly, then, is self-esteem? Based on what we’ve discussed, our definition can now be: the value a person places on themselves in the context of their larger society and its values. It remains to be seen how that new definition will change the way healthy self-esteem is encouraged in children.