Self-esteem Counseling
You hate hearing your child say things like “I can’t do anything right, I’m no good.” They may criticize themselves, become passive, refuse to try anything new, won’t ask for help, need to win all the time, take abuse from others or put others down through blame, guilt, shame, faultfinding. It may seem like you just keep trying to assure them and build them up, and it just never works.
What’s Healthy?
Like to see them talking back to the internal critic, tolerating errors, confident, able to ask for help and share control, stop getting angry so easily? These are some signs of a healthy sense of self-esteem. See more about my child counseling for self-esteem here.
I Can Help
With Self Esteem Counseling you can get them help. Some parts of a child’s temperment are somewhat preset genetically, recent research indicates, like if they are generally an optimist or a pessimist. In the end they are their own person and will make their own choices and experiences. You can research and learn about resources to help your child become a better friend to themselves. I’ve already done that and have the resources in my brain and my office and I invite you to come and see how I can help you help your child gain more confidence in themselves.
How I Help
Your kid can learn about positive thinking and patterns of incorrect thinking that cause them distress, like overgeneralizations such as “Nobody cares, everybody hates me, you never let me do anything I want,” (watch out for words like always, never, have to, always). They can with support develop habits of reviewing what they like about themselves and what they are proud of, get lessons to develop a skill or talent they have to a greater mastery level, especially if their peers are made aware of your child’s skill or ability in a special area (ranking; turns out we rank ourselves relative to others and one way to improve self-esteem is being able to demonstrate ourselves as great at something to others).
You can also take the Self-talk, Self-esteem, Self-control video course here.