Children with a healthy sense of self-esteem experience less anxiety, avoid self-critical thoughts and find it easier to handle negative influences, new situations and setbacks. Improve your child's feeling of self-worth with activities to build a positive attitude, a realistic self-perception and techniques for adapting to failures and high-pressure situations.
Empowering Collage
Follow a suggestion from the Education World website and ask your child to create a self-worth collage. Give your child a poster board and let her affix a favorite photo of herself in the center with double-sided tape. Provide a selection of magazines, scissors and a glue stick. Encourage your child to cut images, words and phrases from the magazines that describe her personality, best qualities, activities she enjoys, accomplishments or how she wants family, friends and classmates to see her. Glue the snippets to the poster and hang the positive artwork on her bedroom wall, where she can read it and soak in the positive feelings each day.
Affirmations
The National Mental Health Information Center suggests encouraging your child to write a series of affirmations about himself to recite each day. Provide slips of colorful card stock and markers, and help your child add statements that will boost his self-esteem, such as "I will have a great day today," "My family cares for me," "I have a friend who is nice to me" or "I am an excellent student." Drop the slips into a box and ask your child to remove an affirmation each morning to greet the day with a positive outlook.
Problem-Solving
Giving children the opportunity to succeed can build self-esteem. The Building Strong Families Program of the University of Missouri Extension suggests encouraging your child to use her problem-solving skills so that she'll feel empowered to help herself and make the right decisions on her own. Role-play with your child to encourage her to devise solutions to problems, such as arguing with a friend who wants her to make fun of a classmate, dealing with a clique that is ignoring her or questioning a friend who suddenly wants to hang out with someone else.
Daily Roles
Follow a tip from Houghton Mifflin Harcourt's Education Place and encourage your child to feel better about himself as a result of the important roles he plays in the family, classroom and community. Let your child create a series of small signs featuring labels such as "son," "brother," "friend" or "teammate." Help him write his positive qualities and why he is invaluable in each role. For example, he can write that he is important as a son because he makes mom smile, helps take care of a little brother or sister, keeps his room clean and helps set the table for dinner.
