DR. F. FELICIA FERRARA: Hello. I'm Dr. Felicia, and I've been working with parents and families for over 25 years. Today, I'd like to talk to you about how to boost the self-esteem of your child. Self-esteem is so important, and it is the core of a person's personality. It helps them persevere to the future. Where does self-esteem come from? Well, quite honestly, all of us are born with different characteristics in our personality. Some have a really strong, residual inner strength; and no matter what happens to them, they just pick up and keep trying. We've seen this with marvelous children. However, we also have the child that could have all these beautiful talents and still fall apart at the slightest bit of criticism, and I'm sure you've all seen the child I'm talking about. That's a child with a very weak ego that is easily fractured. So for instance, if they're just in a reading class in second grade and they were told that they were to finished last of everybody else, that's enough for that child, seven or eight years old, to realize that they are not as good as their classmates. And I've had children actually complained about that that I was the last one in the reading class, and they get really sad about it for several hours or days depending on how long it lasts. So you really want to be aware of what's going on in your child's life. Be sure to ask them everyday what their day was like and if they have a misperception like: Oh, I'm the last one in the reading class; I can't read; I'm no good; it's not going to happen. You want to counteract all of their fears and concerns. You want to say: No, that's not true. Now, tomorrow you may do better, so you just go back in there and you try again. Now, this inner resiliency that we either have or don't have, I've seen children with a huge amount of deficits and disabilities and still have confidence and achieve great things; and on the other hand, you can have children with tremendous talents and no disabilities and they can be crushed very easily because their ego is so easily bruised. So you want to be careful to monitor each one of your children and see where they're at as far as your criticism. You really want to be really, really careful about using negative words. Because if anything hurts self-esteem, it's that negative, negative comments like you're a loser. You're not going to make it. You're no good. So you want to make sure to stay away from all those negative connotations. And you'll always want to give your child a boost for whatever it is they did do well, even if it's just throwing out the trash well or maybe they just snapped their fingers well. Whatever that child has as a special talent, make sure you identify it and you praise it and you encourage that child to always keep trying no matter what happens. With that in mind, if they have a family that they know supports them then they very much going to try harder the next time. Participate in their school functions because that gives them extra motivation but always please them to just try their best, and that's all we can ask of anybody. So I wish you good luck with that and I'll see you soon.
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