There is much we fantasise about, or commit to, “giving” our children: education, fun, hope, morality, gadgets, self-discipline and much besides. But perhaps, above all, we want, or should want, to impart those elusive qualities of self-esteem and self-respect.
Closely aligned with the third selfie – self-confidence – we try to boost our children’s vision of themselves with compliments and invocations. They are beautiful, they are clever, they are talented, they are special, and so on. Does it work, though?
I only have daughters, so I don’t know if there is a gender issue involved, but however much I butter up my children, it seems to make little difference. All of them at one time or another (thankfully, only briefly) have shown signs of the darker fifth and sixth selfies: self-doubt and self-abnegation.
There’s nothing wrong with praising your children, but they are too smart to believe anything their parents tell them in this regard, imagining, rightly, that the praise of a parent is not reliable when held against the opinions of friends, enemies, schoolteachers or the world at large. So they discount these alleged virtues – all the more so, I don’t doubt, if the family is poor or underprivileged, and thus have the whole of society casting doubt on their worth.
I question whether it is within one’s powers as a parent to instil the “good” selfies into a child. One can do much to destroy self-confidence and self-esteem if one wants to, by constant criticism or putdowns (although even that can produce a defiant “I’ll show you!”), but the good selfie seems to be internally generated by mysterious forces.
This sits at odds with conventional wisdom on this subject. I have heard, very often, that character depends on one of two axes – environment and heredity, whose exponents endlessly argue over which is more powerful (as a Guardian reader, you probably favour environment, as culturally conditioned explanations seem to be preferred by the left, even if they are not validated by all of the scientific evidence).
However, the third factor is more widely ignored. This is the sense that a child constructs a picture of the world for themselves, beyond the facts of heredity and environment. Both may influence that picture – but there is a final, elusive element of choice. We build the vision of the world we choose – although as children we are usually too young to understand all the perspectives necessary to build it accurately.
I don’t know what makes one child choose self-esteem over self-doubt – in fact I’m not even sure what self-esteem is composed of. It’s a peculiar quality that seems, often, to be unconnected with any external reality. Stupid and unpleasant people can be full of self-confidence and self-esteem, while often very sensitive, kind and smart children are riddled with self-doubt. Upbringing appears to make a difference – the self-confidence that private schooling imparts is some proof of that – but it isn’t everything. I’ve known many people from very modest backgrounds – my father for instance, who left school at 14 – who had unimpeachable self-esteem.
I know only this about the selfies. They are not something you have or don’t have (although if you get into bad mental habits as a child, they can be hard to break). They are passing states. If you lose them, you can get them back. If you don’t have them, you can build them.
Perhaps the best we can do for our children is build a platform on which they can accept that self-esteem is a possibility, but not a given. Whether that is actualised depends partly on how much you are prepared to accept responsibility for yourself, what you’ve been taught, your private choices about how you view the world and your natural inclinations. Beyond that, it’s a secret debate: no one can determine, finally, its outcome.
