Our Family, Our Strength - Principle #19: Self-Esteem - Rabbi Yirmiyahu Abramov

principle number 19 in our series of twenty five basic principles of Jewish child rearing is self-esteem self-esteem is a very basic ingredient in every human being the person who's lacking sulfurous esteem is not in any way respecting himself so everybody has the right to self esteem everybody is Anna shamma is a soul is an individual is a person with a mission which is a basic Jewish belief every person has a mission therefore we are all entitled to self esteem now this is a vehicle that will really help the child actualize his potential as he begins to respect himself more and hold of himself in his particular areas so his personality builds and so he slowly even from a tender age begins developing into who he really could be and should be this is all based on the fact that as we've said before many times man is essentially a neshama a soul a soul is something completely unique a soul is something very very special a soul has enormous depth and breadth to it and each and every individual is his own entity and his own soul so how is self esteemed both self esteem is built by meeting challenges overcoming them with dignity or at least meeting them with dignity every time a person successfully stands up to a challenge he feels a good sense of self esteem what we as parents need to do is to provide him constantly with challenges one grows through challenges so we need to be providing these challenges for him one word of extreme caution because I'll say her Northland rlp darko educate a child within his ways what does that mean what's the elaboration of that that the elaboration of never ever shoot too high never ever have expectations which are beyond the capacity of the child that is something which could be selfs destroying because he has been put in the situation of a challenge which he is incapable of succeeding failure is something which can happen we need to help our children relate to failures but if failures are repeated over and over and over again for the mere reason that the challenges have been too difficult we've set the bar too high so they're incapable of scaling that par they'll never get over the bar so therefore when he fails and he fails and he fails again and again he begins to think he's not worth much he's lost his self worth the loss of self worth is the opposite of self-esteem so this is a big challenge of parents make sure that we are setting for him goals put him in a situation of challenge but always within his reach sometimes it needs a bit of a foot up a bit of a help to reach that that goal when he matches and reached that goal he feels great he feels good with himself he'll be ready to move on to the next goal so we're going to help him set attainable goals and encourage him to meet them now one of the ways that one achieves this is when you set your child a goal which is like we said it attainable and he succeeds praised that success there's nothing like a praise there's nothing like feeling appreciated and even reinforce them when we notice that a child has a certain inclination to certain areas music art gardening cooking whatever it might be make sure we provide him with enough trials in that arena in an arena where the chances of his excess are excellent then he will he will achieve he will feel good with himself and he'll be ready to take on the next hurdle one word of caution don't focus on failures move on just get up and keep moving so there's a failure that means either he wasn't ready for it he wasn't sufficiently focused he wasn't sufficiently trained for it it wasn't at the right time so let's not dwell on them let's not harp on them let's go on to the next challenge maybe adjusting the bar to a more attainable and realistic level help him I let him try again and let him succeed because success and feeling good with oneself builds up the self-esteem and this is a vital component for mature stable healthy adulthood you