samples
Samples from The Self-Esteem Trap
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Because caring parents are quick to blame themselves for the suffering and unhappiness of their children, I want to be very clear here. This is not a book about blame. The self-esteem trap is complex and rooted in many cultural causes, and it is not the intentional doing of any devoted parent or child. Understanding it allows us to become responsible for changing our approach and to support one another in the process. My decision to write this book came directly from my heartfelt sympathy and sadness for dedicated contemporary parents, and for restless, unhappy young adults who have come to me for help. We're all trapped in the belief that everyone is great and a winner, deserving extraordinary opportunities to become an exceptional individual. Getting out of this trap requires finding a new kind of self-confidence and compassion for ourselves. Grounded in our fundamental shared humanity and interdependence, as I said earlier, this new confidence is rooted in being and feeling ordinary. Feeling ordinary comes from a wisdom about our human condition and a knowledge of how we are all connected. In the 1980s we were duly warned by the social researchers who wrote Habits of the Heart that the human self can never truly be independent of a network or community of people; but we very much lost track of that idea when we began to emphasize being special. What happened?
To answer that question, we will first analyze some contemporary parenting practices in order to see how they affect children's chances of becoming confident, responsible, and compassionate adults. We will also look from the inside and the outside at a range of troubling developmental experiences of children who have had caring, dedicated parents. We'll meet people like Adrienne, Michael, and Jason, who are old enough to serve as examples of the outcomes of parenting practices that stress that each child is a winner. Today's families are raising our future. And many of them are in trouble.
The World Out There
All of our efforts to be good parents take place within a social setting that is bigger than our families and friends. Social climates affect what we take to be the truth about everything we do. In recent decades, as I've been saying, parents have been told by experts that they should boost their children's self-esteem by praising them often and noting their unique and exceptional talents. We are also in a climate of biological reasoning about how children grow up.3 Even though you may know next to nothing about the science of genetics and proteins, you probably subscribe to the idea that some of your children's behaviors come from inherited tendencies.4
When parents come to see me for psychotherapy, they look back to their memories of Aunt Millie or Grandpa Jones to explain at least some of their children's strengths and weaknesses. Little Anna is hyperactive because there's a lot of manic-depression in her genes. Adam has ADD (attention deficit disorder), just like his father, but Adam is getting medical treatment for it and hopefully won't fail in school as his father did. Sixteen-year old Sarah seems rather depressed lately and talks a lot about hating herself, but that's probably due to PMS (premenstrual syndrome), which her mother and sister also suffer from.
Parents often come with these explanations even if they know little about the scientific validity of this way of thinking. They don't question these ideas because their doctors, neighbors, children's teachers and counselors, and friends subscribe to them. In is supported by the social climate. Parents, and their young adult children, also hold on to these ideas because they can do something about the problems (get a diagnosis, get medications, make special academic arrangements), and these ideas do not further burden parents with blame laid on top of what is already a load of self-blame. Conscientious parents tend to blame themselves first these days and then look to others to blame, usually not their children.
