Keep this in mind. Lack of respect, nuisance interference, and trying to make children copies of their parents squelches the best intentions of loving and even loveable parents. It can far too easily prevent the development of children liking themselves.
Children are hardwired to live their own lives. Instinct pushes them ahead with this principle: I develop myself. They lack mature guidance but they do it anyway—except as adults interfere. They play, explore, and please themselves. That’s where parents come in. It starts in toddlerhood shortly after the conscious mind opens and lasts for life.
Self-development makes kids adventurous know-it-alls with willingness and courage to test their world. They have every intent of pursuing whatever interests them. Boys don’t need help as they see it. Girls frequently ask for guidance; it’s instinctive both to receive it as child and dispense it later as mother. (Men are not so instinctively endowed, but many learn to do it in life.)
The ambitions of both sexes develop and expand with each new experience, and they instinctively seek to remain in charge. Although with different motivations and objectives, boys and girls rely on accomplishments to confirm self-satisfaction for boys and self-importance for girls. It consequently leads directly to liking themselves as themselves.
Boys don’t need help to climb, fix things, or try to understand how something works. Curiosity triggers action, sense of responsibility triggers imagination, and desire energizes without much other prompting. They prefer to figure things out themselves until curiosity exceeds ability or sense of responsibility exceeds imagination. Then they might ask for help beginning as toddlers but doing it less as life passes.
Girls find ways to make themselves important, and seek help when their thoughts and intentions go awry. It begins as toddlers and expands in life.
Boys pursue self-admiration by earning satisfaction through accomplishments and the reward of learning to do better as they recover from mistakes. The result is developmental progress initiated and completed by them and out of which they learn to like themselves. Being a competitor and expecting to operate independently, boys seldom seek help except to take on challenges with which they are unfamiliar and even then instinctively from non-competitors.
Girls pursue a sense of importance, mostly by making themselves more important to or in the eyes of others. They take two routes. Primarily, they focus on appealing to certain others, earning respect, preventing squabbles, avoiding hurt of selves and others, and generating relationship successes. Secondarily, they search for and find gratitude in opportunities, others, and things. The better they carve out good relationships, capitalize on opportunities, and find ways to be grateful, the better their development progresses into a rewarding and happy girlhood and adult life. Female self-development is the process of keeping all those things ‘up and running’ to each girl’s satisfaction. Girls often seek assistance, because it helps to improve their cooperative spirit and relationship success.
Parental guidance is simpler, easier, and effective than trying to shape immature personalities to meet parental preferences, standards, and expectations. It begins with this essential element. Parents show respect that the child is both a person and boy or girl, just as adults are respected. Treated respectably and generously and not disparagingly, parents can modify immature intentions and help energize kids to try harder, work harder, study harder, act more maturely, solve their own problems, and produce success as measured by the child and not the parents.
Parents hold a child’s attention by respecting them as person first, boy or girl second, and role in family and life third. Try to keep them on track morally, within family values, and willing to work for themselves while living up to someone or something bigger than they are. Love, nurturing, leadership, coaching, discipline, teaching, preaching, demanding, and other methods of influence are the instruments to deliver guidance in ways that don’t de-motivate the child. Parents do best when they use love to promote guidance and not the other way around.
Lacking effective parental guidance, many boys and girls are pushed or wander innocently into the misery of disliking themselves. When ignored or disparaged by parents, boys won’t ask and girls won’t listen. They turn to each other and too easily follow examples set by the opposite sex. Role and perhaps sex confusion follow. Confusion breeds frustrations that discourage and dissuade from trying harder to fit into their original roles.
Such boys and girls seek friendliness outside parental influence and form relationships inside of common childhood interests. They have little or nothing but peer approval to live up to, nothing bigger than themselves such as comforting home, family life, or parental approval.
Instead, parental expectations become onerous, which invites the ugly face of misbehavior. Facing parental disapproval and expectations to do better, kids give up on parental influence and look to outsiders for guidance or opportunity for boys to find self-admiration and girls to find self-importance.
Too easily they find it in peers after puberty, and a whole new game of life opens up. Too many failures, parent-disapproved achievements, and woefully too few personal accomplishments breed lack of progress to meet their own expectations. They don’t like themselves. It fuels the fires of self-discontent and self-demoralization, and destroys their interest to try harder or do something else. They coast into lack of caring, sink into irresponsibility. Not liking turns to dislike of themselves. It’s downward from there, socially, domestically, and responsibly. Dislike continues and can worsen into anorexia, suicide, or worse.
Parents interfere with good development when they inject themselves too deeply as participants into the growing-up process. Such as excessive parental involvement rather than just encouraging interest in kid’s games—e.g., little league sports—comes easily to mind. Or, parents fail to inject themselves when they don’t guide their children into the habit of accomplishing things before they get habitually involved in media toys, games, and programming that subliminally undermines liking oneself.
Boys and girls mostly need guidance that successfully encourages and energizes them into developing routine habits of working toward goals and accomplishing things. Guidance but not prevention of making mistakes and even failures. Children need to make and recover from those on their own, which become successes to breed self-worth and personal likeability.
Recovery is everything isn’t just a saying. It’s vital to self-development. When parents generate the recovery for kids’ mistakes, boys learn to dodge responsibility and girls learn they can depend totally on others. Both lose their independent spirit and become more dependent on others, which invites them to alibi to save face and use other tactics that take them away from personal responsibility and self-discipline.
Kids have the capability to succeed at what they intend to do, so goal setting is vital to good development. Nurturing, love, leadership, bossiness, discipline, teaching, preaching, and coaching should be the means to reinforce guidance that inspires self-success and mitigation of self-failures. Love should be secondary to mature guidance for two reasons. 1) When love is primary, it’s too easy and pleasant to forget the other essentials that promote guidance to keep boys and girls on the right track. 2) Boys don’t appreciate unearned gifts, and mother love is essentially unearned, although it’s nice to know that love isn’t absent.
Girls expect to develop themselves but with help when they ask for it. They are more fearful than boys of making mistakes. Hence, they don’t develop the strong sense of responsibility until as women they go through the birthing process. That gives them every right and those who like themselves take advantage and dominate their home harmoniously; liking themselves gives them greater ability.
Those who give birth but dislike themselves from girlhood lack the ability to harmoniously dominate their home. They haven’t developed successfully as a strong enough woman endowed with and energized by the accomplishments and small failures from which they recovered growing up—love just isn’t enough.
The absence of strong sense of responsibility developed and independence earned in girlhood makes a woman desperate to have a man. Without the confidence of self-dependence, she needs more help than the woman who likes herself more highly.
Boys expect to do things by themselves, which teaches them to be responsible by living with and learning by both successes and mistakes. Unless interfered with, they naturally learn responsibility by making mistakes and recovering with fix-its or try-agains. They recover for the purpose of earning self-admiration and satisfying themselves.
Too many mothers rely on their love and affection to make their children like themselves. Nothing wrong with trying except that it gives a false sense of ability, competence, and success to moms. Consequently, with fathers depending on mothers, parents ignore or don’t work hard enough to guide kids into the real broadening and deepening of a child’s self-like, which comes from within them and their accomplishments in life.
Liking themselves is different from self-esteem, which is merely a part of self-image, which is the picture of oneself that guides one throughout life. It follows, tomorrow I hope.