The Influence Of The Family In Building Self-esteem

As the famous anthropologist Margaret Mead explains, the family is the first social group in which a whole set of interactions is determined, in large part, by who we are. Our parents are the ones on whom rest the duty and the obligation to fill our life purse with nutrients, rich components, like security, tenderness and consideration. This vital impulse is the only one capable of enabling us to travel the world with courage.

However, on the tortuous road of building self-esteem, sometimes we don’t have enough fuel to move forward. This should lead us to realize a great introspection, which in itself should allow us to solve the problems of our childhood.

Building self-esteem and family harmony

The construction of self-esteem, as we have already said, begins in childhood. However, does that mean that we are entirely determined by the experiences we have in our childhood and pre-adolescence, and never able to escape them? Before answering this question, we must specify that, in the field of psychology, as in most sciences, the term determinism should be handled with care.

In psychological terms, everything that happens in our childhood influences us enormously, but that does not necessarily determine us. The human brain has an absolutely immense plasticity and capacity for surpassing oneself. However, even if we have the capacity to heal ourselves over the years, we must not neglect the importance of our education and the quality of the interactions that we have been able to have with the people who took care of them. we. Our educators, whoever they are, had, during our childhood, the responsibility to feed us and to house us, but also transmitted to us an emotional and educational heritage that we must know how to evaluate a posteriori .

For more on this topic, it is always interesting to read Dr. Edward Tronick, an expert in childhood development and professor of pediatrics at Harvard University. This psychologist draws our attention to the fact that, to promote the construction of a strong self-esteem in children and quality attention, it is essential to enter into harmony with them, that is to say d ” harmonize our emotions with his. However, numerous studies have shown that only, even in the best of cases, parents manage to synchronize only 40% of their emotions with their children.

This statistic may appear to us to be quite alarming, even dramatic. But Doctor Edward Tronick invites us to start thinking about him. The reason parents cannot 100% connect with their children’s emotional needs is because they also fail to do so with their own emotions.

A parent crippled by stress, resistance and emotional knots will only unconsciously transmit a series of emotional patterns to their child; patterns that the child will absorb and make his own. It is therefore very difficult to foster good self-esteem in children if their family structure is not built on good foundations, if they cannot follow a healthy model that can guide them through all the challenges. trials of life.

Family has influence, but only we decide

The construction of self-esteem throughout childhood is influenced by three main factors: our physical appearance, our social behavior and our academic performance. The way our parents deal with these three dimensions can lead us to develop security and confidence or, on the contrary, plunge us into a vicious cycle of vulnerability, loneliness and fear.

We can still see, in our immediate surroundings, that many parents remain immature and unconscious about the language they use with their children and about their method of communication. By simply listening to conversations after school, it is possible to realize how some parents are gradually destroying their child’s self-esteem.

The use of comparisons, absolutist statements (“ You suck at math ”, “ You will never pass ”…) or the inability to see emotional problems hidden deep in their child’s heart, make the new generations reproduce the same devastating pattern as their predecessors: the destruction of self-esteem.

We cannot deny it, the family exerts a determining influence in the construction of self-esteem. But what may have happened in our past does not determine our entire existence. Only we can now fill the purse of our life with powerful fuel, drawn from the forces that we have been able to develop during all our years of independence. The possibility of healing a childhood made up of emotional deficiencies is within our reach. Today we can acquire the maturity that we forgot to teach us yesterday.

It is essential to learn to take responsibility for our own behavior, not to seek in others what we can and must offer ourselves. Self-esteem is a daily job, which requires change, which takes courage and which requires a good dose of self-esteem. Whatever our past, there is always time to change our life and invest in our self-esteem.

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