Hello, Friends
“Thoughts on Self Esteem”
In the last issue of The Link Nonaka San had a helpful piece about how we can develop self-esteem in our children. As she said, it is very important to make sure our children have some expertise, which will help build their self-esteem.
She wondered why Japanese H.S. students rated themselves so low on the question “Do you value yourself?” as compared with three other countries. Only 7.5% of the Japanese said they valued themselves, whereas 57.2% of the American students said they did.
My thought on the reason for this may be simply the different world view of the two cultures. Japanese children in general are taught to be conscious of how other people perceive them. Through their school experiences they learn to consider the good of the group and not just their own desires.
Several years ago California developed a working committee to “Promote Self-Esteem and Personal and Social Responsibility.” Their report in 1989 convinced schools across the U.S. to nurture their students’ self-esteem, thinking it would eliminate social problems and academic failure. In many cases this experiment has failed.
If there is not a balance of promoting self-esteem along with insistence on responsibility, it can lead children toward being narcissistic and to a sense of entitlement.
This is the season of graduations in the U.S. as the school year ends in May or June. One of the commencement speakers shocked the nation recently by telling the graduates of the Wellesley H. S. in Massachusetts: “You are not special. You are not extraordinary.”
David McCullough Jr. was invited to various talk shows and was interviewed by the media around the country. He said his purpose was to get the students’ attention to point out that we are all just a part of the billions of other humans on earth, and that we all deserve to be treated with respect.
Like Nonaka San, I believe that our AP program presents the needed balance so that the self-esteem we teach parents is the kind that includes humility, self-reliance and service to others.
We want all children to know and feel they are special to some others, hopefully their family and friends, but not to get such an inflated sense of self that they believe they are the center of the universe.
June Seat, Founder, APJapan
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