Self-esteem in children: how to build it without empty praise

“I’m just stupid at maths.”

An eight-year-old girl says it at the kitchen table, pencil in hand, stuck on a problem she cannot solve. Her mother, washing up, turns round and says what most of us would say: “What are you talking about! You’re the cleverest girl I know.” It is meant with love. It is meant as a plaster. But the next day, when the teacher hands out extra, slightly harder exercises, the girl picks the easier sheet. Because if you are the cleverest girl and you cannot solve the problem, that is far worse than if you were just an ordinary girl.

This scene is a composite, but almost every parent knows it in one form or another. We want our children to believe in themselves. And because we want it so much, we often try to convince them with words: “You’re great”, “You’re the best”, “You can do anything”. In this post I will try to show why self-esteem in children does not grow from reassurances like these — and what really helps it.

What a child’s self-esteem actually is

When we talk about self-esteem, we often picture a child who is loud, who happily stands up in front of the class and is not afraid of adults. But that is temperament, not self-esteem. A quiet child who watches for a long time before joining a game can be perfectly self-assured. And a loud child who constantly seeks attention can be deeply insecure inside. I have written more about why confidence is not the same as loudness in Confidence isn’t volume: what trusting yourself really means.

With children it seems useful to separate two layers. The first is a sense of being accepted and worthy — not because the child is good, pretty or successful, but simply because they are. The second is a sense of being able: that they can learn, try, get it wrong and try again. The first layer is born in relationships, the second in experience. When we parents try to “give” a child self-esteem through praise, we often mix the two up. We praise the achievement, and the child hears that their worth depends on achieving. I explain how these layers differ in adults in Self-image, self-worth, self-confidence: how they differ, and you will find a short explanation in the knowledge base under self-image.

When praise does the opposite

The Dutch psychologist Eddie Brummelman and his colleagues have spent more than a decade on exactly this question: what does praise do to a child who thinks poorly of themselves? The results are rather unexpected.

In one of their studies they noticed that adults spontaneously give children with low self-esteem more inflated praise — not just “you drew that nicely” but “that’s incredibly beautiful!”. The logic is understandable: the child is unsure, so we lift them up a bit more. But when the researchers looked at what happened next, they found that after inflated praise, children with low self-esteem were less willing to try something harder. For children with high self-esteem it was the other way round. Why? Because inflated praise sets a high bar. If I was “incredible”, I cannot afford to be merely “decent” next time. For a child who already doubts themselves, it is safer not to try at all.

Another of Brummelman’s studies, which followed 565 children aged seven to eleven over a year and a half, separated two things we tend to confuse. Children whose parents overvalued them — who believed their children were special, better than others and entitled to more — developed more narcissistic traits over time. High self-esteem, however, was predicted not by overvaluation or praise but by warmth: parents who showed their children that they loved them and enjoyed spending time with them. From the outside, narcissism and self-esteem can look alike. In reality the first is a feeling of “I am better than others”, the second a feeling of “I am all right, just as I am”.

Person praise and process praise

None of this means we should not praise children. It means it matters what we praise. Psychologists distinguish between person praise (“you’re clever”, “you’re a good boy”, “you’re a real artist”) and process praise (“I can see you tried three different ways”, “you kept going even though it didn’t work straight away”, “you chose that colour very thoughtfully”).

As early as the late 1990s, Carol Dweck and Claudia Mueller showed that children praised for their intelligence lost their enjoyment of a task more quickly after failing and put it down to “not being clever enough”. Children praised for effort were more likely to persist after failure. Brummelman later added an important nuance: person praise was most harmful precisely for children with low self-esteem. After a failure that followed person praise, these children felt more shame. When praise is tied to “me”, failure is tied to “me” too.

A long-term study by Elizabeth Gunderson and colleagues is also interesting. They observed how parents praised toddlers aged one to three and followed the children into the second year of school. Children who had heard more process praise in early childhood were more likely, at seven and eight, to believe that abilities can be developed.

I must add a note of caution, though. The idea of a “growth mindset” has become very popular, but more recent meta-analyses show that the effects of school programmes trying to instil it are considerably smaller than first thought. Process praise is not a magic formula. It is simply a more accurate description of what happened — and it tells the child they were seen.

Autonomy: “I did it myself”

Self-determination theory, developed by Edward Deci and Richard Ryan, holds that every person has three basic psychological needs: for relatedness, for autonomy and for competence. When these needs are met, people — children included — grow, stay curious and persist. When they are not, people become either overly dependent on outside approval or rebellious.

Autonomy in a child does not mean they may do whatever they like. It means having a sense of being the author of their own actions. That they chose, tried and solved it themselves — even if the solution was clumsy. Self-esteem that grows from “I did it myself” is sturdier than self-esteem that grows from “Mum said I’m great”.

In practice this often means that we parents need to do less. Not tying the shoelaces if the child is learning to. Not correcting a drawing to make it “nicer”. Not writing the homework for them when it is already late. Not sorting out a quarrel with a classmate before the child has even tried to sort it out alone. This is hard, because watching a child struggle hurts. But every time we do something for them that they could have done themselves, we are unintentionally telling them: “I don’t believe you can.”

How parenting style shapes how much room a child has is briefly described in the knowledge base under parenting styles. The most favourable is the one that combines warmth with clear boundaries — which is something different from permissiveness.

Competence: experience, not reassurance

The second need is competence — the sense that I can do something. And here the key word is experience. We can tell a child a hundred times that they can swim, but until they swim a length of the pool on their own, they will not believe us. And once they have, we no longer need to tell them.

Competence grows from tasks that are just hard enough: hard enough that the child has to make an effort, and not so hard that failure is almost certain. Tasks that are too easy build nothing — the child knows they are easy, so success does not tell them much. Tasks that are too hard confirm the doubt. A parent’s job is not to spare the child effort, but to help them find a task where effort pays off.

How we respond when things go wrong is just as important. A child who makes a mistake and sees the adults stay calm learns that mistakes are part of the way. A child who sees disappointment on a face or hears “I told you so” learns that mistakes are dangerous. I have written about how self-trust is built through small steps rather than thoughts in Small actions, real confidence, and about getting back up after failure in Confidence after failure.

What it sounds like in everyday life

Let us go back to the girl and her maths. What could her mother have said differently? There is no single right sentence, but the conversation might have gone something like this (a composite, not a real person):

“I’m just stupid at maths.”
“That problem has really made you cross.”
“I can’t do it. Everyone else can.”
“Show me how far you got.”
“Up to here. Then I don’t know what to divide.”
“You got the first part right. What do you think they’re actually asking us here?”

The mother did not say her daughter was clever. But she did not agree that she was stupid either. First she noticed the feeling. Then she moved from the verdict (“I’m stupid”) to the task (“how far did you get”). And instead of praise she gave precise feedback — the first part is right. From this the girl does not learn that she is clever. She learns something more useful: that she has already managed part of it and the next step is small.

A few phrases you can try instead of a general “well done”:

• “I noticed you started again when it wasn’t working.”
• “How did you come up with that idea?”
• “A month ago you couldn’t do this yet.”
• “What do you like most about it?” — so the child judges their own work.
• “Thank you for helping to tidy up.” — thanks for an action, not a rating of the person.

What a child reads from us

Children do not only listen to what we say about them. They also listen to how we talk about ourselves. A mother who sighs in front of the mirror, “God, the state of me”, and a father who mutters “I really am useless” at every mistake teach a child more than any praise. From this the child learns how mistakes, bodies and failure are handled in this family.

In relational family therapy, in which I am training with Christian Gostečnik, this is one of the founding insights: a child takes on not only words but the emotional atmosphere in which they grow up. If self-doubt is something the family does not talk about, the child often senses it anyway — and carries it on as their own. I have described where low self-esteem in adults comes from and how early relationships shape it in Where low self-confidence comes from. How attachment patterns are passed down the generations is covered in Attachment and parenting: how the pattern passes to a child.

This is not a reason for guilt. Nobody is a perfect parent, and nobody should have to be. It is, however, an invitation to notice which voice speaks inside us when we are hard on ourselves — and whether it is a voice we would like to hand on. We often call this inner voice the inner critic. I explore how a parent’s self-image affects a child in more depth in Self-image and parenthood.

In Slovenian schools, too, the pressure around marks and being “good” is often considerable. A child who gets top marks hears “well done”, while a child who gets an average mark hears “what happened?”. This is not necessarily wrong. But if those are the only two things a child hears, they learn that their worth is written in the mark book.

Exercise: a week of descriptive praise

If you would like to look at how you praise your child, you can try a simple exercise. It lasts a week and takes only a few minutes a day.

1. For the first two days, just observe. Change nothing. In the evening, write down three pieces of praise you gave, exactly as you said them.
2. Sort them. Next to each, note whether it was person praise (“you’re good”, “you’re clever”) or a description of process (“you kept going”, “you tried a new way”).
3. On the third day, choose one moment when you would have said “well done” and instead describe what you saw: “I noticed that you …”
4. At least once a day, ask your child what they think of their own work: “What went best for you here?” — and wait for the answer.
5. At the end of the week, write down what you noticed — in your child and in yourself. Was it hard? Did an old phrase slip out? What happened when you described instead of rating?

The point is not to give up praise. The point is to become more aware of what you are telling your child through it.

Where this approach falls short

I want to be honest here, because praise is now talked about as if every “well done” were a mistake. It is not.

Warmth matters more than formula. A child who loves their parents and knows they are loved will survive the odd inflated “best drawing in the world”. The studies I have cited describe patterns, not single sentences. A parent who stops at every “well done” to check whether they praised correctly can become more tense and less present — and the child senses that more than the form of the praise.

Not every doubt in a child is a self-esteem problem. A child who says “I’m no good” may in fact be overloaded, tired, or being bullied at school. If a child withdraws from others, suddenly refuses to go to school, sleeps or eats differently, or talks about not being worth loving, this is not a question of praise. Then it is right to talk to the school counselling service or your child’s paediatrician, or to seek help at a child and adolescent mental health centre. If your child talks about not wanting to live, call the Samaritans helpline in Slovenia on 116 123 or, in an emergency, 112.

Temperament remains. Some children are by nature more cautious, more sensitive or more reserved. No praise, however thoughtful, will turn such a child into the class speaker — and there is no need for it to. Self-esteem is not the same as extraversion.

And finally: research has its limits too. Most studies on praise have been carried out with Western European and American families, often in laboratory settings. How the findings translate into the everyday life of a particular Slovenian family is not always clear. So take them as a direction, not a rule.

If you notice that your own insecurity is what makes parenting hard — that your child’s failure hurts you more than you would expect, or that you recognise yourself in your child’s self-doubt — this can be a good subject for your own therapy. Not because you are a bad parent, but because parenthood often wakes up what we carried from our own parents. I continue thinking about where self-esteem really begins in Confidence doesn’t start with praise, it starts with self-awareness.

What to remember

• Self-esteem in children grows from two sources: the sense of being accepted and the experience of being able to do something.
• Inflated praise can put children with low self-esteem off challenges, because it sets the bar too high.
• Process praise (effort, strategy, progress) is more useful to a child than person praise (clever, good, talented).
• A child needs autonomy and tasks that are just hard enough — sometimes that means the parent doing less.
• Self-esteem was predicted by parental warmth, not overvaluation — so the relationship matters more than the right sentence.