12.6: Self-Worth V. Shame

Self-worth is the feeling of acceptance a child has about his or her own strengths and weaknesses, desirable and undesirable traits, and value as an individual. To sociologists, self-esteem or the high or low appraisal is not as important today as it was thought to have been 20 years ago. There is innate value in being unique and an individual. Parents are in a prime position to teach their children to see a balance in how they value themselves.

One of the most demeaning messages sent to children from their parents is a message of shame. Shame is a feeling of being worthless, bad, broken, or flawed at an irreparable level. Some parents raise their children in the same shame-based manner that their parents used on them. Shaming children will never yield the positive outcomes parents want in their children. Shame is at the core of addiction, be it alcohol or drugs, TV or gambling, eating or shopping. Addiction is a natural expectation for people who define themselves as permanently broken or flawed. Recovery programs focus specifically on how to help the addicts accept themselves in a broken state (like most non-shamed people already do).

Shame is not the same as guilt. Guilt is a feeling of remorse for doing something wrong or not having done what one should have done. Guilt may be healthy; shame rarely is. Shame used to be used as an emotional tool devised to control and sometimes break the will of a child so that he or she would conform to the parent's will. Many of those Baby Boomers use shame today on their children and grandchildren. Shaming a child teaches them to accept their permanently broken status and give up hope on finding the joy of their own uniqueness and talents.

Parents don't have to use shame, even if their parents did it to them. Parents are the significant others of their children. Significant others are those other people whose evaluation of the individual are important and regularly considered during interactions. Parents are in a prime position to teach healthy self-worth or toxic shame and worthlessness. Especially for their pre-school children, parents teach their children how to see value in themselves and to see balance in how they find out what they are good at in life.

Parents avoiding shame teach their children how to learn from failures and mistakes. They teach them how to be patient and work hard at their goals. When the outcome goes in an undesirable way these parents console their child and reinforce that child's uniqueness and value as an individual. These parents teach their children not to draw hasty conclusions too early in life. When the children have tried and tested their talents and limits enough and launch out on their own, they can take not only a positive evaluation of themselves into their adult roles, but also a process of balancing their strengths and weaknesses in the big picture of their lives.

The process leading up to a healthy self-worth is easy to grasp. Look at Figure 6 to see a metaphor on how we measure our self-worth by weighing our ideal expectations against our real or actual performance. The key to understanding self-concept is to understand that balanced self-concept works the same way as balanced weights.

The same can be said of those who try to balance too high of an "ideal" expectation in a role because they're most likely to perform less than expected in their "actual" performance in this role. Again, balance between "ideal" and "actual" is crucial. In this example imagine that you are looking at the selfconcept formed by a young female college graduate. She has been accepted into a prestigious corporate internship role and has actually been labeled the "Intern."

If this young professional woman was raised to be fair to herself and others in seeing the balance of her worth in terms of reasonable "shoulds" and "oughts," she will be more accurate in learning from her successes and failures rather than simply chalking them up as more evidence of her core worthlessness (rocks in the apple juice). The goal is to help children learn to set reasonable goals and see one's efforts as objectively as possible.

As parents your definition of self-worth will shine on your children in direct and indirect ways. They will see how you keep the balance or don't. Make a concerted effort to value your children. Express that value to them often (some suggest that you should express it daily). Make a concerted effort to console them in their grief when they feel they might have let themselves or others down. Then teach them how to see their worth in terms of being good at some things (like most) and not so good at others (like most).