For decades it has been fashionable to boost our children's self-esteem. Could we be setting them up for a fall?
"YOUNG people are coddled long after they should start learning that they aren't perfect." That was the conclusion of HS,?a blogger commenting on an article inThe New York Times?lamenting the state of today's youth. The trouble with kids, he went on, is that they have an overinflated opinion of themselves because they have been brought up to believe that everything they do is valuable and important. This was no grumpy old codger, but a young man writing about his own generation, those people born between about 1980 and 2000 who have been labelled Generation Y, or Generation Me.
As its name suggests, Generation Me has drawn some flak. Its members stand accused of being spoiled, arrogant and narcissistic, with an undeserved sense of entitlement. College professors complain that today's students demand constant attention. Employers find it hard to stomach the overblown egos of their young recruits, and therapists say they are seeing a new generation of patients depressed because they are unable to live up to their own excessive expectations. Critics argue that the blame lies with the parents, teachers and other adults who have gone out of their way to inflate children's opinions of themselves from an early age.
These are damning allegations that reflect badly not just on Generation Y but also a philosophy about child-rearing that began in the 1980s and is still going strong. If correct, we would need to revise the view that boosting children's self-esteem is the best way to ensure they reach their full potential. So what is the evidence? Are today's young people really more egotistical than past generations? If so, is that a problem? And if the modern western cult of building self-esteem is to blame, what can we do about it?
One of the most vocal critics of today's youth is Jean Twenge, a psychologist at San Diego State University, California, and author of?Generation Me?(Free Press, 2006). For evidence of Generation Y's inflated ego we need look no further than the annual American Freshman survey of 9 million college students, she says. It reveals that 52 per cent of the 2009 cohort rated themselves as having a level of social self-confidence higher than the average for the general population, compared with 30 per cent of students questioned in 1966. Today's students also rate their intellectual self-confidence, public speaking skills and leadership ability around 50 per cent higher than their 1966 counterparts (Self and Identity,?DOI: 10.1080/15298868.2011.576820).
The overriding importance of self-esteem to Generation Y was highlighted in an experiment in 2010. A team led by Brad Bushman at Ohio State University in Columbus found that college students valued a boost to their self-esteem - for example, receiving a grade hike or a compliment - more highly than the rewards that have motivated humanity since the dawn of time, such as eating a favourite food or engaging in a sexual activity. Students also rated that boost more highly than getting paid, drinking alcohol and seeing a best friend (Journal of Personality, DOI: 10.1111/j.1467-6494.2010.00712.x). Exploring further, the researchers asked the students to rate how much they wanted each of these rewards versus the pleasure they gained from them. Wanting something more than liking it is considered an indication of addiction. In all cases, they liked the reward more than they wanted it, but the difference between the two was smallest for boosts to self-esteem.
Yet the picture is not quite that simple. Mark Leary, a social psychologist at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina, cautions that colleges are not as elitist as they were in the 1960s, so the demographic profile of students has changed, making past and present cohorts not entirely comparable. "We don't know if this is a real change, or if it has to do with a change in the people who are being tested," he says. Indeed, Kali Trzesniewski at the University of California, Davis, has looked at a survey of 400,000 US high-school students over the 30 years from 1976, and found no evidence for increasing egotism in this slightly younger group. "Self-esteem scores have not changed at all," she says (Perspectives on Psychological Science, vol 5, p 58). She suspects that some, generally older, researchers have fallen foul of an age-old prejudice: "We critique the next generation. That's just what we do," she says. It is possible, she notes, that everyone, not just Generation Y, has gradually become more egocentric - but with limited data about other age groups it is difficult to test this idea.
The generous generation?
More sceptical still is Jeffrey Arnett, a psychologist who studies adolescence at Clark University in Worcester, Massachusetts. He points out that young people are volunteering for charity work in greater numbers than ever before, and are more concerned about social inequalities than their parents were. He has gone so far as to rename Generation Me, the "Generous Generation".
Nevertheless, most researchers acknowledge that there has been a real increase in self-esteem - at least in the US, where the phenomenon has been studied most. That still leaves the question of whether this is a problem. When American psychologist William James, coined the term self-esteem in 1890, he defined it as the ratio of a person's successes to their "pretensions" or goals. In other words, self-esteem is a subjective measure of your own value that increases as you achieve your goals. This matches the dictionary definition: "respect for or a favourable opinion of oneself". Surely there can be nothing wrong with that?
These days, however, self-esteem has acquired a second meaning: "an unduly high opinion of oneself; vanity". It is this definition that best fits Generation Y, according to Twenge. And that is the source of the problem. For a start, inflated egos leave many young people with unrealistic expectations, and their inability to achieve these can lead to depression. It is no coincidence, she says, that the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta, Georgia, reported last October that 1 in 9 Americans over the age of 12 now takes antidepressants - a quadrupling of the rate since the late 1980s.
Twenge sees another sign of dangerously overblown self-esteem in rising levels of narcissism. She found that twice as many college students had high levels of narcissism in 2006 compared with the early 1980s. Narcissists tend to be intolerant of criticism and prone to cheating and aggression. "These are the people who wind up in your office arguing over a grade," she says. They are also more concerned about their physical appearance, and as she points out, Americans are resorting to plastic surgery in greater numbers than ever before. In her latest book,?The Narcissism Epidemic, written with W. Keith Campbell (Free Press, 2009), she recounts anecdotes of people hiring fake paparazzi to make themselves look famous, and buying "McMansions" on credit, as evidence of the US's overblown ego.
"We have taken individualism too far," says Twenge, and popular culture reflects this. She has worked with University of Kentucky social psychologist Nathan DeWall and others to chart an increase in the frequency of the word "I" in the lyrics of hit US pop songs from 1980 to 2007. In the same time frame words related to other people, social interaction and positive emotions have decreased in frequency (Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts, vol 5, p 200). Twenge blames four factors: changes in parenting styles, the cult of celebrity, the internet and easy credit. "All of these things allow people to have an inflated sense of self in which the appearance of performance is more important than the actual performance," she says.
Others blame the self-esteem movement that began in California in the 1980s. Unfortunately, says Leary, the movement was born of a misunderstanding. Studies had shown a correlation between high self-esteem and positive life events. "People jumped to the conclusion that self-esteem was the cause of those other things, and it's not really," he says. Three decades and many self-esteem-boosting programmes later, the view persists that the best way to rear children is to build their self-esteem through a constant stream of praise and positive feedback. The evidence is equivocal at best.
In 2003, a team led by Roy Baumeister at Florida State University in Tallahassee conducted a review of the literature. A complicated picture emerged. They found that high self-esteem was generally associated with greater happiness and initiative-taking and low self-esteem was linked to depression. However, contrary to expectation, people with high self-esteem became more depressed in stressful times, while those with low self-esteem were more resilient when faced with life's ups and downs. It also emerged that attempts to boost schoolchildren's self-esteem did not improve their academic performance and could sometimes be counterproductive. High self-esteem seemed to protect girls from bulimia, but it did not prevent children from smoking, drinking, taking drugs or having sex - if anything it prompted them to try these things. Performing well in the workplace was sometimes linked to high self-esteem, but the correlation was variable and the direction of causality unclear. Self-esteem could predict neither the quality nor the duration of relationships. The overall picture was so mixed that Baumeister and his team felt unable to endorse programmes that boosted self-esteem (Psychological Science in the Public Interest, vol 4, p 1).
The consensus among psychologists today is that high self-esteem is more often a consequence of positive life events than a cause - a message that has failed to reach most parents and teachers. Leary goes so far as to assert that self-esteem that is boosted artificially, without reference to achievements, has no intrinsic value. Meanwhile, educational psychologist Herbert Marsh at the University of Oxford argues that we should think of self-esteem as just one part of the broader notion of something called self-concept, which also incorporates ideas about one's ethnic and academic identities, and gender. He believes that a good self-concept and high educational achievement are cause and effect of each other. "That's what makes schoolteachers' jobs so difficult," he says. "They not only have to teach skills, they also have to build self-belief, and then they have to link the two."
Baumeister argues that instead of building up children's egos we should build their self-control. In his new book, written with journalist John Tierney, he points to amassing evidence that willpower, not self-esteem is the essential ingredient for a successful life (Willpower: Rediscovering Our Greatest Strength, Allen Lane, 2012). He proposes that kids should learn to control their impulses and persevere at difficult tasks so that they can achieve their goals, which will naturally boost their self-esteem. Parents and teachers can help foster self-discipline by encouraging children to acquire good habits. And instead of giving constant and therefore meaningless praise, they should encourage real achievement.
If Baumeister's approach seems too draconian, Leary is more pragmatic. The message parents should be sending their children, he says, is that they are loved even though they are not perfect, and that they can improve. "Give them honest feedback." Above all, don't tell your child that he or she is the greatest kid in the world, "because no kid is".
All about others
An overinflated opinion of oneself can lead to problems (see main story) but so too can low self-esteem. During adolescence children become vulnerable, as the seamless egocentrism of their younger self rapidly acquires cracks, says Sander Thomaes, a developmental psychologist at Utrecht University in the Netherlands. Girls experience a greater decline in self-esteem than boys, but for both sexes the change is permanent. Another problem is that young people's self-esteem may be high but unstable, plummeting at the first criticism, for example. Parents understandably want to protect their teenagers' self-opinion from sinking too low at this critical time, but showering them with unfounded praise is not the answer. A better tactic is to encourage them to think about others.
Among several researchers whose work points in this direction are Jennifer Crocker and Amy Canevello from Ohio State University in Columbus. In their study of around 200 pairs of college students they found that those who sought to boost their self-esteem by getting their room-mate to acknowledge their good points failed. Their own self-esteem and their room-mate's opinion of them both dropped off over the three months of the study. "The thing that did work was actually caring about the well-being of the other person," says Crocker (European Journal of Social Psychology, vol 41, p 422).
Parents should help their kids acquire the social and other skills they need to perform well, says Thomaes. "If they succeed in that, their children will develop a reasonable sense of self-esteem."
A self-esteem gene
Some people deal with stress better than others. This ability has been linked with optimism, mastery and, more controversially, high self-esteem. Although such psychological resources are known to run in families, their genetic basis has remained obscure. But last September, Shimon Saphire-Bernstein and colleagues at the University of California, Los Angeles, announced they had identified a gene that influences self-esteem (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, vol 108, p 15118).
OXTR?codes for a receptor for oxytocin, a hormone that plays a role in behaviours including social recognition, bonding and also aggression (New Scientist, 11 February 2012, p 39
). At a particular location in its DNA sequence, the gene can have either an adenine (A) or a guanine (G) nucleotide. Everybody carries two copies of?OXTR, and Saphire-Bernstein's team found that people with one or two copies of the A variant reported lower levels of self-esteem than those with two copies of the G variant. The A group also reported more depressive symptoms.
Sander Thomaes at Utrecht University in the Netherlands thinks genetic influences probably account for between 30 and 50 per cent of individual differences in self-esteem. Saphire-Bernstein's group emphasises thatOXTR?is likely to be one of many genes that affect self-esteem. Nevertheless, the finding underlines the importance of biology in human psychology.
Laura Spinney?is a writer based in Lausanne, Switzerland
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