wondered by Joana Galhardo Tags , ,

The self-esteem thing has been hammered into our brains for decades, based on the belief that high self-esteem types achieve more in school, make and keep more friends and, in general, function better as a member of society.

 Numerous training programs and self-help books take this idea and run like hell with it! They promise that building self-esteem is the key to overcoming obstacles and failure. I even seen somewhere that some elementary schools jumped on board and started giving self-esteem classes to kids, because, as we all know, the key to happiness is constant rewards for little to no actual accomplishments!

And why is this pure bullsh*t? Well, this seems to be one of those deals where they've confused correlation and causation.
So, rather than thinking "Maybe kids with high self-esteem feel good about themselves because they get good grades in school and have lots of friends", they decided to flip that thing around! For some reason, they think that they succeed because they have self-esteem. So they tried to teach people to feel good about themselves for no other reason than pure entitlement, figuring that the actual reasons for feeling good about themselves would follow at some point later.

This results in some kids having too much self-esteem, a breed of human that scientists classify as douchebags and bitches. Yes, for the purpose of this post, those are technical terms.

And stop laughing. Well, stop chuckling or sniggering then! I'm not kidding!
Research shows that kids who have an inflated sense of self-worth become aggressive when their sense of superiority is called into question, leading to a more damaging fall when they realize what a loser they are.

I'm certainly not an expert, but it would seem like the solution would be to teach the stuff that leads to success, you know, like social and communication skills, better strategies at dealing with stress, etc.; and just let that lead naturally to success and thus self-esteem, rather than just bypassing all that and going right for the self-esteem part.

Wonder about that!