Best of Ask Lisa: Confidence, Self-Esteem & Self-Compassion

The Ask Lisa Podcast does not constitute medical advice and is not a substitute for professional mental health advice, diagnosis or treatment. If you have concerns about your child’s well-being, consult a physician or mental health professional.

The following transcript has been automatically generated by an AI system and should be used for informational purposes only. We cannot guarantee the accuracy, completeness, or timeliness of the information provided.

Dr. Lisa Damour:
Friends, I’m clinical psychologist, Dr. Lisa DeMore. Over the course of more than 270 episodes of the Ask Lisa Podcast, there’s a question that has come up again and again. How do we raise kids who feel genuinely good about themselves? Today I’ve pulled together some of my favorite conversations on exactly that, a curated collection covering the developmental arc of self-esteem, how it plays out differently for different tweens and teens and concrete tools for helping them build confidence. We’ll also talk about your self-esteem too, because it matters more than you might think. By the end of this compilation, you’ll have a clear framework for understanding what’s happening with your child’s confidence and a toolkit for supporting it. If you’re here for science-backed, compassionate guidance on raising tweens and teens, make sure you subscribe to Ask Lisa so you never miss an episode. Now, let’s get into it.

Reena Ninan:
Hey there, I’m Reena Ninan, co-host of the Ask Lisa Podcast. Before we can talk about how to build confidence in our kids, we need to understand what self-esteem actually is, where it comes from, how it develops, and why it’s so much more complex than just telling our kids they’re great. In this first chapter, Dr. Lisa walks us through the developmental foundation of self-esteem and we hear from psychologist Dr. Tovah Klein about why a child’s sense of worth is never built in isolation. We’re pulling from episode 50, episode 192 and episode 263.
Where does self-confidence and self-esteem come from, especially when you’re little? When you’re an adult, okay, you probably have had ways to build it and see it crumble. But how do you get and instill that in a kid? Where does it come from?

Dr. Lisa Damour:
Well, it’s interesting because there’s actually a pretty clear developmental trajectory for kids around self-confidence and self-esteem. And so we can go back to earliest days. One, two, and three year olds don’t really think much about it. They’re the center of the universe. They know it, they feel it. They feel good about all that. Four year olds can start to feel a bit more fragile in terms of self-esteem because by four we do kind of challenge kids’ sense of being at the center of everything. We do sort of expect them to start to be more of a member of the organization that is the family as opposed to dictating so much of family life. And you will see in four year olds, there’s almost like a compensatory, very high sense of confidence. They are often sort of braggadocious four year olds. I remember with one of my daughters, we were driving, she’s like, “First I’m going to win the Olympics and then I will be a pilot and after that I’m going to … ” And it was just like this wonderfully ambitious but a little over the top.
And this is where sometimes it’s a huge liability to be a psychologist. This was a good moment where I was like, “Yeah, you really like sports.” And I didn’t feel like I had to take her down a few notches. Because what happens is as they hit five, six, seven, there starts to be a bit of a drop off in self-esteem from what is typically in development, a little bit of an over high confidence around three and four year olds and that drop off comes for a couple of reasons. One is they do get into school and they start to compare themselves a little bit more. They start to sit next to kids who can do things they cannot yet do. And then really, Reena, by third or fourth grade, so we’re talking now eight or nine, we start to give kids more honest feedback that when you’re in kindergarten, first and second, we’re like, “You’re fabulous.That’s a great scribble.” And then by third and fourth, we’re like, “I’ve seen you do better work.” So part of what parents need to be prepared for is that it sort of has its own highs and lows that play out developmentally. So if you feel like, “Man, my kid was so super confident at four, what happened at eight?” Mostly it’s kind of a correction. They’re starting to see the world more broadly and see their place within it. But that’s right, that’s the moment then when we want to make sure they have ways to feel good that they control, right?
So that’s where things like having jobs you do around the house, being expected to be decent and kind within the family, having responsibilities, the expectation that we start to put on kids that even if the work is easy or not interesting to them at school, they’ll do it well. So they may not feel good about the work itself. It may not be their cup of tea, but they can sort of take real pride in how they’ve done it.
If we think about creating a foundation of self-esteem, what I would want parents to know is it’s a little bit up and down wobbly no matter what you do in earlier childhood, but if you start to have standards and hold kids to standards that are fair, ask them to do things that are within their capacity, praise them when they do a really good job, hold higher standards when they don’t do a very good job again so that they can feel good about what they’ve done, that’s where we start to lay the groundwork for good self-esteem.
So in your new book, Raising Resilience, you talk about five keys to resilience. What are they and why are they important?

Dr. Tovah Klein:
So I have what I call “five pillars” to really think about what are these internalized concepts that we want to build in children that are built over time. It’s not like one day this appears and they all also go together. They’re not in an order. This is not a stepwise plan. So the first is this idea that we provide security. We anchor our children and why is that so important? Well, first of all, it brings down their kind of arousal level, but it also teaches them that there’s somebody they can count on and trust that becomes trust in themselves. “I’m going to be okay in the world. I can move out in it.”
Teenagers need this as much as two year olds because when they go out in the world, you don’t want them just to be all over the place thinking they’re alone. So it’s this security and trust.
It’s emotions. And you guys talk about that all the time. This is what we do as psychologists. So this ability to understand emotions, learn to handle them, what we call regulate. In the book, I call it the balanced principle. So it’s feeling them, knowing them and handling them, but the parent is helping particularly in the early years, but still as children get older, we step back, we’re still doing it. And then the third one is in many ways I have to say my favorite, the freedom trail. How do you help that child get that sense of agency so they really can go out in the world? Well, part of it is limits, but also stepping back and giving them the space. And this is always difficult for any of us as parents, that nuance of, how do I let my child separate and be independent, which is what I want and, oh my gosh, I’m worried.
So some reasonable limits.

Dr. Lisa Damour:
The thing I’m thinking about, Reena, is a metaphor I shared in Untangled about kids and self-esteem. The metaphor I shared is the tributaries and the lake. So the way I think about self-esteem, it’s like a lake that needs to be filled. It needs stuff in it. And what we want for kids are lots and lots of tributaries, lots of things that bring a source of pride and self-esteem. Doing well academically, you’re at least feeling good about your academics and having friends and being of service and being a good teammate. It’s not preventable and not necessarily terrible if part of what a person of any age takes pride in is, I like the way I look and I get some feedback about it even that I am a good looking person.That’s not the end of the world. Here’s where to your question about lasting damage, here’s where it can really be a problem.
One is if it’s the major tributary, if the investment in one’s appearance starts to take up so much time and energy, which this letter indicates it’s sort of like bordering on that it’s taking away some other tributaries because the kid’s not reading, the kid’s not writing. If it starts to crowd out other tributaries, that’s a problem. Kids need lots of tributaries and their looks, okay, fine, can be part of it, but it shouldn’t be the whole thing. The other thing I will say, Reena, and I don’t know if you know women like this, I think it’s changing as people alter themselves so much and appearance is so dealt with so differently these days. One of the things we’ve long recognized when we talk about things like narcissism is that people who are narcissistic need admiration. They need the oxygen of being admired. One of the things I learned in my training and I have watched in real life is sometimes you’ll have an extremely beautiful woman and the world is giving her all this feedback that she’s so gorgeous and she develops her sense of value and worth around that.
And frankly, it goes fine as long as she’s pretty. And then as she starts to age and the world doesn’t give that kind of feedback, if that is her sole source of oxygen for feeling good, she’s in trouble. That’s the worst case scenario, want to prevent this down the line, but I’ve seen it. I’ve seen that happen where looks fade, man, they do. They always do.

Reena Ninan:
Here’s something that surprised me. The confidence crisis doesn’t look the same for every kid. Tweens and teens experience different valleys of plummeting self-esteem. If you don’t know what to look for, it’s easy to miss what’s actually going on. Let’s look at the sharp confidence drop girls often experience around age 12. The puberty valley that can devastate boys’ self-esteem in middle school and why appearance is such a complicated piece of the puzzle. We’re drawing from episode 189, episode 246, and also episode 70.
How long does this last, this sort of angst and this questioning of maybe your self-confidence? Can you kind of walk us through maybe elementary, high school, middle school, high school, because it feels so painful.

Dr. Lisa Damour:
It is painful. It is very painful. So the self-confidence question, it’s actually interesting because we’ve done research along those lines and it’s worth saying here, just if we’re going to talk about confidence and trajectories over time, for girls in middle school, we see a real drop off. So elementary school girls feel pretty good about themselves, but a very consistent finding is around age 12. There’s a pretty precipitous slide. We’ve got a million reasons why we think this is true, suddenly anxious about their bodies in new ways, suddenly anxious about achievement in new ways, comparison comes in. I mean, there’s a lot going on. For boys, interestingly, confidence is more steady and it can be especially high and you may be seeing this right now with where your son is, in boys who hit puberty early on the early side of the trajectory who are bigger and stronger, which also confers athletic capacity often.
And in sports obsessed towns, that athletic stuff can go a long way towards supporting self-esteem in boys. For some boys, they ride that very comfortably all through high school. Other kids catch up physically and that can help them. But for boys, the physical piece really is big when we look at broad self-confidence things. Okay. So now this kid is basically not playing in that space, right? And you’ve probably seen him. I’ve watched guys who are dying to hit puberty so that they can keep up athletically with their 10th grade classmates or they’re just behind, they’re not behind, they’re just on the sort of other end of the bell curve of puberty. For this boy, I think it is going to be around getting closer to 14 where you can have more perspective on things and getting good at something.

Reena Ninan:
Anything.

Dr. Lisa Damour:
Let him get good at something. Help him get good at something that he cares about.

Reena Ninan:
It’s really hard when it’s so sports focused and you see your kids’ self-confidence kind of go down the drain. And even I have to say, even for boys who play sports, I find middle school years are so hard because some boys just fully develop and they’re there and other boys aren’t even registering on the puberty meter.

Dr. Lisa Damour:
It’s true.

Reena Ninan:
So even if you are playing a sport, if you’re a little guy or you haven’t fully started hitting that, it’s really hard to see them go through that.

Dr. Lisa Damour:
Yeah. It’s painful. It doesn’t last forever, but it’s hard.

Reena Ninan:
Can moms of boys do something to make sure their boys are not sexist or do not become sexist?

Dr. Lisa Damour:
Part of it is though we have to find ways to help boys maintain self-esteem through this. This is their whole day. This isn’t just like something they’re dipping in and out of. It’s class and then it’s recess and then it’s back to class. And a lot of these guys are trying to consolidate some sense of masculinity and for a lot of them, like I mentioned this in The Emotional Lives of Teenagers, the definition of that is not getting beat by a girl and all they’re doing is getting beat by girls. So their self-esteem is enormously fragile.

Reena Ninan:
That’s great to know. That’s like a news flash for so many people that at this point their self-esteem is fragile.

Dr. Lisa Damour:
Can be very fragile. And it’s interesting, Reena. Another thing we’ve always seen in the data is that for girls to hit puberty early is actually not on balance all that good for them, that they get these very adult women bodies when they’re sometimes even 10 or 11, which is so hard on a kid.
For boys to hit puberty early has always been associated with good outcomes. They’re bigger, stronger, faster, they have neurological advantage. We know that this is hard on kids if they are like right in the middle or even late puberty. You’ve got a son, right? You see the range of where the kids are. Some are shaving, some look like fourth graders. I mean, they’re all classmates. It’s like such a strange configuration at this point, eighth, ninth grade for boys is like, they’re all over the map. So first and foremost, this kid has to have ways to feel good about himself and so do all of his friends. They need to have their own scout group or they need to have their own hobbies or they need to have their own fill in the blank.

Reena Ninan:
Find something that you’re passionate about.

Dr. Lisa Damour:
Yes. They can take pride in service projects. You can’t mess those up. I mean, there’s just so much value in those things and especially at this moment for boys.

Reena Ninan:
If I tell my daughter she looks beautiful, I feel like I’m feeding into the focus of the parents. If I don’t tell my daughter she’s beautiful, I feel like I’m not building up her self-confidence. Please help. Isn’t this such a great letter?

Dr. Lisa Damour:
It’s such a great letter. And honestly, it’s so accurate to the tension of having a girl. And I really struggle with this and I was struggling with this while I was writing Under Pressure because part of me feels like I don’t want for one more drop of ink to be spilled or one more word to be said about girls’ appearance. I am so over it talking about girls’ appearance, the world is obsessed with girls’ appearance every time. I’m so over it. And then one of my daughters will walk in the kitchen, I’ll be like, “Oh my gosh, you look adorable.” Do you do this too?

Reena Ninan:
Absolutely.

Dr. Lisa Damour:
You can’t even help it.

Reena Ninan:
That is like a laughter that I totally identify with exactly what you’re saying. But what I love about this dad’s letter is what do you do as a parent? Not saying they look beautiful or good also has an impact on their self-esteem, right?

Dr. Lisa Damour:
It does. And it’s so complicated Reena. I mean, this is one of those things where I kind of like turn and twist and turn and twist within it because on the one hand, you kind of can’t help yourself or I can’t help myself from being like, “Oh, you look so cute or you’re so darling.” And it feels unstoppable in a way, or I don’t want to stop it. And on the other hand, especially those of us raising daughters, the last thing we want to reinforce is the idea that their outward appearance is where their value lies.

Reena Ninan:
But I’m so torn by this. Should you not ever comment that on their appearance? How do you deal with that?

Dr. Lisa Damour:
I have to say, of course you have to comment sometimes on how adorable they are and how beautiful you think they are. I have no problem with that where I think this can go off the rails. I think there’s a few ways. One is if that becomes a heavy emphasis, right? If there’s a lot of time and energy spent talking and thinking about a daughter’s appearance and that’s the line he quoted in the letter from Under Pressure is like, “Yeah, we’re going to end up talking about our kids’ appearance, especially probably our daughter’s appearance, but we got to balance it with talking about everything else.” So I think finding a balance where maybe for every one comment you’re making on how cute you think your kid is, you’re making nine on her science project.

Reena Ninan:
Got it.

Dr. Lisa Damour:
That’s one way to do it.

Reena Ninan:
So what can parents do to build confidence in girls?

Dr. Lisa Damour:
The key I think is to focus on what they control and they control things like how they treat other people, the activities they do, how much practice they put into things, school, especially if school’s something that’s a source of pleasure or fits well with that girl’s skillset and to repeatedly frame it in terms of, you know, people’s appearance, they kind of got handed that and they don’t really have much say about it and also you can’t change it that much. I think part of what’s really hard is our kids live in a digital world that suggests that the body is kind of infinitely mutable You can lose weight, you can trim your thighs, you can have makeup that makes you look like a totally different person. And I think that that can play to this idea that their outward appearance is something they have a lot of control over and could change if they wanted to.
So one of the ways to help kids build confidence is just to say, “Yeah, I mean, the way we look, it’s kind of the hand we’re dealt, but it’s a very small part of that hand. Who we are is really where the action is. And that may not feel true right now, but I promise you it’ll feel true before long.”

Reena Ninan:
So now that we know what we’re dealing with, the question is, what do we actually do? So let’s get practical. Dr. Lisa and her guests share useful concrete guidance on finding the one thing your kid can genuinely call their own, building social confidence through low stakes practice and also using everyday moments of responsibility and independence as powerful confidence builders. We’re featuring episode 189, episode 137 and episode 222.

Dr. Lisa Damour:
When I think about things that were said to me when I was in training that have really, really stayed with me, probably one of the most powerful comments that ever came to me was from a supervisor I just adored. We were talking about a case I had where the person was, it was an adult who was struggling in a lot of ways and also not doing things she was supposed to be doing. And he said, “People feel good about themselves for the things they do well.” When we get to any question of self-esteem, that always is the first thing that comes back to my mind.

Reena Ninan:
Find something you’re good at.

Dr. Lisa Damour:
Find something for this kid to feel good at and get good at. And that’s hard to get good at, that takes effort, right? Chess club, I mean something. People feel good about themselves for the things they do well, help this boy find something that he does well.

Reena Ninan:
Lisa, what do you do if, obviously as you mentioned, they don’t want to go to the social groups and they don’t have that friend because it can be so isolating often that you climb up into a shell. How does a parent respond then?

Dr. Lisa Damour:
Well, and especially like clam up into a shell does sound a little bit like this letter. What she’s saying is this child has very low social confidence, is very anxious. Now these are my words about how things are going to go socially. So the rule here, Reena, is the only way to get past an anxiety, the only way to build confidence is by doing the thing is by doing the thing. The more you wait or daydream about how it can go wrong, the more anxious you become. So what I would say in terms of the low social confidence or a kid who’s feeling very reluctant to put themselves out there is can the parents create very low stakes, high chance of success conditions for her to actually start to wade into being a bit more of a social person and then see if you can’t say like, why don’t you invite that one kid over, like a kid who you know is going to be likely to be a fun guest and a wonderful kid and just treat it all as practice, right?
That social skills are like any skills, you develop them through practice and so she may need to practice her social skills so you want to set her up for success. There’s something I learned when I was in my training about toddlers and handing things over to them that actually applies at all ages and it’s like a stagewise process by which you hand things over. So it’s not like you say to a kid, “Okay, you’re now in charge of this and you walk away.” That may fail, right? They may not really know the steps. But so Reena, when I was 29, we moved to Cleveland and I was doing some training with this very, very esteemed psychoanalyst named Erna Fuhrman. Her area was little children, toddlers. And what I learned from her is when you’re handing a task over to a kid, there’s actually steps. There’s doing for, doing with, standing by to admire, and then letting them do it on their own, like independent from you.
So doing for and then doing with. So making time, carving out the time, whether it’s doing with teaching a kid how to make dinner, doing with getting on the public bus with your kid before they have to do it alone and you take the ride together. Of course, this really requires time. It could be doing with like, let’s do a round of laundry, doing with let’s load the dishwasher together and I’ll show you how I like it done. Okay. So there’s first doing for and then there’s doing with, then they’re standing by to admire where you just stand back and let them do it. They load the dishwasher, you cheer them on, they make dinner, you cheer them on. And then there’s the point where you say like, “Oh, you know what? We need you to make dinner Wednesday night. We aren’t getting home till seven, so whatever you put on the table, we’re going to eat.” So it moves towards independence.
So to your question of like, how do you know if it’s too much, you’ll get feedback every step of the way if when you’re doing with it, like if the kid can’t tie their shoes still, it’s too early. It’s too much. If the kid is really struggling to figure out the bus while you’re just, maybe the second bus ride, you’re just like, “All right, you lead, I’ll follow,” and they really don’t know what they’re doing, then you walk it back. Doing for, doing with, standing by to admire, letting them do it entirely on their own gives both the teaching that we have to do and also gives a little bit of room for maybe realizing that we’ve overshot in terms of what we’re asking of them.

Reena Ninan:
Everything we’ve covered so far has been about the world around our kids, the activities, the opportunities, the responsibilities we create for them. But there’s another side to this and it might be the most important one, what happens inside their heads. In this chapter, we’ll look at negative self-talk, perfectionism and self-compassion and what parents can do both directly and through modeling to help kids develop a gentler, more resilient relationship with themselves. We’re drawing from episode 135, episode 158 and episode 143.

Dr. Lisa Damour:
So when kids are engaged in negative self-talk, like, “I’m so lousy, I’m so terrible, I hate myself,” I want to give a few different tactics because different families are going to need different things for different kids on different days. So one thing you could do is you could actually just be like, “Whoa, whoa, whoa, I love you and no one gets to talk about you that way, not even you.” So basically be like, “You’re not allowed to talk that way about yourself because I won’t let anyone talk that way about you, yourself included.” So just basically be like, “Stop, stop.” Another thing you can do is to say, “I get it that is your first reaction when you make a mistake. I don’t love it as your first reaction. I hate that you feel that way, but I’m going to hang here for a second. Let’s see if you can have a second reaction.” So to create space for them to be like, “Okay, yeah, so my first thought is ‘I’m terrible,’ but my second thought is ‘actually that was a really hard project’ or whatever.” So make room for the kid to get themselves there on their own.

Reena Ninan:
So walk me through this. If my kid is having negative self-talk, you acknowledge it is what you’re saying, but then you give them the space to have a second opinion. So how do you foster that to happen?

Dr. Lisa Damour:
So I think you could say, “All right, I hear you. I hear you, that you’re upset with yourself about what you feel to be a mistake.” And you can even use that language of, “what you feel to be a mistake.” You’re already inserting space between their perception and what you think the reality may be. And then you can say, “And I get that that may be your first reaction to think that, but I actually think you may also soon have a second reaction. You may be able to see the situation in a different way. So I’m going to wait for that second reaction.” So you’re just creating it.

Reena Ninan:
And do you offer other things to get them to rethink like, “Oh, look at this and look at this and look at this, ” so then you can have the second once over about the situation.

Dr. Lisa Damour:
You totally could. If they look at you like, what are you talking about? You could say, “There’s a lot of ways to see what just happened.” You could see it this way, this way, this way, this way. Those are the various reactions I have to it, but I’m also wondering if you might have a reaction yourself. And I think one of the things I’ve learned as a psychologist is there’s more value in having people say the words themselves as opposed to having us say them to it, say the words to them. So if you can kind of lead the kid to the water of saying, “Well, actually I don’t know that anybody understood the assignment, it’s better for them to say it than for us to say it.”

Reena Ninan:
Because they process it then, you know they’ve internalized it.

Dr. Lisa Damour:
It’s somehow, yeah, it’s organic to them. Okay, here’s another option for when kids are engaged in negative self-talk, which is to say, “You and I both know that’s not true,” so just put that stake in the ground, “but I bet it’s awful to even think that,” to actually empathize with how painful it must be to have that thought about oneself is again, like you’re not endorsing it, but you’re getting to a tender place of offering compassion that that’s even where their mind goes.

Reena Ninan:
And then they feel you’re sympathizing with them, so you must get where they’re possibly at at this point.

Dr. Lisa Damour:
Yeah. And you must get how bad it feels to even think that thought. But I think it’s really important to say like, “You and I both know that’s not true, but it must be awful to feel that way.”
And what we’re going there for there, Reena, is an interesting universe of self-compassion, right? Self-compassion. And what we want, and we want this in always for our kids, is for them to actually be able to take a tender stance toward themselves. And it’s interesting around negative self-talk because what we’re actually asking for is a split. There’s a part of you that talks to yourself in that really nasty way and there’s another part of you that could be like, “Oh my gosh, this is really painful to even have these thoughts or feelings, even if they’re mine.”
One of the things that comes up in your book is struggling with personal compassion and using negative self-talk, running oneself down. So when it comes to negative self-talk, which I think many of us can be prone to at times, how do we flip the script on this? How do we move into a place of being gentler with ourselves and more accepting?

Dr. Sue Varma:
When we talk about self-compassion, I’m also very much an admirer of the work of Dr. Kristen Neff, and she talks about the ideas of three common threads is one is a mindful observation of what you’re experiencing. So I always say to my patients, notice these negative thoughts the way you would notice airport baggage carousel, you see it go by, you may have comments and judgment about it, but you don’t go home with somebody else’s baggage.

Dr. Lisa Damour:
Love that. Okay. I am stealing that. That is the best description ever I have heard of letting things go by that is apt and funny at the same time. Okay, keep going. Keep going.

Dr. Sue Varma:
So don’t invest in these negative thoughts. Be aware of them and let them go. The second part is the acceptance of it of, okay, I have this. Okay, this happened to me or okay, I messed up. I did this. I screwed up. And then the common humanity piece, which I love so much because it says, am I the only person who has ever screwed up in the world? I’m not alone in this. We all do this. This is what bonds us. I’m not the first person. And I think for me, what’s really helpful is hearing about other people’s difficulties and they’re like, “Sue, I struggled with the same thing. Do you know I went through this? Why do you beat yourself up over this?” And all of these three things then gives you a path forward after you accept, after you observe and mindfully notice and after you recognize that you’re not alone, it then allows you to move forward.
And what I love and I talk about in the book is the beauty and the science behind the self-compassion that when students take tests, they took a math test, they failed it. When they did self-compassion exercises and asked themselves these three questions, “Are you alone in this? Can you observe it? Can you accept it? ” They actually came back and beat the kids that didn’t and scored higher than those who failed, but then did not do the self-compassion exercises. When parents who are struggling with children and are beating themselves up because they feel helpless and hopeless, do self-compassion exercises. They are more effective with their children.

Dr. Lisa Damour:
What does raising a compassionate kid in the world today look like to you?

Dr. Traci Baxley:
Well, I think first of all, it starts with examples of how we’re living our own lives. I think one of the things that is the most important to me as a mom, and I think it’s also one of my greatest challenge is the idea of self-compassion. I think our children seeing us show compassion to ourselves, showing forgiveness to ourselves. I think when it starts in ourselves and it’s easier to see how it can expand out into the world. I think the way that we model, the way that we talk in our own homes, the way that we self-talk, I think the idea of teaching our children self-compassion at home and modeling that really teaches them how to expand that out into the world.

Dr. Lisa Damour:
Watch how you talk about yourself. If when you make a mistake, it becomes a parade of running yourself down or self-flagellation. That’s not good for you and it’s also not good for your kid to watch. We can work against perfectionism, but we can also just help kids with overall self-esteem. If when we make errors, which we do, which I as a mother do on an hourly basis, I would say.
If we say, “You know what, you’re right. I made a mistake. I’m thinking it through. I’ll try to avoid it going forward.” But we do it in a way where we’re not shattered, where we make it clear like, “I can absolutely look in a clear-eyed way at my own shortcomings and still maintain a sense that I’m a valuable and worthy person.” If we can model that by how we live, and especially if you have teenagers, you’ll have a lot of opportunities because they will constantly point out your shortcomings. You can then really show mistakes get made. We’re all human. We’re all here to try to be better, but making a mistake does not mean I’m a worthless person and it doesn’t mean you’re a worthless person. So again, my favorite quote in all of parenting comes from the inside of a Dove chocolate wrapper. Don’t talk about it, be about it.
So you can be about it here.

Reena Ninan:
I love it. Oh, this is so good. And we will make mistakes millions and billions of times over the course of our lifetime. So it’s an important lesson to learn. We’ve spent this whole compilation talking about our kids, but we want to end somewhere a little unexpected, with you, because it turns out that one of the most important things that you can do for your child’s confidence is to take care of your own. We’ll close with this moment from episode 161.

Dr. Lisa Damour:
It’s imperative that anyone who is parenting teenagers has other sources of self-esteem and other people to talk to. If you go into raising a teenager and your sense of feeling like a good or connected person hinges on how your kid treats you, this is not going to go well.

Reena Ninan:
Probably right.

Dr. Lisa Damour:
You really need, right? So I’ve had my work, I love my work, I have my colleagues, I love my colleagues, people have their friends, people have their work or volunteer or religious pursuits, whatever you got. But my number one piece of advice on this one is by the time you have a teenager, you’re going to need other aspects of your life that help you to feel good and connected because you cannot count on teenagers for this.

Reena Ninan:
Things to mull on that when the pain is so heavy, I felt that in this mom’s letter because I think about it all the time, even though we’re not fully in that stage, but you see them peeling away and the looks they give you of what you can and can’t say sometimes now.

Dr. Lisa Damour:
Yeah, it’s painful and it’s lonely.

Reena Ninan:
It’s lonely. That’s it.

Dr. Lisa Damour:
And it’s important to talk about that. It’s important for people to know that it’s not just their house, that this is what happens in other homes, even if it feels strange and unexpected in yours.

Reena Ninan:
Yeah. It’s the thing is parenting can feel so lonely and you don’t realize other people are experiencing the same thing, just not vocalizing it in the way you feel the pain.

Dr. Lisa Damour:
That’s exactly right. That’s exactly right.
Thank you so much for spending this time with us.
Raising kids who feel genuinely good about themselves is one of the most important things we can do as parents. I hope something you heard today gave you a new way of seeing your child or a new tool to reach out the next time that things feel hard.
If this compilation was helpful, please subscribe to Ask Lisa so you never miss what’s coming next. And if you have a question you’d like us to tackle, you can always send it to [email protected].
Here’s to you, to yours, and to untangling family life.