Ryan Galiotto

We’ve been tossing around the term ‘self-esteem’ for a long time in education and psychology, but what does it really mean? Is it the same thing as confidence? Can it be taught or improved? Let’s start with a basic definition of the term.

At this point, let’s agree that self-esteem is ‘the way in which a person judges their own value.’ What that means, basically, is that if a person judges himself to be without value, he has poor self-esteem. On the other hand, if he feels he’s very valuable, he exhibits good, or healthy, self-esteem.

Now that we’ve established what it is, let’s talk about the impact our self-esteem has on our lives. Surprisingly, research done in the past five years seems to show that the ‘self-esteem movement’ of the 80s and 90s may have been a bit misguided.

In the early 1980s, California schools launched the first ‘self-esteem-based education’ in the U.S. This curriculum was based on the idea that children with healthy self-esteem tend to do better in school, avoid drugs and refrain from teen sex.

Millions of dollars have been invested in self-esteem-based education in the U.S. alone. The hoped-for end result is that the children receiving this instruction will be more responsible and less likely to fail in life.

But two surprising notions have come to light: recent research seems to indicate that healthy self-esteem is not a reliable indicator of success in life, in fact, the reverse appears to be true.

In fact, a large study by Brown University which was published in 2003 suggests that self-esteem follows success. What they found was that a marked increase in self-esteem occurred consistently when their subjects were able to accomplish their goals.

Here’s the other commonly-held belief that may have been shattered: since the 80s, educators and psychologists have followed the notion that self-esteem is based largely on the information they receive from their parents, teachers and others close to them. In contrast, the respondents in the 2003 study, and others since, seemed to base their feelings of personal value on how well they measure up in society at large.

Said another way, one’s social values, or what one’s society determines to be valuable, create the basis for whether or not they feel that they, themselves, have an internal sense of value. For instance, if the society in which one lives places a high value on knowledge, and they have the capability to study and learn easily, then self-esteem increases as ‘measure-up’ to that social value.

And so, we circle back around to our original question: ‘what is self-esteem?’ I hope you’ll agree to a slight refinement in our original definition. And here it is, “self-esteem is the way a person looks at himself against the backdrop of what his society defines as valuable.” Keep that in mind if you decide to look further into what influences a person’s self-esteem.