Lea Ann Fernino is warming up her kindergarten class one chilly fall morning with a little lesson on self-love.
“I like me because I like my hair,” announces 5-year-old Lydia Melendez, twisting her beaded braids.
“I like me because I do my alphabet and my numbers,” Louie Burgos bellows.
“I like me because I like my Yankees hat,” Stephanie Rodriguez squeals.
For the next 10 minutes, two dozen preschoolers at William B. Cruise Elementary School in a largely poor neighborhood here stand and declare their likability as part of a curriculum created to foster students’ self-esteem. The program is called “I Like Me!”
Ms. Fernino plans to punctuate the next three months of school with similar activities, including songs and readings from personalized story books.
“These kids don’t know they are special,” the bright-eyed, 29-year-old teacher says. “They need to be taught.”
Many educators have been singing this tune since the “Me Decade” of the 1970s. The problem with troubled youths, they say, is a deep-seated lack of self-esteem. If children could just buck up and feel better about themselves, they would be less likely to turn to violence or drugs, and more likely to do well in school.
But a growing body of research in the 1990s is introducing a sour note into the popular educational refrain.
While it’s true that students who like themselves tend to perform better academically, there is little evidence that self-esteem programs have any effect, many researchers say.
Their studies indicate that children’s self-esteem can be elevated only if they gain recognition for particular tasks or aptitudes that students themselves believe are important. But in many classes, teachers heap praise on students indiscriminately.
“There may be a role to get kids to love themselves, but can you do that in a course?” asks Kristin Moore, the executive director of Child Trends Inc., a research group based in Washington. “High self-esteem has to be based on real accomplishments rather than something that’s inflated artificially.”
And even if self-esteem programs are successful, it’s questionable whether they can thwart violent behavior. The last thing aggressive people need, many researchers say, is a higher opinion of themselves.
Violent Reactions
No one formally tracks the extent to which schools try to raise students’ self-esteem. But Celia Lose, a spokeswoman for the American Federation of Teachers, suggests that most elementary schools offer some type of lesson for that purpose in the earliest grades.
In middle and high schools, self-esteem programs are less common, and they are most often integrated into health or sex education classes or violence-prevention courses.
While little research has been conducted on specific programs used in schools, studies on self-esteem in general cast doubt on their effectiveness, especially when it comes to reducing violence.
“It’s very appealing that loving ourselves more will solve all our social problems,” says Roy F. Baumeister, a professor of psychology at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland. “But if it were that easy to prevent violence, all violence would have been ended centuries ago.”
Mr. Baumeister and Brad J. Bushman, a professor of psychology at Iowa State University, came to that conclusion after conducting a pair of studies for a report in the July issue of the American Psychological Association’s Journal of Personality and Social Psychology .
The researchers interviewed a total of 540 Iowa State students--all psychology majors--to assess their levels of self-esteem and of narcissism. High self-esteem was described as “thinking well of oneself,” and narcissism as “passionately wanting to think well of oneself.”
The students wrote a short essay, which was returned to them with an evaluation, ostensibly from another participant. Then each student was told that he or she would be competing against someone else in a test of their reaction times. The winner of each round could punish the loser by making the person listen to a blast of noise, the duration and intensity of which were at the discretion of the participant.
Participants were told either that their partners had criticized their essays, had praised the essays, or hadn’t read the essays.
The researchers found that the students’ level of self-esteem, whether high or low, was irrelevant to whether they acted aggressively. This result “contradicts the traditional view that low self-esteem causes aggression, as well as any suggestion that favorable self-views in general lead to aggression,” the report says.
Aggressive responses were strongest, meanwhile, among narcissists who thought they were attacking someone who had given them a bad evaluation.
The report concludes: “It is not so much the people who regard themselves as superior beings who are the most dangerous, but rather those who have a strong desire to regard themselves as superior beings.”
A separate, new study solidifies the link between aggressiveness and narcissism. Mr. Bushman, the Iowa State University professor, assessed the narcissism levels of 65 violent prisoners in three states and found that they were significantly higher than those of a similarly aged group of college students.
Mr. Bushman does not suggest that schools that teach self-esteem lessons are intentionally nurturing little narcissists. But he warns that “if kids begin to develop unrealistically optimistic opinions of themselves, and those beliefs are constantly rejected by others, their feelings of self-love could make these kids potentially dangerous to those around them.”
If the goal is to reduce violence, Mr. Bushman adds, schools should use their money to teach self-control rather than to boost students’ egos.
A focus on mood elevation seems superfluous considering that Americans in general already seem to have a high opinion of themselves, Mr. Baumeister says. He points to a survey in the 1970s that asked people to rate their driving ability; 90 percent of the respondents rated themselves as above average.
“The degree to which we overestimate ourselves is bigger in America than in Asia, for example, where the norm is to be modest,” he says. “It’s a cultural pattern. People here dwell on success and ignore their failures.”
Starting Early
The term “self-esteem” became part of America’s pop-cultural lexicon during the 1960s.
In that era of sexual liberation and experimentation with illicit drugs, curricula that spawned a host of permissive doctrines took root in schools, says William Damon, the author of Greater Expectations: Overcoming the Culture of Indulgence in Our Homes and Schools.
As a flood of trendy self-help books crowded bookstore shelves, educational publishers churned out school curricula that dovetailed with society’s increased fascination with self-betterment.
The “I Like Me!” program being used here in Passaic is one of the newest self-esteem curricula to hit the market. It was developed seven years ago by a group of educators working with the nonprofit group Kindergartners Count Inc., based in Topeka, Kan.
The 12-week course for kindergartners already reaches a quarter of a million children around the country. The subsidized books and teacher’s guides are billed as “early intervention against many of the factors contributing to youth violence.”
One recent morning at William B. Cruise Elementary, a gaggle of 5- and 6-year olds rush to the corner of their classroom to fetch their newly arrived “I Like Me!” books, personalized to include each child’s name as part of the text. Curling up on a red rug with squares spelling out the alphabet, the kindergartners are mesmerized as Ms. Fernino reads from the books.
The “I Like Me!” curriculum includes motivational songs about students’ aptitudes, definition games using words like “unique” and “citizenship,” and daily reading assignments in the “I Like Me!” book.
“Our parents don’t really take the time to boost children’s esteem. They are working or have many children and no time for one-on-one,” says Ms. Fernino, noting that more than 90 percent of the pupils in this inner-city school come from poor families and live in neighborhoods steeped in violence.
She adds that the “I Like Me!” text may be the only book these children have to read at home. “They are starved for attention,” Ms. Fernino says. “Before they can learn anything academically, they have to have confidence.”
Though the program is still quite new, preliminary reports are encouraging, says Donald F. DeMoulin, a professor of education at the University of Tennessee at Martin, who is evaluating the “I Like Me” program. A survey conducted for Kindergartners Count last year of 160 teachers using the course found a 40 percent reduction in reprimands to students for disciplinary problems by the end of the 12-week course.
“Our premise is that if we start early enough, we can minimize the possibility that children’s self-concept gets fed by negative means,” Mr. DeMoulin explains. “That comes through warm homes and warm schools surrounded by a warm community environment. If you have those things intact, you minimize the chance that children will take on violent tendencies.”
The curriculum’s focus on reading and on building other skills youngsters value is especially important, says Susan Gorin, the executive director of the National Association of School Psychologists and the chairwoman of the advisory board of Kindergartners Count Inc.
Surveys conducted before and after kindergartners took the course last year showed a modest 7 percent improvement in children’s self-concept, Ms. Gorin says. “When they are young kids, giving them an academic tool and surrounding it with a caring adult, pretty pictures, and great messages is a bonus,” she says.
A Focused Approach
Making children feel good isn’t all bad, says Susan Harter, a professor of psychology at the University of Denver who has co-written several studies on self-esteem. Ms. Harter says elevating self-esteem can help raise the spirits of mildly depressed children, but only if it’s done in a very specific way.
More than a decade of research shows that traditional one-size-fits-all classroom approaches to improving low self-esteem don’t work because they rarely address the source of a child’s despondency.
“There’s nothing wrong with having a kid’s name on the board [to make them feel good], but it’s too simplistic,” Ms. Harter says.
Daniel Hart, a psychology professor at Rutgers University in Camden, N.J., describes self-esteem classes as silly. “You wouldn’t think you could change kids’ academic achievement by passing out pins that say: ‘I am a student. Go to it,’ ” he says.
Mr. Damon, the author of Greater Expectations, goes even further to argue that young children aren’t developmentally equipped to glean the meaning of statements like “You’re unique in the world.”
“Self-esteem is not a virtue that can be transmitted through abstract incantations,” Mr. Damon writes in his book, published in 1995 by Simon & Schuster.
If schools really want to induce a sustainable mood shift in their students, Ms. Harter argues, teachers should help children excel at individualized activities--whether academic or athletic or artistic--that matter to them.
Ms. Harter and other researchers have found through a series of studies in the last 20 years that children’s sense of self-worth hinges on how well or poorly they do in areas they personally consider important. When children win the approval of important adults in their lives, that can also raise their self-confidence.
For 8- to 14-year-olds, Ms. Harter says, academic competence, peer acceptance, athletic competence, conduct, and physical appearance tend to be the categories most often linked to self-worth.
By the adolescent years, job competence, close friendships, and romantic appeal also begin to profoundly affect teenagers’ self- confidence, she says.
Because these “pathways to self-esteem” are different for each student, the school or community or parental interventions must be equally precise, Ms. Harter stresses.
For example, if an athletically challenged student wants to be a first-string quarterback like his father but doesn’t even make the team, a coach can either raise the performance level of the student or try to help reduce his expectations, she says. If a competitive, academically oriented student is plagued by poor grades in one subject, after-school tutoring may be the answer.
Self-esteem is strengthened when the gap between what is important to the child and what the child accomplishes is narrowed, she says.
Barbara Wheeler, the president of the National School Boards Association, agrees. Individualized attention tends to lead to more involvement in school and improved student behavior, she argues.
“Specific self-esteem-raising courses have a place in education somewhere. A lot of kids out there are time bombs that have the potential to act out in schools,” she says. “But it’s more about making kids feel a connection with someone, and you don’t have to do that in ‘Self-Esteem 101.’ ”
Gender Gap?
The view that concentrating on students’ specific accomplishments works to build self-esteem has prompted Ms. Harter and others to reconsider the supposed self-esteem gap between boys and girls.
Carol Gilligan, the prominent Harvard University psychologist and researcher, popularized the idea through her research that girls’ self-esteem sinks when they hit adolescence. Girls at that age suppress their opinions, which can affect self-esteem levels and lead to an array of psychological disorders, she argues. (“Their Own Voices,” May 13, 1998.)
To remedy the perceived inequity that then results between girls and boys, some schools have made special adjustments for girls. The White House even launched a $16 million federal program last year called “Girl Power!” to fund girl-centered social and educational activities.
A new study by Ms. Harter suggests, however, that this gender “gap” is really more like a slit.
Ms. Harter and three other researchers interviewed 800 middle and high school students in a middle-class neighborhood over a four-year period. The questionnaires were designed to determine how freely students expressed their opinions or “voice,” an indicator of healthy self-esteem.
The study, published in the American Psychological Association’s journal Developmental Psychology, showed a slight decrease in some adolescent girls’ “voice,” but the drop-off was not nearly as dramatic as Ms. Gilligan’s research suggests. Girls’ lower self-esteem scores “may be statistically significant but psychologically trivial,” Ms. Harter says.
Her finding suggests that schools ought to be looking at differences among girls and among boys rather than searching for patterns strictly along gender lines, she says.
Even then, an individual teacher seldom has the time or resources to give each student the personal attention that Ms. Harter and others say is necessary to raise his or her self-esteem.
“There is already such a press on time in the classroom that it’s better to focus time on academics and on things that enable students to get satisfaction from knowing and doing real things,” says Sandra Feldman, the president of the American Federation of Teachers.
Ultimately, mental-health advocates add, the best prescription for truly despondent youngsters who need the biggest self-esteem boost is personalized psychological care or caring parenting, not a stand-alone unit in a health class.
“I don’t think deeply injured self-esteem can be changed through a program,” says Lisa Perkins of the Search Institute, a Minneapolis-based research and advocacy group that focuses on the general well-being of children. “The child’s life has to change.”
