Understanding how low self-esteem affects learners
| Tuesday July 29, 2014 11:18
Self-esteem is not the same as self-confidence. For instance, a learner may be confident about his or her aptitude at school, but still attach a low score to his or her overall self-worth.
Such a learner or even an adult would only feel good about themselves if a certain condition is in place. For instance, learners (or adult) with low self-esteem may feel good only if they stand out from a crowd, by something they perceive to be of great importance. They are obsessed about consolation.
Building healthy self-esteem is particularly important in children and adolescents as they are still in very sensitive developmental stages.
Like all perceptions, self-esteem is shaped by both our personality and our life experiences.
Personality traits
Self-esteem is NOT genetically determined, but it can be influenced by some of our inherent personality traits. For instance, a learner who is a perfectionist may be affected by negative comments than a learner who is not particularly sensitive.
Childhood experiences
Events that happen in childhood can play a huge role in shaping learners’ self-esteem. The people our learners associate with like parents, siblings, friends, teachers and cousins can have a significant influence on how they perceive their own individual worth. If as a young child, the messages a learner received suggested that he or she was inferior to others, worthless, unlovable, this is highly likely to have had an impact on the way the learner perceived himself/herself then as well as now. I remember this other time when I was doing a self-esteem assessment on quite a young child, and she told me she would like to learn to wash the dishes perfectly so that she can grow into a clever woman and get married. Fortunately for her, that perception had to be tactfully dealt with ASAP, because in this day and age, it is no longer a realistic goal.
Other experiences
Many other experiences we accumulate over the course of our lives can adjust our self-esteem. The loss of something that is an important part of a learner’s identity (grief), such as the transfer of a good mentor and the death of a parent or caretaker can have a detrimental effect on the learner’s self-esteem. Conditional love by a significant person, such as a family member, a playmate, or friend can also have a negative impact on a learner’s self-esteem by reinforcing the perception that a learner’s worth is dependent on their achievements or their family achievements. Achievements related to material wealth, fame, physical beauty and academic status are status symbols to which many people aspire.
While there is nothing wrong with aiming towards any particular goal, problems arise when achievements become the foundation on which a learner’s self-worth is resting. Consciously or unconsciously, many people practice conditional self-acceptance. They would utter statements such as ‘ha ke tsena ko mmadikolo ke batla go itshwara ka sponsara sa smart phone le diaparo gore ba seka ba ntlwaela.’ Conditional self-acceptance can put learners under pressure to make wrong choices which can hinder their learning process.
One of the things that can result in low self-esteem in learners is a condition called Learned Helplessness (LH). These are learners who have simply given up. They sit in class disconnected, and they would have a tendency of shrugging their shoulders no matter how much you try to make the curriculum more relevant, challenging and engaging to them. Learned Helplessness is mostly found in learners who always fail to avoid or escape an unpleasant stimulus that occurs as a result of previous exposure to unavoidable traumatic stimuli such as the loss of a loved one, rape and other abusive experiences. Such students are usually misjudged as being lazy or dull. Learners with LH would typically have questions such as ‘why bother?’, ‘what’s the point?’ and ‘who cares?’ They simply do not find a reason to try.
Learners who have developed LH due to traumatic past experiences would show any prolonged (over a month) combination of the following symptoms:
Displays a significant lack of interest and engagement in classroom activities
Looks sleepy in class most of the time
Reports or more often displays difficulty concentrating as well as feelings of guilt, when it is their time to respond to instruction they appear as if they are suddenly waking up from a bad dream
Without proper intervention, learners with LH will not find the key to unlock their minds. Fortunately, Learned Helplessness is not genetic, it is learned, and therefore it can be unlearned. It is important to avoid making a mistake of assuming that a child can willfully control the situation, the root cause of the problem, is in fact, lack of control!
Another mistake that needs to be avoided by parents is to assume that teachers can treat LH or other mental conditions and disorders in class, even if some of them might have the skill to. It takes time to assess and treat a client and lesson time does not cater for that. It is, therefore, helpful for parents to make referrals if they suspect mental conditions and disorders.
*Victoria Sethibe is a practicing teacher and a school counsellor.