by Alfie Kohn
In case it needs to be said, achievement is not undermined by paying attention to how kids feel about themselves—or about their teachers, the curriculum, and the whole experience of school. In fact, these things are closely related. Academic excellence is more likely to flourish when children enjoy what they’re doing and when they do it in an atmosphere of exuberant discovery, in the kind of place where they plunge into their projects and can’t wait to pick up where they left off yesterday. Success is often the result of kids’ feeling confident about—yes, even pleased with—themselves for having figured things out.36 No wonder the statistics belie the claim that a concern about children’s feelings has displaced academic performance. Logic, meanwhile, challenges the charge that self-esteem is inflated.
“I LIKE MYSELF ONLY WHEN I . . .”
Peel back the criticism of self-esteem and you’ll eventually uncover the same three values that fuel the attack on overparenting and indulgence. Part of the objection has to do with deprivation: Kids simply shouldn’t be too pleased with themselves. Part of it is based on scarcity: Everyone can’t be a winner, therefore everyone shouldn’t feel good about him- or herself. And the primary dynamic at work here, the one I want to explore at length, is conditionality. To talk about “inflated” self-esteem is to assume that satisfaction with oneself must be justified by a certain level of accomplishment. Kids must earn the right to be happy with themselves by achieving something impressive. What really drives traditionalists to distraction isn’t self-esteem itself or high self-esteem or even programs to raise self-esteem. It’s the idea of unconditional self-esteem: allowing children to feel good about themselves “for no reason,” as Twenge put it, or, in another writer’s phrase, “just for being.”37 To these critics it seems self-evident that, just as praise ought to be offered only on a conditional basis,38 so self-esteem should be thought of “as a reward rather than an entitlement” (Baumeister).39 As important as it is to set stringent conditions for receiving stickers, A’s, or trophies, it’s even more vital to make sure that children feel valuable only on the basis of what they do, not for who they are.
We can begin, as usual, by asking whether this preference for conditional self-esteem rests on a belief that can be tested empirically. I can think of only one: a core assumption about motivation, which Twenge expressed as follows: “If a child feels great about himself even when he does nothing, why do anything? Self-esteem without basis encourages laziness rather than hard work.” A columnist put it this way: “If people are perfect and lovable just the way they are, why should anyone need to change or strive?”40
If this is really supposed to be psychology (rather than theology), it is very bad psychology. There’s absolutely no evidence to support the depressing premise that for things to get done, we need the anxious energy of perpetual self-doubt, the implication of which seems to be that productivity is inversely related to mental health. In reality, someone who has a core of faith in his or her own efficacy and an underlying conviction that he or she is a good person is no more likely than other people—and probably a good deal less likely—to opt for stagnation. As a rule, it’s hard to stop happy, satisfied people from trying to learn or from trying to do a job of which they can be proud.
Why would anyone think that people who generally feel good about themselves will cease making an effort? If self-esteem must be earned in order to create motivation in people, then the underlying assumption is that “human nature is to do as little as necessary,” as a writer named John Powers succinctly described it in an anti-self-esteem essay called “Feeling Good (for Nothing).”41 Ultimately, this reflects the same bleak view that we encountered in Chapter 4: Without the artificial inducements of carrots and sticks, no one would try, learn, work, achieve, or grow because people respond only to extrinsic motivators. And that includes how you feel about yourself, which can be described as extrinsic even though it’s internal.
A thorough refutation of this prejudice, beyond the brief description of intrinsic motivation that I offered earlier, would require a review of the entire fields of personality theory and the psychology of motivation. Numerous studies have confirmed that children are naturally inclined to try to figure things out, to push themselves to do things just beyond their current level. More broadly, the idea that it’s natural to do as little as possible is a relic of “tension-reduction” or “homeostatic” theories, which hold that organisms always seek a state of rest. These theories are taught only in courses on the history of psychology; few beliefs in the social sciences have been so thoroughly repudiated. The desire to do as little as possible is not “human nature”; it is an aberration, a sign that something is amiss.42
The same people who warn that we won’t bother to do anything if we’re happy with ourselves, who believe that self-esteem should rise and fall with our accomplishments in order to goad us into getting off our butts, also tend to put their faith in the usefulness of screwing up and feeling bad. (Twenge: “Sometimes negative feelings can be a motivator.” Powers: “Failure can be a terrific motivator.”43) Of course it makes sense that these views would go hand-in-hand: Low self-esteem is a “negative feeling” about oneself, perhaps the result of a history of failure. But as I’ve noted, the data don’t support claims for the benefits of failure. In fact, studies show that failure is least productive for people with low self-esteem (see pp. 122–23), which suggests that champions of perseverance and learning from one’s mistakes should be defending rather than deriding the importance of self-esteem.
But of course they don’t. And the feature of the whole “self-esteem movement” that elicits particularly withering criticism is loosened conditionality: the possibility that children may be getting something for nothing, or at least for less effort. “Something” includes that which is tangible (trophies), symbolic (grades), and verbal (praise); now, in the case of self-esteem, it extends to the psychological.
The fact is that no research has ever shown that unconditionality has adverse consequences. It may offend the sensibilities of those with what Lakoff calls a Strict Father morality, but to the best of my knowledge not a single article or book has ever cited evidence showing it to be disadvantageous in terms of future achievement, psychological health, or anything else. In fact, the research reveals exactly the opposite to be true, particularly where self-esteem is concerned.
To understand this, we need to take a step back. I’ve been arguing that self-esteem is a reasonably important variable and that higher self-esteem is generally better than lower. But over the last few years a number of psychologists have suggested that what matters most about self-esteem isn’t how much of it one has. Just as there are different ways of thinking about motivation (for example, whether it’s intrinsic or extrinsic) instead of seeing it as a single entity that can go up or down, the same is true here. In particular, self-esteem varies in terms of stability. If it’s unstable or fragile, even more than if it’s predictably low, the result may be anger or depression. Conversely, even someone whose self-esteem is generally high may struggle with self-doubt and become defensive if that positive view isn’t secure. As one group of researchers put it, “Individuals with fragile high self-esteem are willing to go to great lengths to defend their positive, yet vulnerable, feelings of self-worth. . . . [They] often overreact to perceived threats to their self-worth by becoming angry and either criticizing or attacking the source of the threat.”44
Interestingly, one indication that someone has unstable self-esteem is “a greater tendency to invoke one’s feelings of self-worth in everyday activities.”45 The more variation there is in how you feel about yourself from one situation to the next, the more likely you are to be preoccupied with the whole issue of self-esteem. People with a steady, even if not completely positive, view of their own competence or value don’t have to spend time thinking about how good they are or deliberately trying to feel better about themselves.
But what makes self-esteem unstable? All of us receive feedback that is somet
imes positive and sometime negative; all of us do some things we’re proud of and some things we regret. Yet the stability of one person’s self-esteem may be quite different from someone else’s. What accounts for that? The crucial determinant of stability, it seems, is unconditionality. It’s a solid core of belief in yourself, an abiding sense that you’re competent and worthwhile—even when you screw up or fall short—that creates a more stable form of self-esteem, which, in turn, carries a range of psychological and social advantages.
The flip side is that, where self-esteem is concerned, fragility is really a symptom of conditionality.46 If you think well of yourself only under certain conditions—if you regard self-esteem as something that must always be earned and therefore is forever in doubt—then you’re in for trouble, psychologically speaking. Low self-esteem (“I don’t feel very good about myself”) is bad enough; self-esteem that’s contingent (“I feel good about myself only when . . .”) is even more worrisome.
Contingent on what, though? Some bases for feeling good about oneself may be worse than others. Jennifer Crocker, a psychologist at Ohio State University, and her colleagues have shown that the prognosis is particularly bad when self-esteem hinges on outdoing others (competitive success), approval by others, physical appearance, or academic achievement.47 Consider the last of those. When children’s self-esteem rises or falls with how well they do at school, achievement can resemble an addiction, “requiring ever greater success to avoid feelings of worthlessness.” And if it looks as though success is unlikely, kids may “disengage from the task, deciding it doesn’t matter, rather than suffer the loss of self-esteem that accompanies failure.”
That, you may remember, is what’s known as self-handicapping (pp. 96–97): If I need to do well in order to feel good about myself, that may sometimes light a fire under me so I will avoid embarrassing myself. But if I face something really hard, I’ll create an excuse for not having succeeded. Either way, my real goal isn’t to learn; it’s to rescue my shaky belief in my own competence. If I can do that by figuring out a reason why it makes sense that I fell short, then that’s what I’ll choose. The bottom line is that “contingent self-worth is an ineffective source of motivation.”48 People who don’t think their value hinges on their performance, meanwhile, are more likely to see failure as just a temporary set-back, a problem to be solved.
The danger here isn’t limited to achievement-based self-esteem, however. In fact, it may not matter what exactly one has to do or be in order to feel good about oneself. The problem is inherent to the idea of conditionality, which is “associated with anxiety, hostility, defensiveness, and the risk of depression.”49 And that’s not all. Studies have found that contingent self-esteem is related to feelings of helplessness and also to “maladaptive perfectionism.” Teenagers whose acceptance of themselves depends on external factors suffer more intensely if they’re bullied. College students with conditional self-esteem are more likely to drink “as a means of gaining social approval or avoiding social rejection.”50 Some psychologists have suggested that it can also contribute to narcissism and materialistic values. And when people with conditional self-esteem have children of their own, they may base how they feel about themselves on how successful those children are. That not only impairs their own emotional functioning but also leads to a controlling style of parenting. Which may start the cycle all over again in the next generation.51
Even before researchers began collecting all these data, many psychotherapists had figured it out. Alice Miller wrote that one is free from depression “only when self-esteem is based on the authenticity of one’s own feelings and not on the possession of certain qualities.”52 Carl Rogers traced any number of problems to our having been taught to place “conditions of worth” on ourselves; psychotherapists attempt to supply the “unconditional positive regard” that we may have been missing. Experimental evidence seems to confirm that people who have that unconditional faith in themselves are less likely to be anxious or depressed.53
This is powerful stuff. The very unconditionality that is ridiculed by conservatives—indeed, that seems to account for their penchant for vilifying the whole “self-esteem movement”—turns out to be a defining feature of psychological health! It’s precisely what we should be helping our children to acquire. That doesn’t mean harboring unrealistic or grandiose beliefs about one’s own competence. Quite the contrary: It means being sufficiently secure about oneself so as to be able to acknowledge one’s failings and try to improve.
Neither does unconditional or stable self-esteem imply that our feelings about ourselves never vary. It’s natural to be happier (in general, and with oneself) when we’re successful and to be disappointed when we aren’t. But underlying those temporary fluctuations is a permanent reservoir of respect for oneself, a fundamental acceptance of one’s own worth.54 In one of my favorite movies, Harold and Maude, the almost-eighty-year-old Maude admits that, even though she’s impatient with people who are too attached to their possessions, she, too, enjoys “collecting things.” But she immediately qualifies this by describing those things as “incidental, not integral, if you know what I mean.” That’s an apt way of thinking about our successes and failures with respect to self-esteem: Their impact isn’t integral to how we see ourselves.
HOW DOES SELF-ESTEEM BECOME CONDITIONAL?
So what determines whether people place conditions on the way they regard themselves? There are no hard-and-fast answers here; no one has ever conducted a study that can settle the matter once and for all. In fact, there may not be a single answer for everyone. But the best guess is that conditional self-esteem results from having been esteemed conditionally by others. When children feel as though they must fulfill certain conditions to be loved by their parents—a feeling typically evoked by the use of psychological control (see pp. 62–64)—it’s not easy for them to accept themselves unconditionally. And everything goes downhill from there.
Susan Harter, a developmental psychologist at the University of Denver, points out that “level of support and conditionality of support are correlated with one another.” In other words, the kind of parents who are not especially warm and loving also tend to be the kind who put conditions on the affection they do provide. But even when you hold the level of support constant, the degree of conditionality counts. “At relatively high as well as relatively low levels of support,” she explains, “the more conditional the support, the lower one’s self-esteem”55—and the more likely it is that one’s self-esteem will also be conditional.56
That’s not really surprising, is it? Children don’t just need to be loved; they need to know that nothing they do will change the fact that they’re loved. They require reassurance that their “lovability” isn’t in question, which is another way of talking about self-esteem. By contrast, one conservative critic of self-esteem not only complains about “unearned praise” for children but expresses distaste for how “today’s parents” are likely to express “enthusiasm for their children’s very existence.”57
Would that it were true! The eminent psychoanalyst and social critic Erich Fromm put it this way:
Unconditional love corresponds to one of the deepest longings, not only of the child, but of every human being; on the other hand, to be loved because of one’s merit, because one deserves it, always leaves doubt; maybe I did not please the person I want to love me, maybe this, or that—there is always a fear that love could disappear. Furthermore, “deserved” love easily leaves a bitter feeling that one is not loved for oneself, that one is loved only because one pleases, that one is, in the last analysis, not loved at all but used.58
Beginning in 2004, two Israeli researchers, Avi Assor and Guy Roth, and their colleagues have been conducting experiments to examine this issue scientifically. They started by asking college students whether the love they had received from their parents seemed to depend on whether they had succeeded in school, practiced hard for sports, been considerate toward others, or suppressed emo
tions such as anger and fear. The answer: Yes, that was indeed true for many of them. (Their parents probably would have been dismayed to hear they felt that way. But what determines a psychological outcome isn’t what parents think they’re doing; it’s how the children experience it.) It turned out that kids who received what they interpreted as conditional approval were indeed somewhat more likely to act the way the parent wanted. But that compliance came at a steep price. First, these children tended to resent and dislike their parents. Second, they were more likely to attribute their behavior to “strong internal pressure” than to “a real sense of choice.” Moreover, their satisfaction after succeeding at something was usually short-lived, and they often felt guilty or ashamed.
The researchers then interviewed a group of mothers of grown children. With this generation, too, conditional parenting had proved damaging. Those mothers who, when they were young, sensed they were loved only when they lived up to their parents’ expectations now felt less worthy as adults. Yet despite the negative effects, these mothers were more likely to use conditional affection with their own children.59 Apart from being profoundly depressing, that finding can serve as a metaphorical Rorschach test, revealing something about one’s way of thinking about such issues. Is it mysterious and counterintuitive? (Why on earth would someone do to her children exactly what damaged her?) Or is it perfectly predictable? (How could someone love her children unconditionally if she never received that kind of love herself?)
