Below are the seven principles that you can use as

guideposts for raising your child’s self-esteem. All of your

interactions as a caring parent can be consistent with these
principles. Specific examples of how to implement these
principles will follow.

1. You must model self-respect. Just as you must

provide an example of a person with positive self-
image, you must also show your child through
behavior, that you respect yourself and are entitled
therefore to be treated respectfully. A child must
believe down to his soul that you genuinely think of
yourself as a respected human being. This means
first of all carrying yourself in a way that gives you
personal dignity, with all that this implies; it also
means that you never tolerate disrespect from anyone
in front of your child, and particularly when that
disrespect comes from your child. The importance of
this principle can be summed up in these words: If
you want your child to respect himself, give him
an example of a person who does the same, and
never, ever waiver from that position. When
children see a shining example, it is easier for them to
incorporate high self-esteem behaviors into their own
lives.

2. Treat each child as a unique individual. Each of

your children is a special person not like his brothers
or sisters, or any other person with whom you might
compare him. Respecting a child’s uniqueness means
more than simply avoiding comparisons. It is a
genuine acceptance of that person as a unique
creation who had unlimited potential within him to
become anything that he might choose for himself
throughout his life. It means respecting him or her as
 total and complete now and always being conscious
of his unique attributes. A child who is treated as
unique in all the world begins to see himself the same
way. A child who is allowed to be different, to dance
to his own special music, to be unlike everyone else
without being criticized, to be in fact anything he
chooses as long as he does not interfere with anyone
else’s right to uniqueness will have a great deal of
self-confidence and high levels of self-esteem.

3. A child is not his actions. He is a person who acts.

To promote high self-esteem you must be aware of
the difference between these two conflicting notions.
A child who fails is not a failure; he has simply acted
in a way which has given him an opportunity to grow.
A child who does poorly on a mathematics quiz is not
a dunce; he is simply performing in mathematics at a
given level at this particular time in his life. You can
teach your child to grow from mistakes and to never
fear failure as long as he understands that his worth
does not come from how well he performs a given
task on a particular day. You are worthy because
you say it is so, because you exist. No more, no
less. Self-worth cannot be validated on the basis of
performance; it must be a given and something you
convey every day.

Provide opportunities to be responsible and make

decisions. Children with high self-esteem are those who are
given the opportunity to be decision-makers right from the
very beginning of their lives. Children need to take on
responsibilities, rather than have their parents do things for
them. They learn confidence by doing, not by watching
someone else do it for them. They need to feel important, to
take risks, to try new adventures, and to know that you trust
them, not so much to do something without error as to
simple go out and give it an effort. Children who learn early
to be decision-makers – to pick out their own clothes, to be
responsible without endangering themselves – learn very
early to like themselves and feel positive about who they are.

4. Teach enjoyment of life each day. Children who live

in a positive environment learn to be positive about
themselves. To raise self-esteem it is essential to
provide a positive approach to life as a way of thinking
for your children. Give them regular examples of
“counting your blessings” reactions when they feel
down. Show them with your own example that you are
grateful for being alive, that this is a wonderful place
to live, and that this is the greatest time in the history
of mankind to be alive. There is something positive to
be realized in all of life’s situations. Having to wash
the dishes is a time to be grateful for having food to
eat and dishes to wash. Fixing a flat tire is a time to
appreciate having a car when you consider all of the
people in the world who do not have cars. Even more
basic is the satisfaction of doing any job well, no
matter how simple or repetitive it may be.

5. Provide praise rather than criticism. Children who

are criticized learn to do the same thing to
themselves, and ultimately become persons with low
self-regard. Praise is a wonderful tool in the entire
process of child rearing. Remember, nobody
(including yourself) enjoys being told what to do or
being criticized. Parents often believe that they are
providing help to their children when they constantly
correct and criticize them, assuming that they will
grow from these remarks. But ask yourself: Do you
like being corrected? Do you grow when you are
constantly criticized? In truth, we tend to stay the
same when we are criticized; we want to defend what
we have done, and our innate stubbornness refuses
to permit us to accept the criticism we are receiving.
 Create an environment in which your children know
that you are with them in their efforts, rather than
looking to criticize them, and you will have taken a
step in building a positive self-image.

6. We become what we think about: Our thinking

determines our self-image, which in turn
determines our feelings and our behavior.
Philosophers from ancient times until today have
reminded us of this truth, and it impacts profoundly on
a child’s self-picture. Marcus Aurelius, the Roman
emperor, said it this way: “A person’s life is what his
thoughts make of it.” Ralph Waldo Emerson, an
American philosopher of the nineteenth century, said,
“A person is what he or she thinks about all day
long.” Keep in mind that your children from the
earliest moments of existence have thoughts that are
shaped by your input. What your children think about
can be shaped in a positive way by you, their most
significant person. Do they believe in themselves?
Their thinking will determine what their life will be.
They will become what they think about, and you can
be a positive force for thinking or a negative force.

– Dr. Wayne W. Dyer

The Four Desires Driving All Human Behavior:
Bertrand Russell’s Magnificent Nobel Prize
Acceptance Speech
“Nothing in the world is more exciting than a moment of sudden
discovery or invention, and many more people are capable of
experiencing such moments than is sometimes thought.”
By Maria Popova

Bertrand Russell (May 18, 1872–February 2, 1970) endures as one of humanity’s most lucid and luminous
minds — an oracle of timeless wisdom on everything from what “the good life” really means to why
“fruitful monotony” is essential for happiness to love, sex, and our moral superstitions. In 1950, he was
awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature for “his varied and significant writings in which he champions
humanitarian ideals and freedom of thought.” On December 11 of that year, 78-year-old Russell took the
podium in Stockholm to receive the grand accolade.

Later included in Nobel Writers on Writing (public library) — which also gave us Pearl S. Buck, the
youngest woman to receive the Nobel Prize in Literature, on art, writing, and the nature of creativity — his
acceptance speech is one of the finest packets of human thought ever delivered from a stage.

Russell begins by considering the central motive driving human behavior:

All human activity is prompted by desire. There is a wholly fallacious theory advanced by some earnest
moralists to the effect that it is possible to resist desire in the interests of duty and moral principle. I say this
is fallacious, not because no man ever acts from a sense of duty, but because duty has no hold on him unless
he desires to be dutiful. If you wish to know what men will do, you must know not only, or principally, their
material circumstances, but rather the whole system of their desires with their relative strengths.

[…]

Man differs from other animals in one very important respect, and that is that he has some desires which are,
so to speak, infinite, which can never be fully gratified, and which would keep him restless even in Paradise.
The boa constrictor, when he has had an adequate meal, goes to sleep, and does not wake until he needs
another meal. Human beings, for the most part, are not like this.

Illustration by Alice and Martin Provensen from ‘Homer for Young Readers,’ 1965. Click image for more.

Russell points to four such infinite desires — acquisitiveness, rivalry, vanity, and love of power — and
examines them in order:

Acquisitiveness — the wish to possess as much as possible of goods, or the title to goods — is a motive
which, I suppose, has its origin in a combination of fear with the desire for necessaries. I once befriended
two little girls from Estonia, who had narrowly escaped death from starvation in a famine. They lived in my
family, and of course had plenty to eat. But they spent all their leisure visiting neighbouring farms and
stealing potatoes, which they hoarded. Rockefeller, who in his infancy had experienced great poverty, spent
his adult life in a similar manner.
[…]

However much you may acquire, you will always wish to acquire more; satiety is a dream which will always
elude you.

In 1938, Henry Miller also articulated this fundamental driver in his brilliant meditation on how money
became a human fixation. Decades later, modern psychologists would term this notion “the hedonic
treadmill.” But for Russell, this elemental driver is eclipsed by an even stronger one — our propensity for
rivalry:

The world would be a happier place than it is if acquisitiveness were always stronger than rivalry. But in
fact, a great many men will cheerfully face impoverishment if they can thereby secure complete ruin for
their rivals. Hence the present level of taxation.

Rivalry, he argues, is in turn upstaged by human narcissism. In a sentiment doubly poignant in the context of
today’s social media, he observes:

Vanity is a motive of immense potency. Anyone who has much to do with children knows how they are
constantly performing some antic, and saying “Look at me.” “Look at me” is one of the most fundamental
desires of the human heart. It can take innumerable forms, from buffoonery to the pursuit of posthumous
fame.

[…]

It is scarcely possible to exaggerate the influence of vanity throughout the range of human life, from the
child of three to the potentate at whose frown the world trembles.

Illustration by Maurice Sendak for ‘Nutcracker’ by E.T.A. Hoffmann. Click image for more.

But the most potent of the four impulses, Russell argues, is the love of power:

Love of power is closely akin to vanity, but it is not by any means the same thing. What vanity needs for its
satisfaction is glory, and it is easy to have glory without power… Many people prefer glory to power, but on
the whole these people have less effect upon the course of events than those who prefer power to glory…
Power, like vanity, is insatiable. Nothing short of omnipotence could satisfy it completely. And as it is
especially the vice of energetic men, the causal efficacy of love of power is out of all proportion to its
frequency. It is, indeed, by far the strongest motive in the lives of important men.

[…]

Love of power is greatly increased by the experience of power, and this applies to petty power as well as to
that of potentates.

Anyone who has ever agonized in the hands of a petty bureaucrat — something Hannah Arendt
unforgettably censured as a special kind of violence — can attest to the veracity of this sentiment. Russell
adds:

In any autocratic regime, the holders of power become increasingly tyrannical with experience of the
delights that power can afford. Since power over human beings is shown in making them do what they
would rather not do, the man who is actuated by love of power is more apt to inflict pain than to permit
pleasure.

Illustration by Alice and Martin Provensen from ‘Homer for Young Readers,’ 1965. Click image for more.
But Russell, a thinker of exceptional sensitivity to nuance and to the dualities of which life is woven,
cautions against dismissing the love of power as a wholesale negative driver — from the impulse to
dominate the unknown, he points out, spring such desirables as the pursuit of knowledge and all scientific
progress. He considers its fruitful manifestations:

It would be a complete mistake to decry love of power altogether as a motive. Whether you will be led by
this motive to actions which are useful, or to actions which are pernicious, depends upon the social system,
and upon your capacities. If your capacities are theoretical or technical, you will contribute to knowledge or
technique, and, as a rule, your activity will be useful. If you are a politician you may be actuated by love of
power, but as a rule this motive will join itself on to the desire to see some state of affairs realized which, for
some reason, you prefer to the status quo.

Russell then turns to a set of secondary motives. Echoing his enduring ideas on the interplay of boredom and
excitement in human life, he begins with the notion of love of excitement:

Human beings show their superiority to the brutes by their capacity for boredom, though I have sometimes
thought, in examining the apes at the zoo, that they, perhaps, have the rudiments of this tiresome emotion.
However that may be, experience shows that escape from boredom is one of the really powerful desires of
almost all human beings.

Illustration by Olimpia Zagnoli for ‘Mister Horizontal & Miss Vertical’ by Noémie Révah. Click image for
more.

He argues that this intoxicating love of excitement is only amplified by the sedentary nature of modern life,
which has fractured the natural bond between body and mind. A century after Thoreau made his exquisite
case against the sedentary lifestyle, Russell writes:

Our mental make-up is suited to a life of very severe physical labor. I used, when I was younger, to take my
holidays walking. I would cover twenty-five miles a day, and when the evening came I had no need of
anything to keep me from boredom, since the delight of sitting amply sufficed. But modern life cannot be
conducted on these physically strenuous principles. A great deal of work is sedentary, and most manual
work exercises only a few specialized muscles. When crowds assemble in Trafalgar Square to cheer to the
echo an announcement that the government has decided to have them killed, they would not do so if they
had all walked twenty-five miles that day. This cure for bellicosity is, however, impracticable, and if the
human race is to survive — a thing which is, perhaps, undesirable — other means must be found for
securing an innocent outlet for the unused physical energy that produces love of excitement… I have never
heard of a war that proceeded from dance halls.

[…]

Civilized life has grown altogether too tame, and, if it is to be stable, it must provide harmless outlets for the
impulses which our remote ancestors satisfied in hunting… I think every big town should contain artificial
waterfalls that people could descend in very fragile canoes, and they should contain bathing pools full of
mechanical sharks. Any person found advocating a preventive war should be condemned to two hours a day
with these ingenious monsters. More seriously, pains should be taken to provide constructive outlets for the
love of excitement. Nothing in the world is more exciting than a moment of sudden discovery or invention,
and many more people are capable of experiencing such moments than is sometimes thought.

Complement Nobel Writers on Writing with more excellent Nobel Prize acceptance speeches — William
Faulkner on the artist as a booster of the human heart, Ernest Hemingway on writing and solitude, Alice
Munro on the secret to telling a great story, and Saul Bellow on how literature ennobles the human spirit —
then revisit Russell on immortality and why science is the key to democracy.