Member Columnist — Steven Unruh, MDiv, LMFT

5 Ways To Build Your Teenager's Self-Esteem

As a parent of three young adults, I love being a parent. I also loved the years when my kids were teenagers. One year they were all teenagers — 13, 17, and 19.

Over the years, they would often have friends over. Sometimes their friends from the swim team or the football team would crash in the living room for the night. That gave me a chance to be a role model to a lot of those kids who were either missing a dad or missing a mom.

What was surprising to me was not the number of kids who came from divorced homes, but the number of kids who had a parent that they rarely saw. Many had a parent that they had very little contact with. It was so sad to hear their stories.

#1 Apologize

If we’re going to be a role model to our teens, we have to learn to make apologies. These apologies cannot be followed with excuses or explanations. They need to be real and sincere.

We are modeling for them that it’s not devastating to make a mistake and it’s not humiliating to admit that you made a mistake. By apologizing to our kids it actually builds their self-esteem. It gives them a sense that they can be right.

If we are always correcting them and acting as if WE are always right, then they will learn to not trust themselves and their own judgment. This often leads to kids either being bullied or victimized. Because if they can’t learn to think for themselves and trust their judgment, they will not trust their intuition.

Later in life, they will second-guess themselves because we’ve taught them that they’re always wrong. As a result, they will make unhealthy decisions and find themselves in relationships where they are being taken advantage of.

#2 Don’t YELL

I know you think I’m joking… Right? But we must understand that yelling is so harmful to children’s self-esteem. As adults, we are responsible for regulating ourselves and controlling our emotions. Younger children are easily traumatized and afraid when we yell at them. As our kids become teenagers, our yelling feels very demeaning towards them and only causes them to feel a lot of anger towards us.

If we’re yelling a lot, our kids will see us as hypocrites. We have rules and expect them to follow those rules but our inability to regulate ourselves demonstrates to them that we’re not keeping rules, that we can’t control ourselves.

#3 Be Honest

When our kids see us lie, whether they know we are lying to them and we’ve changed the story or they hear us lying to a friend on the phone, they lose respect for us. If they see us as parents as dishonest, it’s very harmful to their self-esteem.

Honesty is very crucial for our children. If they see us as dishonest it creates within them a sense of shame. They’re embarrassed. It makes them withdraw from us. As they lose respect for us they feel that they are lacking something. Certainly, our lying is obvious to them. It only teaches them to be dishonest with us.

#4 Give Consequences

Our children need to have consequences for their actions. It's essential and helps their self-worth.

“Kids need to see how their actions impact others. Having consequences helps teach empathy for our children.”

Without consequences, children can develop a false sense of arrogance. They imagine that they can do what they want and that rules don’t apply to them. When they don’t have consequences, kids are less impacted by how their actions harm other people. This false sense of power is ultimately a very fragile self-esteem.

Consequences teach our teenagers that they must take responsibility for their actions. This actually builds their self-esteem.

#5 Don’t use CRITICISM

Consequences and yelling and criticism go together! Certainly, our children will make mistakes… Plenty of mistakes. Rather than yelling at them for not getting their homework done, we can simply have consequences. Rather than criticizing them and calling them lazy, we can find ways to affirm and encourage them although you’re disappointed by their actions. Affirmation builds up. Criticism tears down.

For Example:

“You’ve told me that you did your homework and I don’t think that’s true. You need to finish your homework and you need to admit that you lied about it. I want you to use your skills and the intelligence that you have to get your homework done.

But because you didn’t finish your homework, and you told me that you did, I will be keeping your phone the rest of the evening and all day tomorrow. You will get your phone back once I see that all of your homework is finished, after a day and a half.”

See…That wasn’t so hard, was it?

Solomon, one of the wisest men in existence said that our words have the power of life and death. Criticism destroys our child’s self-esteem. You can see from the illustration that even though this teenager lied, they were confronted about that untruth, but they were also built up. They were encouraged. They were told that they were skilled and intelligent.

Our children need to be affirmed. They need to be encouraged. They need to know that we absolutely believe in them 100 percent!

Final Thoughts

Be that role model.

Be the kind of parent that your kids are proud of. Be the kind of parent that they can bring friends over and know that you are going to be kind and thoughtful not only to them in front of their friends but to their friends as well.

Steven Unruh, MDiv, LMFT is a licensed MFT and a Divorce Mediator. He is the owner of Unruh Mediation. Steven works with high conflict divorce. He has two graduate degrees from Fuller School of Psychology and Fuller School of Theology, Pasadena, CA. He is the father of 3 young men. He loves hiking, running, fishing, reading and dancing.