🎁 Your best gift
Hi friends!–
Writing to you from the peak of the holiday season. Although a fairly unusual one this year, the gift-giving storm is real.
That's why I am dedicating this week's issue to the best gift we can give to our children🥁: self-esteem.
When we think of self-esteem, we think of it as a good thing. Indeed, high self-esteem has to do with good mental and physical health. But there is a small caveat.
To understand self-esteem better, researchers have been distinguishing between implicit and explicit self-esteem for the last 2 decades.
- Explicit self-esteem is what we say about ourselves
- Implicit self-esteem is our unconscious evaluations of ourselves
According to research, people with high explicit and low implicit self-esteem have a higher level of narcissism.
Our implicit beliefs about ourselves are seeded in early childhood. These beliefs turn into automatic internal self-talk over time.
Also, implicit self-esteem improves very slowly if we ever want to improve it.
So, the best is to have a good start in childhood. How can we seed a high level of implicit self-esteem in our children?
Research found that children who had nurturing and caring interactions with their parents had higher implicit self-esteem, whereas children with overprotective parents reported lower implicit self-esteem.
Are you confused about whether to fit yourself into nurturing & caring or overprotective parenting profile? So was I. That's why I wrote about the 4 main parenting styles to help clear out the confusion.
What I'm saying in short, dear friend, is that being mindful of our parenting style is the first step towards raising children with positive internal self-talk, and that is the best gift we can ever give to our children. ❤️
🥄 Nurturing my favorite moms and dads
Here are a few articles I recently posted on the blog:
4 parenting styles explained through a real-life example: Learn about the sweet spot between strict and submissive parenting. Also, see how different parenting styles respond differently in a real-life situation.
Ungrateful children? How to look beyond ungrateful behavior: An important topic in the holiday season. Find out reasons for ungrateful behavior, how parents might be causing ungratefulness, and 6 steps of guiding our children into gratitude.
That's it! ❤️
Thank you for reading.
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Until next Saturday!
Love, Basak (founder of Apparent)