Kids Self Esteem, Self Esteem Starts at Home !
A recent study by the American Psychological Association found that Children can experience as much stress as adults do, and they are often not equipped to deal with everyday stresses of social pressures, peer pressure, school and home life. We can easily help our children deal with stress and connect with their inner knowing by teaching them simple relaxation techniques like deep diaphragmatic breathing sometimes called the Balloon Breath, and using guided meditation and imagery.
Creative guided imagery offers your child the opportunity to blow away worries and travel by magic carpet to a very special place inside themselves. Children are naturally creative and imaginative. Adults are too, but often times we forget the fun of imaginings and have turned off our imagination to take care of our worldly focuses. Imagination however, is the key to creating and molding our future.
Make your life wonderful by using your own imagination each and everyday. Apply positive thinking and concentrate on your own goals and peacefulness for 10-15 minutes twice a day. See how your life changes for the better and your dreams start to materialize. We can learn to change our results by using the incredible power of our imagination. Guided meditation is a powerful tool to help you and your child engage the imagination, release stress and worry and enjoy a moment of calm together.
Encouraging Self Esteem in Children
Self-esteem is the perception of self. Its how you feel about yourself, what you believe to be true about you. Want to evaluate your own self esteem? A simple test to gage your own self-esteem is to start taking stock in the internal dialogue that is happening within your own mind each and every day. What kinds of things do you say to yourself as you pass by the mirror? What do you say as you look at your face or body, or as you do a challenging task (or even imagine doing one)? How does your internal dialogue respond? Are you pretty enough, smart enough, healthy enough, funny enough, rich enough, slim enough, outgoing enough? In short, are you good enough? What does your internal dialogue say?
Simply put, it's the internal dialogue that differentiates the various levels of self-esteem. And surprising or not, a lot of that internal dialogue is simply belief patterns from our own parents, passed on to us. As a child, think back to what you heard about yourself. What were the positive messages? What were the negative messages? Children learn everything from the adults around them, including how to view life, their bodies and their selves. Parents are a tremendous influence on their children's lives. Positive self esteem is a learned skill and parental positive self-esteem rubs off on children and so does the contrary.
While you'll want to seriously look at the messages you give to your child, you'll first need to investigate your own self -esteem and the patterns and beliefs you hold onto from your own childhood. Ask yourself if those beliefs are still valid for you. Are they still serving you or not? If they are a detriment to your living a full joyful life, then it may be time to let go and re-create a new vision of yourself.
Teaching positive self-esteem to our children starts out with us as parents fully loving ourselves. Like it or not, kids gets cues from you and they definitely pay much more attention to what you do than what you say. They can sense how you feel about yourself. They begin to believe that your thinking patterns are the right ones. Loving ourselves becomes our number one priority in parenting. Loving yourself is not selfish love. It's all about realizing what a truly magnificent being YOU are, how lovely, smart, creative and beautiful you are, no matter what! It's about seeing that you deserve to treat yourself with respect and that others respect you because they can see you deserve it too. When you feel good about yourself, the world feels it. You light up a room with your smile. You radiate, you shine. A beautiful woman takes care of herself in many ways, and she does not have to be most people's definition of pretty. If she shines her light, there will always be that special something about her that makes her beautiful. That's called self-esteem. When you begin to respect yourself and truly honestly fall in love with yourself, life changes. Good things come into your life. You prosper in all ways. Start out with daily affirmations. Tell yourself you love yourself at least 4 times today and see what happens over the next week as you practice daily. Whenever a negative thought arise in your mind, move it over and replace it with "I love you, and I accept you anyway!" And see what happens in your mind, body and in your life.
It's not enough to compliment your children so they will feel good about themselves. Self-esteem is built in the small moments when a child drops a glass of juice and you've had a really rough day. What is your reaction? Are you able to just tell them it's no big deal or do you react in anger and frustration, implying they are not capable (which will lower their self-esteem). Most children have never even heard the term self-esteem and yet they are affected by it each and every day at home and at school. They pick up cues as to whether their abilities and looks are acceptable to you and others by the reactions they get. If a child has developed high self-esteem, hearing someone else call them a name will not affect them because they know the truth.They are able to see that the person is not being kind, but it will not make them feel any less valuable. We can prevent a lot of difficulties in our society if we simply heighten our own self-esteem and that of our children. Increasing self -esteem will have a tremendous impact on the care of each other in relationships, friendships and choice of friends, in family life, in school, in health and later on in our careers or business, financial matters, choice of partners, social networking/friends, : in virtually every aspect of life.
Recommendations to increase your child's self esteem: One with the Universe CD and Our Life Skills Program.
