By Judi Light Hopson, Emma H Hopson and Ted Hagen/Tribune News Service


If you’re a parent, teacher, baby-sitter, or grandparent, you have a unique opportunity to improve the world. How? Help children in your care develop self-respect and healthy self-love.
How we each view ourselves determines how we behave, what goals we pursue and how we form relationships. If every adult and every child possessed healthy self-esteem, a lot of problems would dissipate in the world.
For example, if a 12-year-old boy sees himself as loved, respected, a winner, he’s not likely to become a bully. We bully others when we don’t feel great about ourselves.
If a 44-year-old woman is going through a divorce, she isn’t likely to give up on life if she feels okay about herself.
What children believe about themselves, deep in their hearts, matters more than any language they hear from the world.
A man we’ll call William says his family believed in saying, “I love you,” freely and openly. “I grew up in a clan where the men gave plenty of hugs to their children and to their wives,” says William.
William believes his foundation in life gave him a good image of himself. “When you tell yourself that you’re okay, you’re loved, everything is going to be okay, you can survive anything,” William told us. “Adults should ideally start pouring nice words and approval into kids early on. It’s tough to do a makeover on your self-image if you’re a grown person.”
William is right. Adults with a poor self-image have to travel a much different road. They tend to go through life feeling very judged by others. Therefore, they’re always on the defensive.
Here are some tips for helping a child develop self-worth:
♦ Encourage children a lot. By encouraging someone, you’re helping that person feel competent to choose their actions, fail, regroup and try again.
♦ Make problems seem easy to fix. We all know adults who practically yawn when a crisis occurs. They’ve learned to stay calm, think, choose options to fix a problem, and then act. Help children feel that solving problems is doable.
♦ Smile and make eye contact with children. A smile means: You make me feel good. Eye contact says: I like connecting with you, and you’re important to me.
♦ Listen with your whole heart. Find at least five minutes each day to actively listen to a child. Don’t interrupt or check email during your conversation. Ask questions about what matters to your child.
Helping a child develop a healthy self-image means you’re helping a child to love himself. A child who loves himself will find it easier to love other people. These natural feelings of love will spill over into all of his or her relationships.
“I was raised in a family where humility was emphasised,” says a friend of ours we’ll call Andrea. “My dad was was way too harsh in discipline. Instead of developing self-esteem, we were verbally punished a lot on a daily basis.”
Andrea says her dad, who is 90 now, changed his tactics with his grandchildren. “He read a few self-help books in his fifties, and he learned a new love language,” Andrea explains.
“He teaches that we should be kind to ourselves. He tells his grandchildren they should try to grow every day as a person. He lets them know they need to invest time and effort in themselves, because they do have worth and they can impact the world positively.”

♦ Judi Light Hopson is the executive director of the stress management website USA Wellness Cafe at www.usawellnesscafe.com . Emma Hopson is an author and a nurse educator. Ted Hagen is a family psychologist.