Liberation Psychology:
The Self Esteem of Children, Part II

By Royal E. Alsup, Ph.D.

We all become more beautiful when we are loved, and if you have self-love, then you are always beautiful.
-- Alice Walker, The Color Purple

Liberation Psychology seeks to expose and relieve the suffering that dysfunctional families and social agencies are causing children. Basic needs satisfaction is essential to help all children to have high self-esteem and to live healthy, productive lives. These writings are intended to generate dialogue and to encourage parents and agency people to evaluate if the children they are responsible for are getting their basic needs met. It is easy in a materialistic society to think we can easily recognize the basic needs dissatisfaction of the poor. It may even be more difficult, however, to spot the suffering of children who have all their material needs met but who suffer from inner need deficits. Some poor children know by the age of 4 that the society is against them, and the economic oppression causes them to feel frightened and shameful for who they are. Children born into the middle class or upper class with luxuries and wealth have demands on them to achieve, and they suffer from losing themselves by having to be successful. They suffer from the deprivation of meaning, a spiritual and ethical oppression. The poor child adopts a false self because of economic injustice and the middle class or upper class child adopts a false self because of the pressure to succeed. These children may suffer from low self-esteem because of not being valued and appreciated for who they are. We need to become aware of the suffering of all children and work as hard as possible to relieve their basic need deficits.

Once a child decides to hide behind a false self, the inner demons begin to discount the child's worth. She feels anxiety and guilt when she puts forth a false self that seems more acceptable to others than her real self might be, a false self that is adapted to the dysfunctional world in which she finds herself living. The inner demons then fill her with self-loathing and shame, telling her that she is an imposter. The real self that is hidden in the unconscious -- the famous inner child -- demands that an ideal self should be lived instead. But the child can never meet the high expectations of the ideal self and thus the self-hatred -- the voice of the inner critic -- is maintained.

Uniqueness, Gender, and Cultural Needs

We are physically programmed by genetic instruction to be a certain gender and to belong to a common humanity. This same gene program builds in diversity with the potential to program trillions of different possible human beings from one fertilized egg. We have a common gene inheritance that enables us to relate, love, and grow together, yet our individual gene inheritance makes us so unique that there is not another physical, mental, emotional,and spiritual human being that is exactly like us. Understanding this fact is a radically amazing and surprising experience if we allow ourselves to truly sense the massive diversity of our humanity. The genetic material unites with non-living matter in an agreement with the universe to form a unique human being that creation has never before encountered. This is the wonderful mystery of love and intelligence that is at the center of the cosmos. The form of each human body is like all other human beings but the content of each is different. This wonderful uniqueness needs to be recognized and honored in the child.

Ethnic diversity is the way our historical time is expressing itself. The sad fact of the world condition is that horrible genocide is happening in Europe, Africa, and other parts of the world because of the nonacceptance of ethnic diversity. Strong forces in the United States are socially and politically trying to oppress and deny gender and cultural diversity. Many times, I have witnessed agencies responsible for the lives of children deny the uniqueness of the child by not confirming the child's gender or by denying the child's ethnicity. When we deny the Portuguese child, the Irish child, or the American Indian child the value and beauty of their ethnicity we have denied the child's uniqueness. The child is not just another Mexican-American or Italian-American. He is a singular expression of those unique cultures. The uniqueness of a child is distorted when his or her gender or ethnicity is overlooked or depreciated. If a child's particular gender form is violated, the genetic meaning and purpose for that child will lean towards a false expression of the genetic material. When individual uniqueness is not confirmed because of a dysfunctional family and society, a false self emerges and the real self goes underground, causing low self-esteem.

Freedom and Self-Determination Needs

Children need guidance and modeling to develop freedom of choice and responsibility. When we rely on punishment and authoritarian means of parenting, we take opportunities for growth from our children and we may interfere with their development of conscience. For example, when we punish our children for telling us that they broke a family rule we teach them to go underground and lie to us. Just imagine yourself driving on the freeway doing 70 miles per hour. A Highway Patrol car is behind you so you slow down and when he exits at the next off ramp, you speed up again. Punishment teaches this type of behavior. Just think how different it would be if the Highway Patrol randomly pulled over automobiles for going the correct speed on the freeway and gave them a ticket to receive 50 dollars for adhering to the speed limit. This sounds ridiculous but by recognizing that we are caught for doing something right would encourage us to go the right speed when the Highway Patrol was not in our rearview mirror. Encouragement works very efficiently to develop responsibility and effective choice-making.

Studies in schools have indicated that when the teacher is told he has a class of highly intelligent children, when in fact he has a group of average students, the overall student performance improves. The opposite has also been proven. When the teacher has a classroom of highly intelligent, motivated students and is told they are below average, the overall performance of these bright students drops drastically. These studies demonstrate that when we encourage our children to make good choices and to be responsible for themselves they rise to the occasion. I have repeated these results by taking a class of students who were identified as poorly motivated to read and whose reading performance was low because of teachers' expectations. I told the students that I wanted them to select their own reading material and bring it to the school. The only rule was that they bring something to read. Every one of the children brought appropriate literature to read. Some brought comic books, but by the third day, because they were not censured, they started bringing reading material they were not suppose to be capable of reading. There was an overall improvement in the students' reading abilities, and they started feeling better toward themselves. The students thought the process was fun. The increase in their self-esteem positively affected their school behavior as a whole when coercion was removed and they were allowed to develop self-determination.

Creativity and Spiritual Needs

The use of creativity in art and storytelling facilitates the spiritual aspects of a child's development. It is amazing to watch American-Indian children dance complicated dances with remarkable coordination even at young ages. American Indian children are involved in the most sacred dances in their culture's spiritual practices because the children are raised to respect and to participate in ritual and ceremony. Children are attuned to the sacred and to the spiritual/transpersonal when they are raised in a society that has respect for the Great Mystery.

American Indian children are involved in the spiritual way of life from an early age and are not set apart from the adults. Even during important business or spiritual meetings children are always present, playing and acting like children, not separated and treated like they are a nuisance. I have witnessed gatherings where children were running around being noisy while story telling was going on. Then one by one, the children began sitting down to listen, captivated by the storytelling. They did not have to be threatened or coerced. There was something about the story itself, the humor, and the beauty, that captured each child's interest and for close to an hour almost 30 children were sitting quietly, paying close attention. I have seen the same type of event happen in the larger community with creative readers theater.

Children can tell when a person is honestly interested in them and is truly inviting them to be creative. When creative projects are mixed with humor, they are more interesting to children. The laughing and loving ushers them in and excites them. Creative and spiritual freedom of expression is a deep psychological need of the child, which helps him transform a serious,ugly world into a way of beauty and love.

These two articles on the self-esteem of children have opened the conversation about the necessity for the satisfaction of basic needs for children and adults in order for them to find life meaningful. Basic needs are not hierarchical; one need is just as important as another. They are the needs that seem to be universal but which are expressed in a particular way of life in different cultures and different ethnic groups. We all have different ways of being human but we have basic human needs that require satisfaction. It is an individual's responsibility, as well as the responsibility of each society, to meet the basic needs of the children so that their humanity can mature into fully functioning, creative, happy people who feel at home in a sacred, transpersonal, friendly universe.