RULE 2

The real world won’t care as much as your school does about your self-esteem. It’ll expect you to accomplish something before you feel good about yourself.

This may come as a shock. When inflated self-esteem meets reality, most kids complain that it’s not fair. (See Rule 1.)

Someday you will have to deliver—not give it your best effort, but deliver. Whether you will succeed depends on your preparation, your skill, and your confidence. Right now you live in a world where failure might be met with a hug and reassurance. You are about to go into a world where failure will be met with “you’re fired,” “you’re cut,” or “you’re dead.” Your mom won’t always be there, and you won’t be able complain to a very understanding guidance counselor with a master’s degree in self-esteem-boosting rationalizations.

*   *   *

To legions of educationists, therapists, counselors, and PTA members who got a C-minus in their introductory psychology course, “self-esteem” has become more than merely a mantra—it has become an organizing principle, an obsessive fixation on making sure that children feel good about themselves no matter what. The result, believes psychology professor Roy F. Baumeister, is that your generation was raised on what he calls “unrealistic hopes, undisciplined self-assertion, and endless, baseless self-congratulation.”

So we get a world of meaningless gold stars, “participation” trophies, inflated grades, and happy faces on work that might otherwise be recognized as schlock. But (the philosophy goes) if we don’t ask too much, or set expectations too high, no one will feel bad about himself. Instead of preparing children for the challenges, setbacks, defeats, frustrations, and triumphs of life, we bubble-wrap them.

“Behold the wholly sanitized childhood, without skinned knees or the occasional C in history,” Hara Estroff Marano wrote in a Psychology Today article titled “A Nation of Wimps.”17 This feel-good mania means that “messing up … even in the playground, is wildly out of style.”

“Although error and experimentation are the true mothers of success,” she wrote, “parents are taking pains to remove failure from the equation.” That same attitude explains why you can’t be expected to handle something as seemingly harmless as red ink.

“Red is the most aggressive of all colors, and it sets off the fight or flight response,” one educationist says. “It meant bloodshed or one of the colors in fire, so a clicker goes off in your head that red means danger.”18 Of course, this was the point of the red ink: It was a warning. All that red was supposed to get your attention and tell you that you had done something wrong.

But in schools across the country, efforts are underway to stamp out the use of red pens for marking papers—in favor of friendlier, more affirming, less scary colors.19

“Red just has a connotation,” one sixth-grade teacher says. “It just doesn’t have a good feeling for kids.”20 That’s where purple comes in; theoretically it is a way to tell students that they screwed up without making them feel bad about it.

“You want the kid’s attention, but you don’t want them to feel like a loser at the same time. Purple is attention-getting without being intimidating.” Sort of like getting a hug from a big purple dinosaur who wants you to know that you can’t spell to save your life, but that’s OK.

Of course, the red-pen banners haven’t considered that if purple becomes the color of correction, nothing will prevent it from becoming the new color of crushed self-esteem. As it turns out, that’s really not a problem.

“In fact,” says an anti-red-ink teacher from Madison, Wisconsin, “there’s a move away from marking up papers at all.

“Writing is very personal. You want to not make them feel bad in any way.” Apparently this would include the awful trauma of pointing out to students that they had written incomprehensible, ungrammatical drivel.

So getting rid of red pens makes perfect sense to the sort of person who thinks it’s worse to mark a child’s paper with red than it is for the child to become an adult who loses a job because he can’t write a coherent sentence.

If this catches on, companies might decide not to traumatize shareholders by describing losses as “red ink.” Maybe they’ll move to something more affirming like yellow, or brown. Judges could decide that sentencing criminals to jail while wearing black robes is too negative. “I’m sentencing you to twenty years to life, but hope you’ll appreciate the sensitive way I’ve accessorized myself in purple.”

But here’s a tip: if you botch your legal brief, business letter, or corporate report, you’re not likely to get a drawing of a smiling purple dinosaur holding a friendship flower on your pink slip (or will pink slips become purple too?).

The reality that the self-esteem movement ignores is that children learn to feel good about themselves by actually acquiring skills: this is called self-confidence. Ask yourself if it is better to feel good about your swimming abilities, or to actually know how to swim.

A Red Cross swim program in Canada gently assured parents that it took a compassionate and expansive view of swimming.

“We acknowledge that children’s physical abilities develop at different rates, and the program will focus on participants’ successes rather than areas for improvement.” [Emphasis added]

Alarm bells went off for one parent, who observed:

Excuse me, Red Crossers, but how are my kids supposed to improve their swimming skills if you intend to focus only on their previous successes and not on the areas that need work? [Emphasis added] “Johnny, we’re not going to work on teaching you to tread water longer [a skill that would possibly be useful if little Johnny goes on an unsuccessful summer boating trip at the lake]. Instead, I’d like to congratulate you for a fine job of getting your face wet, and beautiful rhythmic breathing, last week.”

I thought I was signing them up for swimming lessons, but it sounds as if the Red Cross is more interested in bucking up their self-esteem. No one at the Red Cross … seem to have noticed that children derive oodles of self-confidence—which comes from within, rather than self-esteem which is imposed from without—from making marked improvement in any area. On their own! Without gold stars or stickers at every turn! Shocking!21

A growing body of evidence suggests that this obsession with self-esteem does not derive from an especially profound insight into human behavior. It is in fact a silly notion adopted as a passing fad by the kind of people who used to buy snake oil and fake moon rocks. It is certainly not supported by research or experience. Four scholars debunked the entire notion in a Scientific American article entitled “Exploding the Self-esteem Myth,” which concluded that despite the national preoccupation with making children feel good about themselves, self-esteem didn’t lead to academic success, cure any significant dysfunctions, or prevent bad behavior.22

As Christina Hoff Sommers and Sally Satel noted, “High school dropouts, shoplifters, burglars, car thieves, and even murderers are just as likely to have high self-esteem as Rhodes Scholars or winners of the Congressional Medal of Honor.”23 Other studies have shown, for instance, that “bullies showed less anxiety and were more sure of themselves than other children.”24

The reality is that a movement designed to raise a generation of well-adjusted, introspective individuals has instead helped spawn packs of self-absorbed, navel-gazing narcissists, who often find themselves unable to handle the setbacks of normal daily life. A steady diet of “I love myself because” can create a generation of smug, arrogant, touchy kids who have an inflated sense of their own abilities and worth, but are unprepared to handle adversity. Interestingly, the “experts” never saw it coming. But as one study remarked with notable understatement, “People who have elevated or inflated views of themselves tend to alienate others.”25 Maybe because they are stuck-up jerks.