I was talking with a friend this morning about kids. He is a middle school teacher and a high school football coach. During the course of our conversation he made the statement, "the first thing we need to do is to debunk this myth that teaching kids self esteem is the most important thing." I remember when our oldest kids were in elementary school. They came home with packets on teaching your kids self esteem. At the time, Kelli and I looked at each other with a puzzled, "huh". What does it mean to teach self esteem? Do we teach them to stand in front of a mirror and say, "I'm good, I'm good, I'm goooood!". We've found that self esteem is a bi-product of self control. Proverbs 25 reminds us that without self control we are like a city whose walls are broken down, 1 Thessalonians 5 simply tells us to be self-controlled, Titus 2 emphasizes self-control in a list of things to teach men and women, and the list goes on. The bible tells us often the importance of self-control. On the other hand you won't find verses about self-esteem, unless it's talking about our new self in Christ.

So what about self esteem?  Maybe the better question is, when do you feel best about yourself? When you are doing the things that you say you want to do. When do you feel the worse about yourself? When you are doing the things that you told yourself you weren't going to do. How about this article that came out a few years ago?

Dr. Roy F Baumeister, professor of psychology at Florida State University, confesses that five years of serious research commissioned by the American Psychological Society now show this effort hasn’t worked. The Los Angeles Times quoted him as follows: “People with high self-esteem think they make better impressions, have stronger friendships and have better romantic lives than other people, but the data doesn’t support their self-flattering views…A generation and many millions of dollars later, it turns out we may have been mistaken…I’m sorry to say, my recommendation is this: Forget about self-esteem and concentrate more on self-control and self-discipline.”

Our recommendation is similar: rather than just telling our kids how good they are (unless of course you mean because of what Jesus did!) let's train them to actually be good.