Building Self Esteem in Your Teenage Group

A lot of times we totally miss it. As a child, many of our teens miss the ESSENTIAL NEED of being emotionally nurtured and because of this they are unintentionally breached into a huge world of hateful critics and abusers. If we can grasp the fact that our children need to have a built self worth positive outlook at them self before they even enter into the teenage years, we would see a huge decline in low self esteem, painful fear of rejection, suicidal thoughts and successful attempts and a decline in teen pregnancy and sex. All of these are a vicious cycle that most adults do not want to come to terms with. However, it is gripping our teenagers and tearing them apart at the seams.

Self esteem MUST be established at a young age, but that is not the case in the society we now live in. A lot of parents either don't care, don't have the time or suffer from depression and low self esteem them self. Again, this is where we need to break the invisible cycle of neglect or abuse by omission, if you will. Parents need to open their eyes and want to see a change in their children. It is a proven fact that if parents really "cared"enough to instill morals and self worth into their children 9 times out of 10, they WILL be successful in doing so. What's stopping us?

We must build our children up from an early age so that they not only feel like they can open up to us but they can also know their own worth before someone else attempts to make them feel worthless. Once they have a sense of self worth, as a teenage girl, chances are she will be able to say "no" to sex, because she recognizes that she is better than that, as her self worth had already been established as a child.

Ways that are fun for teenagers to help build self esteem is to make them interact with one another. One perfect example is to make them talk about the qualities of other teenagers that they don't normally hang around with. This will cause them to not only accept the qualities of others, but to also share those qualities. Peer pressure is not always "the actually influence of other peers". A lot of the time it is the "fear" of your peers passing judgment. The fear of rejection is only a figment of your imagination or a false thought.

Establish a group of teens and split them up into groups of two. These groups of kids should not know much about one another; they shouldn't be friends or even acquaintances. Have them each write down qualities that they feel they have. From there they would share these with their partners. The partner would share with the class. Making this an assignment causes the fear of rejection to subside. The teens automatically have a sense of trust and confidence in not only them self, but their peers, now having to share positive things about each other. I feel that this is essential and should be mandatory in all health science middle school students.