Generation Me--Revised and Updated

by Jean M. Twenge

  This is a bit of a mystery, however. The United States of the 1980s to 2000s never approached the kid-friendly stability of the 1950s and early 1960s: violent crime rose, divorce was still at epidemic levels, and the economy went through several recessions. Such societal upheavals usually have a negative effect on self-esteem. So without the calm and prosperity of earlier decades, why did children’s self-esteem increase so dramatically during the 1980s, 1990s, and 2000s?

  THE SELF-ESTEEM CURRICULUM

  The short answer is that they were taught it. The years after 1980 saw a pervasive, societywide effort to increase children’s self-esteem.

  The Boomers who now filled the ranks of parents apparently decided that children should always feel good about themselves, and GenX’er parents continued that trend. Research on programs to boost self-esteem first blossomed in the 1980s, and the number of psychology and education journal articles devoted to self-esteem doubled between the 1970s and the 1980s. Journal articles on self-esteem increased another 52% during the 1990s, and the number of books on self-esteem doubled over the same time. Generation Me is the first generation raised to believe that everyone should have high self-esteem.

  Magazines, television talk shows, and books all emphasize the importance of high self-esteem for children, usually promoting feelings that are a lot closer to narcissism (a more negative trait usually defined as an inflated sense of self). One children’s book, first published in 1991, is called The Lovables in the Kingdom of Self-Esteem. “I AM LOVABLE. Hi, lovable friend! My name is Mona Monkey. I live in the Kingdom of Self-Esteem along with my friends the Lovable Team,” the book begins. On the next page, children learn that the gates of the kingdom will swing open if you “say these words three times with pride: I’m lovable! I’m lovable! I’m lovable!”

  Parents are encouraged to raise their children’s self-esteem even when kids are simply coloring. Even the cat has high self-esteem on this coloring book cover. However, the dog lacks a self-esteem-boosting ribbon. He probably has low self-esteem—after all, he drinks out of the toilet.

  Another example is the BE A WINNER Self-Esteem Coloring and Activity Book pictured in this chapter. Inside, children find activities and pictures designed to boost their self-esteem, including coloring a “poster for your room” that reads YOU ARE SPECIAL in yellow, orange, and red letters against a purple background. Another page asks kids to fill in the blanks: “Accept y_ur_e_f. You’re a special person. Use p_si_iv_ thinking.” A similar coloring book is called We Are All Special (though this title seems to suggest that being special isn’t so special).

  Remember, everyone is special. Maybe if you color the whole poster you can catch the irony.

  Many school districts across the country have specific programs designed to increase children’s self-esteem, most of which seem to promote self-importance and narcissism. One program is called “Self-Science: The Subject Is Me.” (Why bother with biology? I’m so much more interesting!) Another program, called “Pumsy in Pursuit of Excellence,” uses a dragon character to encourage children to escape the Mud Mind they experience when feeling bad about themselves. Instead, they should strive to be in the Sparkle Mind and feel good about themselves. The Magic Circle exercise designates one child a day to receive a badge saying I’M GREAT. The other children then say good things about the chosen child, who later receives a written list of all of the praise. At the end of the exercise, the child must then say something good about him- or herself. Boomer children in the 1950s and 1960s gained self-esteem naturally from a stable, child-friendly society; GenMe’s self-esteem has been actively cultivated for its own sake.

  One Austin, Texas, father was startled to see his 5-year-old daughter wearing a shirt that announced I’M LOVABLE AND CAPABLE. All of the kindergarteners, he learned, recited this phrase before class, and they all wore the shirt to school on Fridays. It seems the school started a bit too young, however, because the child then asked, “Daddy, all the kids are wondering, what does capable mean?”

  After school, when kids play sports, the self-esteem emphasis continues. In most leagues, everyone gets a trophy just for playing—you sit on the bench, you get the trophy; you don’t try, you get the trophy; you suck, you still get a trophy. My nephew has a large trophy engraved with EXCELLENCE IN PARTICIPATION. What does that mean—I’m good at showing up? In other leagues, everyone gets the same-size trophy no matter who wins or loses. In a widely read op-ed in the New York Times, Ashley Merryman reported that trophy and award sales are a $3-billion-a-year industry in the United States and Canada—even though, as she summarizes the research, “nonstop recognition does not inspire children to succeed. Instead, it can cause them to underachieve.”

  Some people have wondered if the self-esteem trend waned after schools began to put more emphasis on testing during the late 1990s. A quick Google search suggests that’s not the case, with many schools mentioning self-esteem in their mission statements. And in 2012, my daughter Kate came home from kindergarten with a self-portrait worksheet proclaiming “I’m very happy to be me” and (worse) the same song I use in my talks to illustrate how we teach kids narcissism: “I am special / I am special / Look at me . . .” Kate now knows what (as she pronounces it) “narcissisms” is. (Her definition: “Narcissism is when you fart and then say, “I rule!”)

  Parenting books and magazines stress self-esteem as much as ever, and a large number of schools continue to use self-esteem programs. The mission statements of many schools explicitly announce that they aim to raise students’ self-esteem. A Google search for elementary school mission statement self-esteem yielded 2.9 million Web pages in February 2014. These schools are located across the country, in cities, suburbs, small towns, and rural areas. “Building,” “improving,” “promoting,” or “developing” self-esteem is a stated goal of (among many others) Monterrey Elementary School in Carlsbad, New Mexico; Memorial Elementary School in Milford, Massachusetts; James McHenry Elementary in Prince George’s County, Maryland; Sechrist Elementary in Flagstaff, Arizona; Randolphville Elementary in Piscataway, New Jersey; Rockhill Elementary in Alliance, Ohio; Haynes Elementary in Lubbock, Texas; and Hume Elementary in Nelson, BC, Canada. Private religious schools are not immune: St. Francis of Assisi Catholic School in Louisville, Kentucky, aims to “help the student discover and develop a positive sense of self-esteem.” Jahn World Language School in Chicago raises the bar, adding that students will “exhibit high self-esteem.” So self-esteem must not just be promoted by teachers, but must actively be exhibited by students.

  As John Hewitt points out in The Myth of Self-Esteem, the implicit message is that self-esteem can be taught and should be taught. When self-esteem programs are used, Hewitt notes, children are “encouraged to believe that it is acceptable and desirable to be preoccupied with oneself [and] praise oneself.” In many cases, he says, it’s not just encouraged but required. These exercises make self-importance mandatory, demanding of children that they love themselves. “The child must be taught to like himself or herself. . . . The child must take the teacher’s attitude himself or herself—‘I am somebody!’ ‘I am capable and loving!’—regardless of what the child thinks.”

  Most of these programs encourage children to feel good about themselves for no particular reason. In one program, teachers are told to discourage children from saying things like “I’m a good soccer player” or “I’m a good singer.” This makes self-esteem contingent on performance, the program authors chide. Instead, “we want to anchor self-esteem firmly to the child . . . so that no matter what the performance might be, the self-esteem remains high.” In other words, feeling good about yourself is more important than good performance. Children, the guide says, should be taught “that it is who they are, not what they do, that is important.” Many programs encourage self-esteem even when things go wrong or the child does something bad. In one activity, children are asked to finish several sentences, including ones beginning “I love myself even though . . .” and “I forgive
myself for . . .”

  Teacher training courses often emphasize that a child’s self-esteem must be preserved above all else. A sign on the wall of one university’s education department says WE CHOOSE TO FEEL SPECIAL AND WORTHWHILE NO MATTER WHAT. Perhaps as a result, 60% of teachers and 69% of school counselors agree that self-esteem should be raised by “providing more unconditional validation of students based on who they are rather than how they perform or behave.” Unconditional validation, to translate the educational mumbo jumbo, means feeling good about yourself no matter how you act or whether you learn anything or not. Although unconditional love from a parent has many benefits, unconditional validation of yourself may not be quite as positive. A veteran second-grade teacher in Tennessee disagrees with this practice but sees it everywhere. “We handle children much more delicately,” she says. “They feel good about themselves for no reason. We’ve given them this cotton-candy sense of self with no basis in reality.”

  Although the self-esteem approach sounds as if it might be especially popular in liberal blue-state areas, it’s common in red states as well, perhaps because it’s similar to the ideas popularized by fundamentalist Christian churches. For example, the popular Christian children’s book You Are Special promotes the same unconditional self-esteem emphasized in secular school programs. First published in 1997, the book notes, “The world tells kids, ‘You’re special if . . . you have the brains, the looks, the talent.’ God tells them, ‘You’re special just because. No qualifications necessary.’ Every child you know needs to hear this one, reassuring truth.” Traditional religion, however, did have “qualifications” and rules for behavior. Adults hear this message of self-esteem as well. In an article in Ladies’ Home Journal, Christian author Rick Warren writes, “You can believe what others say about you, or you can believe in yourself as does God, who says you are truly acceptable, lovable, valuable, and capable.”

  Calvin knows exactly why the notion of unconditional self-esteem is so popular: it feels good and requires little work.

  Even programs not specifically focused on self-esteem often place the utmost value on children’s self-feelings. Children in some schools sing songs with lyrics like “Who I am makes a difference and all our dreams can come true” and “We are beautiful, magnificent, courageous, outrageous, and great!” Other students pen a “Me Poem” or write a mock TV commercial advertising themselves and their good qualities. The children’s museum in Laramie, Wyoming, has a self-esteem exhibit where children are told to describe themselves using positive adjectives.

  Parents often continue the self-esteem lessons their children have learned in school, perhaps because more children are planned and cherished. The debut of the birth control pill in the early 1960s began the trend toward wanted children, which continued in the early 1970s as abortion became legal and cultural values shifted toward children as a choice rather than a duty. In the 1950s, it was considered selfish not to have kids, but by the 1970s it was an individual decision. As a result, more and more children were born to people who really wanted to become parents. Parents were able to lavish more attention on each child as the average number of children per family shrank from four to two. This parental attention has many benefits, but it may also have resulted in a hothouse environment of specialness. Young people often say that their parents believed in building self-esteem. “My mom constantly told me how special I was,” said Natalie, 19. “No matter how I did, she would tell me I was the best.” Kristen, 22, said her parents had a “wonderful” way of “telling me what a great job I did and repeatedly telling me I was a very special person.” The problem: “I think I am a special person” is one of the items on the Narcissistic Personality Inventory.

  Popular media has also promoted this idea endlessly, offering up self-esteem as the cure for just about everything. In one episode of the family drama 7th Heaven, one young character asks what can be done about war. The father on the show, a minister, says, “We can take a good look in the mirror, and when we see peace, that’s when we’ll have peace on earth.” The rest of the episode features each character smiling broadly to himself or herself in the mirror. In other words, if we all just loved ourselves enough, it would put an end to war. (Not only is this tripe, but wars, if anything, are usually rooted in too much love of self, land, and nation—not too little.) But, as TV and movies have taught us, loving yourself is more important than anything else.

  These efforts have had their intended impact. In Souls in Transition, Christian Smith concludes that the 18-to-23-year-olds he interviewed in 2008 “are as a group some of the most optimistic people we have ever encountered or listened to—at least when it comes to their own personal lives and futures.” In a CBS News poll, the high school graduates of 2000 (the first wave of GenMe) were asked, “What makes you feel positive about yourself?” The most popular answer, at 33%, was the tautological “self-esteem.” School performance was a distant second at 18%, with popularity third at 13%. Yet this is not surprising: saying that having self-esteem makes you feel positive about yourself—forget any actual reason—is exactly what the self-esteem programs have taught today’s young generation since they were in kindergarten.

  Yet when everyone wears a shirt that says I’M SPECIAL, as some of the programs encourage, it is a wide-open invitation to parody. The 1997 premier episode of MTV’s animated show Daria features a character named Jane, who cracks, “I like having low self-esteem. It makes me feel special.” Later in the episode, the teacher of a “self-esteem class” asks the students to “make a list of ten ways the world would be a sadder place if you weren’t in it.” “Is that if we’d never been born, or if we died suddenly and unexpectedly?” asks one of the students. Wanting to get out of the rest of the class, Daria and Jane recite the answers to the self-esteem “test”: “The next time I start to feel bad about myself [I will] stand before the mirror, look myself in the eye, and say, ‘You are special. No one else is like you.’ ”

  By the time GenMe gets to college, these messages are rote. John Hewitt, who teaches at the University of Massachusetts, says his students are excited when they begin discussing self-esteem in his sociology class. But once he begins to question the validity of self-esteem, the students’ faces become glum and interest wanes. Hewitt compares it to what might happen in church if a priest suddenly began questioning the existence of God. After all, we worship at the altar of self-esteem and self-focus. “When the importance of self-esteem is challenged, a major part of the contemporary American view of the world is challenged,” Hewitt writes.

  GIRLS ARE GREAT

  It is no coincidence that the Daria episode parodying self-esteem programs features two girls. Feminist Gloria Steinem, who spent the 1970s and 1980s fighting for practical rights such as equal pay and maternity leave, spent the early 1990s promoting her book Revolution from Within: A Book of Self-Esteem. In 1991, a study by the American Association of University Women (AAUW) announced that girls “lose their self-esteem on the way to adolescence.” This study was covered in countless national news outlets and ignited a national conversation about teenage girls and how they feel about themselves. Reviving Ophelia, a bestselling book on adolescent girls, popularized this idea further, documenting the feelings of self-doubt girls experience as they move through junior high and high school. Apparently, girls’ self-esteem was suffering a severe blow when they became teenagers, and we needed to do something about it.

  Before long, programs such as the Girl Scouts began to focus on self-esteem through their “Girls Are Great” program. Girls could earn badges like “Being My Best” and “Understanding Yourself and Others.” Amanda, 22, says that her Girl Scout troop spent a lot of time on self-esteem. “We did workshops and earned badges based around self-esteem-building projects,” she says. “We learned that we could do anything we wanted, that it was good to express yourself, and being different is good.” (I spent 10 years as a Girl Scout myself, but what I remember most is getting good and dirty on camping trips,
which may have been more beneficial than any self-esteem program.)

  In 2002, the Girl Scout Council paired with corporate sponsor Unilever to launch “Uniquely ME!”—a self-esteem program to “address the critical nationwide problem of low self-esteem among adolescent and preadolescent girls.” The program includes three booklets for girls ages 8 to 14, each including exercises on “recognizing one’s strengths and best attributes” and “identifying core values and personal interests.”

  However, there is little evidence that girls’ self-esteem dives at adolescence. The AAUW study was seriously flawed, relying on unstandardized measures and exaggerating small differences. In 1999, a carefully researched, comprehensive study of sex differences in self-esteem was published in Psychological Bulletin, the most prestigious journal in the field. The study statistically summarized 216 previous studies on more than 97,000 people and concluded that the sex difference in self-esteem was fairly small—about 56% of men have higher self-esteem than the average woman. Exaggerating this difference might be unwise. “We may create a self-fulfilling prophecy for girls by telling them they’ll have low self-esteem,” said University of Wisconsin professor Janet Hyde, one of the study authors.