Bookmark (article) self-esteem: The Self-Esteem Debate

http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_pwwi/is_200801/ai_n21214576

I’m learning more about self-esteem right now, and in particular what I’m wondering about is: What type of self-esteem does the kids in U.S. have? As I was reading in my Google Reader, this article caught my attention because there are article out there that mention kids with high self-esteem, while other articles talk about the problem of kids with low self-esteem, so I’m very confuse about the self-esteem of most kids in U.S.

The quote I chose here is basically saying there are large percentage of the population of the kids that have low self-esteem, actions are being take to solve the problem, but these action face many problems.

Almost 10 percent of American adults suffer from depression and, according to statistics from a Harvard University study reported in "Harvard Mental Health Newsletter," the number of children under 18 who are depressed rises by 23 percent every year.
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It’s very mess up, those that lack self-esteem doesn’t receive enough, while other people have sky-high self-esteem according from the news items I read before this article.

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Children's self-esteem problems have been addressed in some peculiar ways of late. As Vision points out, "In the summer of 2005 Liz Beattie, a retired British school teacher, proposed to her union that the word failure should be banned from classrooms and replaced with the more palatable phrase deferred success so as not to discourage students from continuing efforts to achieve." At about the same time in the United States, various bans on red ink gained momentum as teachers assumed that the color was causing undue stress in children.
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People are making kids’ lives way too easy for, don’t they know they are actually harming them by doing that? How are these kids going to survive when they step their feet into the real world? They might survive in this country if this is going on in the whole country, but how will they be able to compete with other country? Our country will fall behind. There are kids who struggles to live in the poorer countries, and with no question will they fit well in the real world if  they survive, there no way kids form our country could compete with them, with the comfortable condition they live in.

It would appear that there is no avoiding failure -- and then overcoming it -- on the way to the achievement of success. A child knows when he or she has actually succeeded, and false praise in an effort to make a child "feel better" can make a child mistrust even honest praise.

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I believe I had experience this type of feeling a lot of time, whether the compliment may or may not be true, it doesn’t sound true to me deep in my heart. By doing that, adults confuse the children whether or not they done a good job. Furthermore the kids might lost their trust in the adults.