Developing a Self-image

From the Start

As a starting point for our discussion, let us look at the changing self-image of the developing child. His first discovery, when he is a few months old, is that his mother is something different from himself. He soon realizes that there are a whole lot of other people as well.

At about two years, he realizes that individuals have different agendas, and he can have his own. Hopefully, he soon learns that people cope with conflicting agendas by cooperation.

Around age five or six, he figures out that, just as he is starting to have opinions about others, the others must have opinions about him. It is not unusual to have a five-year-old who can stand up in front of an audience of strangers at a Speech Arts festival, and speak a poem comfortably. Come back the next year, and at the age of six the child is suddenly too shy to stand in front of the audience. During that year, this child has realized that he is a separate unit, and that all those other people are separate units as well, and that their ideas may differ from his. Some of them may even be critical of what he does.

Then, around age ten, he starts to notice the norms of social interaction, and see how his own experience matches. It is around this age that sexually abused children suddenly show behaviour changes. Before this, they did not understand what was happening to them, and they were not aware that their lives were abnormal. Once they become aware of social condemnation, they become more upset by their situation.

And all this time, the child is slowly forming an image of himself. How this image develops is one of the strongest factors influencing the rest of his life.

There is one basic way an organism, from a tadpole to a human, learns (if a tadpole can learn, and, having been a teacher, I'm not sure about some humans). The individual performs an action. It receives a response. It remembers that response, and adapts future actions because of that memory.

The self-image is developed through this learning process, over the child’s (and adult’s) life. Given the complexities of the human brain and society, there are three ways a child develops his self-image:
1. from the results of his actions, as described above,
2. from the reaction of those around him to his actions, which is simply the social side of the procedure mentioned above, and
3. from his understanding and interpretation of his own actions and accomplishments, which modify his perceptions of the world.

A simple example to illustrate how all three work together to develop self-image:

A child is goal keeper in a soccer game. The ball is kicked towards the goal. He grabs for the ball, and takes a hard blow to the solar plexus.

A child is playing with his soccer ball. A bully comes to take it away. The child tries to grab the ball, and the bully punches him, hard, in the solar plexus.

In both these instances, the child’s motivation for his action is the same, the resulting pain is the same. However, the result to his self-esteem is dramatically different, because of his perception of the situation.

You can imagine, in the first instance, the child lies there a moment, winded, holding the ball. The team responds with concern and admiration. The child, noting their support and his success, jumps to his feet, ready to play again. His self-image, due to both the reaction of his peers and his knowledge of his success, has been bolstered, in spite of the painful experience. The next time the ball comes near, the goalie will dive even harder, and thus become a better goal keeper, achieve more success in his own eyes and that of his peers, and thus become an even better goal keeper, and the spiral goes upwards.

In the second instance, the child lies on the ground, winded, without the ball. The other children look on silently in fear and pity. The child begins to cry, from the pain and the loss of the ball. His self-image, due to the pain and the reaction of the others, has been dealt a severe blow. The next time, the child will avoid the bully, and perhaps the other children. The child will give in more easily to the bully, and feel badly about it. He will perhaps learn that the only way to achieve power over the other children is to bully them, although he knows that this is wrong, so he feels badly, and the spiral goes down.

In both examples, the child’s interpretation of his action is influenced by the resulting feeling(in both cases pain), the reaction of his peers, and his interpretation of the success of his action. As he grows older, he will also develop a sense of the fairness of the situation, which is one of the strongest influences in later development of the self-image. Ask any parent of a teenager.

Independence and Maturity

It stands to reason that the younger a child is, the less independent in action and thought he will be. The development of an individual, independent self-image is intricately involved with the maturing process. The maturing process is a process of gradually gaining independence, through making choices, noting the results of those choices, including the reactions of others, and then deciding how to integrate that information into further decisions.

Healthy maturing is a process of slowly taking more and more control of our self-image, and the ways to develop and nurture it, and depending less and less on the reactions of others to influence our actions and how we feel about ourselves. And here is the nub of the problem.

Dependency and Immaturity

If the adults around him conspire to keep a child dependent on the opinions of parents and teachers, this delays that child’s control of his own self-image, and impedes his maturity. In severe cases, this can damage the child’s self-image to the point where it will never truly mature.

Which explains why we have so much childish behaviour in the adult population. Take a drive through the streets of any city during rush hour.

It is my premise that a self-image that is too strongly affected by others is a poorly-developed self-image. To create a healthy self-image, the child must be allowed the freedom to make choices and accept the consequences. This is a scary thought for many adults, especially the controlling ones, who are afraid to allow the child to make a mistake.

I recall one poor woman. I’m sure you know the type. She was always dressed perfectly, with impeccable makeup, not a hair out of place. She managed to get through a day working with children, without ever getting mussed or dirty. She once confided in me that she was so concerned with this perfection, that it affected the way she raised her family. She was so anxious that her children be perfect, she would ignore anything they did that was wrong. It certainly seemed not to be working. When one of her children ran seriously afoul of the law, nobody at the school was surprised. The sad part of it was that she was intelligent enough to know she was wrong, but her own self-image was so concerned with looking good, with seeming perfect to other people, that she couldn’t do anything about it.

By praising her looks and grooming, someone had made her too concerned with other people’s opinions. By ignoring her childrens’ bad behaviour, she was, in essence, praising it, and so it continued. By controlling her children, she did not allow them to mature, and so they made bad choices.

In my next posting, I will talk about creating a positive self-image.