Self esteem in individuals is the glue that ties society together. Think of it as the bricks of a massive building. Weak bricks make a weak building. Strong bricks make a magnificent building that will last millennia. Every attribute and value defining a civilization will be transmitted between individuals within a society by those with the strongest self esteem. Self esteem is the strength in the bricks, the mortar is the relationships between these strong bricks.
Here we are going to talk about the second most important factor reinforcing a teen’s self esteem, which is the teacher. Teachers play a unique and critical role in the emotional lives of young people as young people emancipate from the relatively safe harbors of family and home, sailing out into the open seas of public adult life. Teachers have the most sacred responsibility in not one but two areas of a young person’s development.
The first area is in teaching them general knowledge they will need to be complete as a person out in the community. They will need an extensive background in life itself, spoon fed to them as subjects of science, math, history, culture, arts, and a whole bunch of other peripheral subjects, both required and elective in nature. Teens have one foot in the home and the other in venturing out into society. This transition place requires confidence in not only what they are taught, but of themselves as a functioning adult learning to be their individuated selves. That is a deep thought, but it simply means learning they matter in life.
The second area requiring much more emotional and therefore spiritual skill than teaching is ability to connect with each teenager in their own world. Anyone who has experience of being around young people will tell you all teens are not the same. Young people enter the common ground of public life from very different private backgrounds. Some are complete and they are well nurtured, others are incomplete, as I was, with almost no sense of personhood, and absolutely no ability to enter safe relationships. In other words, not all things that can fit together will fit together, and it is the teacher’s task to a limited degree to find out why. On top of that, how to make common ground happen in the minds of everyone in her classroom.
When a teenager leaves home their first personal contact with the vast sea of Humankind is the teacher. Whatever emotional nurturing they received from motherhood, or lack thereof in their emotionally barren family will need to be either reinforced or corrected as much as possible by the teacher. In an era where many households and families are deficient with incomplete nurturing, dealing with teens with low self esteem will make the teacher’s task much harder. Self esteem and a student’s seeing himself as a fit somewhere in the adult world are prerequisites for the teacher to teach them anything.
The teaching function must at some point shift emphasis from that which is being taught to the recognition of the one learning. The best teachers know this and will nurture needful teens as much as can be done in a group setting with the time provided. Spiritually deep teachers will not only emphasize the material the teenagers must learn, but they must also the same time teach each student they are a person and are needed in life by others as well. Teaching is one task, teaching each student they matter and are wanted to make other’s lives complete is another. The best teachers will emphasize this in a way that recognizes their students’ seven spiritual birthrights as a way of doing that. The student will readily see when their teacher respects their seven spiritual birthrights, they will respond with wanting to learn, because their teacher cares. These seven spiritual birthrights are:
Seeing things through our own eyes, (and not some negative someone’s or some organization’s eyes).
Feeling our own feelings, (and not some negative someone or some organization’s feelings).
Thinking our own thoughts.
Making our own choices (and taking full responsibility for them).
Beyond that, with love from others, we will turn inward and be encouraged to:
Find our own talents, gifts, dreams.
Build on our talents, gifts and dreams.
Lastly, we joyously share our gifts and dreams with others to make Humankind complete.
When a teenager leaves their home and ventures into the school setting, the most important person is not their friends and associates on the field or in the school hallway as we may think. It is the teacher. Their role is to reinforce the nurturing that motherhood has already placed in them, or as much as possible, negate the negative message that they do not matter. What good parenting has been put into their strong self esteem can be reinforced. What bad or missing parenting had misled the teenager to believe about themselves can be somewhat reversed. This is done by the teacher, who can be the most important person in a teenager’s life in some cases.
That is a very big spiritual responsibility.
One last word about perfectionist teens: Perfectionist teens, both boys and girls compare themselves to perfection, instead of to adequate, a more realistic standard. Moreover, most perfectionist young people are highly sensitive, artistic and introverted. This works against them in the short term because they feel deeply things they cannot put into words, which they need to express at some point. Later in life it will be a big spiritual asset, but not right now. This is because they lack the ability to verbalize feelings adequately, also because they also lack the vocabulary, we older people have acquired. Quantifying things we see, and feel is a skill that takes decades to fully develop.
The best advice I can give is to set a role model example of yourself that they will readily see and copy. Tell them about your feelings in how you see things, the mistakes you have made and personal aspects of yourself that show you are a human being. An example might be I like small cars because I cannot park big ones, or I like the ocean because as a child I liked a musical group out of California. Your personal opinions shared show you are human and finite. This tells them you do not take yourself seriously and you are optimistic about life and the good in it. Perfectionists need an easy-going, open, optimistic, casual personality to copy.
That tells them they can look at life the same way. When they encounter difficulty with a concept, they will not see themselves as a failure, but as a person, just like you. And that is the best lesson of all for a perfectionist to learn.
Just for the record, this is an emotional and spiritual encouragement ministry. We are selling nothing here and are not at the present time even set up to take donations, and probably never will. Your healed life is our reward enough, and we are very pleased with that. If you want to, please share your strength with others in your future so our nurturing can live on.