Self-Esteem Activities for Kids: What Builds a Child's Sense of Worth and What Backfires

About this tool

Self-esteem activities for kids are things an adult sets up so that a child can experience being capable, being useful and being valued, which is where the research suggests a stable sense of worth is most likely to grow. The phrase is slightly misleading, because the activities here do not try to talk a child into feeling good about themselves. They aim at competence, contribution and connection, on the view that a sense of worth needs something real to rest on. This page is written for the parent, carer or teacher who will run them, and it begins with a correction, because the most popular self-esteem activity of the last forty years, telling children how clever and special they are, is the one the research says to stop.

Self-esteem, in the developmental research of Susan Harter and others, is a child's overall judgment of their own worth, built up from how they see themselves in specific domains, such as schoolwork, friendships, sport, looks and behavior, weighted by how much each domain matters to them and to the people they care about. In Harter's account, younger children mostly describe themselves domain by domain, and a more global judgment of worth emerges gradually across middle childhood; adult feedback shapes it at every age, and there is no fixed age at which it sets. The practical point is that the adult's feedback habits matter from the start.

The correction comes from Carol Dweck's laboratory. In 1998, Claudia Mueller and Dweck gave fifth-graders a set of problems and praised them afterward either for being smart or for working hard. The children praised for intelligence then chose easier tasks, enjoyed the harder ones less, gave up sooner, performed worse, and were more likely to lie about their scores. The children praised for effort did the opposite. The mechanism is simple: "you're so clever" turns every future task into a test of whether the label is still true, and the safest way to protect a label is to avoid anything you might fail at. Praise for effort, strategy and specific progress gives the child something they can control and repeat. It is a specific change an adult can make at once.

Two further findings sharpen the point, with limits worth stating. Eddie Brummelman and colleagues followed Dutch children from ages seven to twelve and found that parental overvaluation, treating a child as more special and more entitled than other children, predicted later narcissism, while parental warmth, simply enjoying and being affectionate with the child, predicted later self-esteem. Warmth and overvaluation are different things: one says you matter to me, the other says you are better than others. The study was observational, so it shows association over time rather than proof of cause, and it measured overvaluation, not ordinary praise. The second finding comes from Roy Baumeister's 2003 review of the self-esteem literature, which concluded that high self-esteem had not been shown to cause better grades, better relationships or better behavior, and that programs designed to raise self-esteem directly had little to show for it. A 2022 reassessment by Ulrich Orth and Richard Robins, drawing on later longitudinal studies and meta-analyses, found that self-esteem does predict later outcomes in relationships, school, work and health, with small average effects, so it is not merely a byproduct. Neither review shows that any particular self-esteem exercise produces those benefits, which is why this page works on competence, contribution and connection, where the adult can act directly.

What produces it, in practice, falls into four groups of activity. Effort-focused feedback: changing what the adult says after a child does something, so the comment describes the effort, the strategy, the persistence or the specific result. Mastery experiences: tasks that are slightly beyond the child's current ability, which they complete with just enough help, so they learn from their own evidence that they can do hard things. Albert Bandura identified these as the most powerful source of self-efficacy, and children's self-worth leans on them heavily. Contribution: real jobs that matter to the household or classroom, with the child's work actually relied on, because being needed is a form of worth that praise cannot manufacture. And strengths spotting: noticing and naming, with examples, the character strengths the child shows, such as kindness, curiosity, persistence or humor, so the child builds a specific, true picture of themselves.

What the evidence does not support is as important. Mirror affirmations, in which a child repeats "I am amazing" or "I can do anything," have thin evidence in children and some worrying evidence in adults: Joanne Wood and colleagues found that positive self-statements made adults with low self-esteem feel worse, apparently because the statements were too far from what they believed. Broad growth mindset programs, which teach that ability can grow, have modest effects; a 2018 meta-analysis by Sisk and colleagues found small effects that were larger for struggling and low-income students and close to zero for others. The specific finding about praise holds up better than the broad program built on it, so the advice here stays specific: change the praise, build the experiences, and do not expect a poster to do the work.

Age shapes the activities. For ages three to five, the work is mostly in the adult's mouth: naming effort, letting the child do small real jobs badly, and tolerating the mess of a child learning to pour their own milk. For six to nine, mastery projects with a visible result, regular household jobs that others rely on, and strengths spotting with concrete examples all land well. For ten to twelve, children can set their own stretch goals, take on responsibilities with real consequences, reflect on evidence of their own growth, and start to catch and reframe their own global self-judgments with adult help. At every age, the activities suit children with ordinary wobbles in confidence. A child who seems persistently worthless, who says they hate themselves, who withdraws from everything, or whose self-criticism follows bullying or a loss needs a pediatrician or child therapist, and these activities become part of a bigger plan.

The common mistakes are mostly well-meant. Global praise, "you're so smart," "you're the best," which sets up a label to defend. Rescuing from struggle, so the child never collects the evidence of getting through something hard. Comparing to siblings or classmates, in either direction. Praising everything, which teaches the child that praise is noise. Manufacturing success, such as letting a child win every game, which the child usually notices. And confusing warmth with praise: a child needs to feel unconditionally loved and to receive specific, honest feedback, and when the two are blended into constant admiration the child gets neither.

If you are running these activities and your child's view of themselves is not shifting over months, if their self-criticism is harsh and persistent, or if it followed something that happened to them, a licensed child therapist can help you understand what is underneath it. The Psychology.com therapist directory lets you search for child and family therapists at no cost. On this site, the List of Strengths gives you a vocabulary for strengths spotting, and the Behavior Chart for Kids can keep one specific effort visible while you build the habit of noticing it.

Reviewed by Michael Callans, MSW
Checked the praise research and its limits, the distinction between warmth and overvaluation, and that the page addresses the adult throughout.

References

1. Mueller CM, Dweck CS. Praise for intelligence can undermine children's motivation and performance. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. 1998;75(1):33-52.
2. Brummelman E, Thomaes S, Nelemans SA, Orobio de Castro B, Overbeek G, Bushman BJ. Origins of narcissism in children. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. 2015;112(12):3659-3662.
3. Baumeister RF, Campbell JD, Krueger JI, Vohs KD. Does high self-esteem cause better performance, interpersonal success, happiness, or healthier lifestyles? Psychological Science in the Public Interest. 2003;4(1):1-44.
4. Orth U, Robins RW. Is high self-esteem beneficial? Revisiting a classic question. American Psychologist. 2022;77(1):5-17.
5. Wood JV, Perunovic WQE, Lee JW. Positive self-statements: power for some, peril for others. Psychological Science. 2009;20(7):860-866.
6. Sisk VF, Burgoyne AP, Sun J, Butler JL, Macnamara BN. To what extent and under which circumstances are growth mind-sets important to academic achievement? Two meta-analyses. Psychological Science. 2018;29(4):549-571.

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