A musing Beam

(This blog has been in the hopper for quite awhile, but I had forgotten where I put the draft -- yet another reason to leave everything in the default folders ...) Okay, the title is purposely provocative.   What I really mean is that I don't want you to have an artificially high self esteem:   I want you to (eventually) have a healthy self esteem that deserves to be high.   For a long, long time, well-meaning people have been preaching high self esteem -- don't do that to your kid, it will hurt his self esteem ....   While not being a jerk is good advice, especially when it comes to those that you have a special relationship with such as kids, in theory what you do should have very little effect on someone else's SELF esteem. Your self esteem should be based on how well you measure up to your personal values.   Because these values are personal, most of what other people say should only inform your own opinions, and as you become more self aware the importance of othe