It was the 1970s and adults were looking for a way to raise
confident, go-getter children, ones who would celebrate the
person they were to become. And so parents and teachers started
showering them with praise, creating a pop movement of self-
esteem that played up their worth. Up those youngsters grew,
with grand aspirations of becoming celebrities, astronauts —
anything they wanted to be. And then out came the beating
sticks. Children of the self-esteem movement — their identities
shaped by I Am Special songs and “Princess” t-shirts — have
become entitled, confused and self-critical youth and adults,
raised to believe they can do anything and frustrated, sometimes
devastated, when they can’t, experts say. The phenomenon seems
at odds with the very definition of self-esteem: feeling good
about yourself. Now, decades since the praise began,
psychologists and researchers say they’ve found a way to ease
the mental self-battery that has become prominent in North
American culture. A new wave of research on self-c