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Building Self Worth in Your Child

by Anne O'Donnell
1/07/2024 / Parenting

Building Self-Worth in Your Child

Hello all you beautiful mommas – I’m thrilled to celebrate motherhood with you and to reassure you that your heavenly father sees all your attempts to raise healthy-minded God-fearing children in the best way you know how.

I picked the topic of your child’s self-worth because it is the single most crucial component in raising children to face a sin sick world and discover how they can thrive inside it. The worth they feel from a loving environment in their early years sets the stage to know their worth to God.

Without a stamp of approval confirming their value every minute of every day, a child or young person can lose their footing, and the odds of them plummeting severely increases as they grow older. Multiply those years into the future and it’s no surprise that teens and adults find themselves floundering through life inside the absence of safe and secure relationships that can leave them feeling helpless or hopeless.

I believe what governs the way we live our life consists primarily of three things:

How we are born — physically, mentally, behaviorally, and emotionally
The impact of our environment — which we sometimes have no control over
And the choices we make — based on truth or deception

All of them point to our self-evaluation: AM I WORTHY?

Why is this topic of self-worth so important? God sets up earthly relationships to mimic his character and unconditional love for us, knowing our self-worth plays a huge role on how we perceive ourselves. He says so himself.

Psalm 139:14 You are fearfully and wonderfully made — absolute unwavering certainty

Genesis 1:27 Let us make man in our image — an intimate expression of being created after his likeness

Isaiah 43:4 You are precious and honored in my sight — validation

Ephesians 2:8 By his grace we are saved — you are worth saving

1 Corinthians 4:20 You were bought with a price — demonstration to us of what perfect sacrificial love looks like

John 3:16 For God so loved the world that He gave — unconditionally

John 1:12 He gave us the right to become his children — He desired us for Himself

Revelation 1:5 To him who loves us and has freed us from our sins by his blood — he gave ALL He had

His plan is to equip us to flourish within our relationship with Him and others.

HE MADE US FOR RELATIONSHIP.

Since the beginning of time, God has desired to bless us and enjoy close fellowship with us, and for this reason He made us like Himself.

Children learn what a relationship is through their primary care takers, guardians, teachers, peers, friends, family members, and by their own personal experiences.

I grew up in a home of seven children and the word “relationship” was not in my parents’ vocabulary. We went through life solo, hoping our meager efforts to pretend we knew what we were doing would add up to the same personal fulfillments that high functioning adults were experiencing. But that did not happen and we all navigated through adulthood like bumper cars bumping into the next set of unknowns without a compass to direct us. We eventually walked out of our parents’ home with some level of a mental disorder or emotional disturbance.

I want to focus on specific factors and building blocks that shape a child’s self-worth – a word that is often used synonymously with self-identity and self-esteem.

One of the first senses a newborn develops a few days after birth, other than touch, is eye contact, preferring to look at the mothers eyes because of the stark contrast to skin, which enhances their ability to communicate with their environment, namely the closest family members or care takers. This stage is their first exposure to equip them to adapt to effectively building a relationship.

Eye contact validates a child’s self-worth – it signals your availability and your intentions of communicating inside the relationship. It non-verbally tells them you have an interest in what they are thinking or feeling. There is no substitute for being physically present and in the moment to connect with your child.

Eye contact activates the neural regions of the brain that orchestrate their response to other people.

Eye contact involves a signal that we care – it involves the cerebellum which is connected to predicting the sensory consequences of actions.

Eye contact activates the limbic mirror system of the brain which means that the same neurons that are firing in someone’s brain will also fire in yours when you share eye contact with them. For example, when a child comes to you crying because they got pushed at the park and you listen to what happened – you then mirror their neurons when you feel sad for them. Getting on their level to listen through eye contact increases your empathy to the child and affirms that their feelings mean something.

Psalm 18:19 He led me to a place of safety; he rescued me because he delights in me. That is a very heartwarming promise.

Psalm 102:19 The Lord has his eye on you.

Psalm 32:8 I will counsel you with my eye upon you.

I want to side track for a moment and share how Psalm 32:8 was the number one game changer for me during a time when my own self-esteem had plummeted to a dangerous low, and I’m sad to admit that it wasn’t until I was well into my adult years that this verse brought about the change I had craved and yearned for my whole life.

Since I was a child, I knew I was a very melancholy person, as was my other siblings, and struggle severely to know my worth that eventually lead to three suicide scares. I had become a Christian, went to Christian counseling, was in several moms groups, and belonged to a wonderful church that held fast to sound biblical doctrine, but no one in my circle of contacts ever spoke to the brokenness that comes to a person who never experiences their true worth.

I began listening to doctors describe why an adult will remain with a child brain without a lifeline to heal and recover from emotional trauma. The brain, as these doctors explained, monitors a child’s reaction to repetitive emotional harmful situations over a prolonged period of time and stores them in the hippocampus, which encodes threatening events into memories. The amygdala then attaches emotional significance to those memories, making them difficult to forget.

The progression of activity inside the brain resulting from poor attachments in child/parent relationships explains why few people make it out of their early years without being impacted by some level of stress or emotional trauma. As a child matures into adolescence and adulthood, any perceived threat mimicking familiar childhood events opens up the memory box and triggers the same fears. In essence, a panic button gets pushed when the brain detects emotions linked to bad memories because it has been programmed to do so. This explains why the brain acts as a broken record, forcing an adult to live through the same childhood patterns repeatedly.

For all children, one’s relationship with their own feelings stems from how their parents related to them at a young age; if a child bonded from healthy interactions and felt secure inside their unconditional love, later on in life when negative situations confront them, they are less likely to act out of stress.

To the contrary, childhood detachment from a parent sets up stress triggers for negative emotional recurrences in adulthood, and the individual will measure their place in the world based on those core feelings.

Ongoing emotional neglect — and I want to equate emotional neglect as being the result of damaged self-worth — trains the brain to become over sensitized, making the person inevitably wired for stress, which means less has to happen to cause the same brain response. A person can remain in a chronic state of paranoia well into their adult years, which is what happened to me.

I remember the day, standing in my kitchen, when I decided from that moment on, I would allow the Lord to counsel me — he would be the one I would listen to.

With the stark realization that God’s eyes were on me, he showed me how to reset my brain to allow self-love, which is not selfish love at all, but the kind that comes only from Him where I could feel worthy enough to prevent feelings of inadequacy from catapulting me back into chronic stress and paranoia.

God’s plan for shaping a person’s self-identity relies on the outcome of family influences. He designed families to operate in love. Love is a medicine which changes a child’s brain structure in response to parent attachment, and when parents demonstrate to the child that he or she is valued and cared for, they set him or her up to be that high functioning adult I referred to earlier that will more readily accept the unconditional love from their heavenly father.

It is very important to touch on some realities that prevent a child or young person from the receiving the acceptance they need. Not everyone is born into this world with the same opportunities: the death of a parent, adoption, foster care, special needs, hospitalization, neglect, abandonment, rejection, abuse, and many other circumstances that are void of the foundation that comes from a loving family. Even within the framework of a loving family, there is never a guarantee that a maturing child or young person will make all the right choices to shield himself from the consequences of their own sin or the consequences of someone’s sin against them. But none of those limit God. He draws all of his creation with loving kindness. We are all precious in his sight and he loves us all with an everlasting love.

God’s redemption doesn’t depend on us – it depends on his infinite grace. We’ve all read testimonies of how an individual coming out of dire circumstances that all but wipe out their faith in God can become a full tank of God’s love for others. How is that possible?

A person who has internalized secrets about their shame, inferiority, or embarrassment of themselves before their salvation, will find themselves in outreach situations after their salvation. Their life experience can become the exact tool that God can use to reach others in the same trenches of life they once lived in.

A person’s freedom from addiction can be the voice God will use to those who feel like a failure. A person’s recovery from depression can be the story God will use for someone on a slippery slope to despair needs to hear. A person’s rise to overcoming the worst of obstacles can be the platform God will use to encourage others. Nothing is ever wasted in God’s economy.

It is possible to walk through life with debilitating pressures, caused by ourselves or others, and watch how God displays his wonders through us. The contrast between our failures and his faithfulness is staggering. God can take the worst of situations and transform them into his priceless gifts, and use the most unqualified to magnify his transforming power.

So as mothers who wear our hearts on our sleeves, where do we go from here?

Work with what you have, and trust God for the rest.

Stay educated and mindful on what influences will most likely press in on your child’s self-worth: peer pressure, computer games, temptation, the lure of false security from outsiders, the tendency to want to be included, coping with feeling left out, believing lies from the devil that come through books, TV programs, teachers, leaders, or other peer recreation activities.

Stand in the gap for your young ones. Let their minds receive the spoken word of God through stories and prayer time. Let them get washed in his promises. Continue to be a role-model of Christ-likeness — teach them how to be honest, kind, loving, forgiving, and patient.

Teach them delayed gratification, and the dangers of self-indulgence. Teach them to express their emotions with words. A melt down is better handled when talked about and more apt to prevent habitual lack of self-control for attention.

Be on your knees interceding for their young minds. Release them to the Lord daily. Show them how rewarding and fulfilling God’s presence is by the activities you initiate. Most important, pray with them out loud multiple times a day, whether at breakfast, lunch, and dinner, getting into the car for safety, dropping them off at day care or school or a friend’s house, at bedtime, when they have a fear or hurt feelings, or when they are confused or discouraged. Always point them to their heavenly father who cares — show them how to live like someone valued by God.

Yes, these are tall orders but ones that create the foundations from which a child can grow during their formative years. Focus only on how God wants to use you in their growing years. He is on your side. He planned families, and he planned for your child to mature vigorously within your family unit. Anoint them with oil often. Paint his blood over the doorpost of your home often. Be their watchman on the tower. Tell them why you are their prayer warrior. Embrace them often. Be on the lookout for their love language and “speak” to them often in that language. Notice what their strengths are and cultivate them regularly.

In closing, let’s pray.

Father, it’s impossible to put into words the exhilarating wonders of parenting, and the sobering responsibilities that come with it. Sometimes it’s overwhelming. I lay my heart down now before you and ask you to carry it in the coming days, weeks, and months, so that I may be reassured that what I do here on earth will ultimately make a difference for their eternity. Show me how to teach my children about you. I vow to walk in your footsteps the best way I know how.

I am humbly aware I don’t deserve the grace lavished upon me through Jesus Christ, but I ask you still God, to put your hand on the canvas of my children’s lives and take them into your care, because they are the safest under the shadow of your wing, and there they will find rest for their souls as they travel through this life.

Thank you for trusting me with your precious child. I ask for your grace now, and commit my heart to you once again. Amen.

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