Undesirable Side Effects of Enhancing Self-Esteem

Burr, Wesley R.; Christensen, Clark

doi:10.2307/585591

Cited by 10 publications

(4 citation statements)

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“…The contribution of maternal self-esteem is negative and accounts for 29% of the treatment effect on female warmth and empathy. This result is consistent with research that argues that improvements in self-esteem may increase selfishness (Burr and Christensen, 1992). Conversely, the mother's maternal mastery explains 29% of the improvement in female warmth/empathy (p-value: 0.09).…”

Section: Decomposition Of Treatment Effects At Agesupporting

confidence: 90%

An Analysis of the Memphis Nurse-Family Partnership Program

Heckman¹,

Holland²,

Makino³

et al. 2017

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We are very grateful to Professor David Olds, founder of the NFP, and his team for generously sharing the data and source materials from the NFP Memphis Randomize Control Trial. Years of collaboration and productive discussions with him have made this study possible. We thank Terrance Oey and Willem van Vliet for superb research assistance. We are grateful to Juan Pantano, Sylvi Kuperman, Jorge Luis Garcia, Maryclare Griffin, Andres Hojman, Yu Kyung Koh, Cullen Roberts, Karl Schulze, Naoko Takeda, and Joyce Zhu for helpful comments. An early version of this paper was presented at seminars at the University of Chicago and the Association for Public Policy Analysis and Management 2012 Fall conference. This research was supported by NICHD R37HD065072 and NICHD R01HD054702, and previous support of the Pritzker Children's Initiative. A portion of Holland's time on this project was also supported by an NRSA Institutional Research Training Grant from the Health Resources and Services Administration (T32 PE12002), awarded to the Department of Pediatrics at the University of Rochester. The views expressed in this paper are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent the official views of the National Institutes of Health. The views expressed herein are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Bureau of Economic Research.NBER working papers are circulated for discussion and comment purposes. They have not been peer-reviewed or been subject to the review by the NBER Board of Directors that accompanies official NBER publications.© 2017 by James J. Heckman, Margaret L. Holland, Kevin K. Makino, Rodrigo Pinto, and Maria Rosales-Rueda. All rights reserved. Short sections of text, not to exceed two paragraphs, may be quoted without explicit permission provided that full credit, including © notice, is given to the source. TN in 1990. NFP offers home visits conducted by nurses for disadvantaged first-time mothers during pregnancy and early childhood. We test NFP treatment effects using permutation-based inference that accounts for the NFP randomization protocol. Our methodology is valid for small samples and corrects for multiple-hypothesis testing. We also analyze the underlying mechanisms generating these treatment effects. We decompose NFP treatment effects into components associated with the intervention-enhanced parenting and early childhood skills. The NFP improves home investments, parenting attitudes and mental health for mothers of infants at age 2. At age 6, the NFP boosts cognitive skills for both genders and socioemotional skills for females. These treatment effects are explained by program-induced improvements in maternal traits and early-life family investments. At age 12, the treatment effects for males (but not for females) persist in the form of enhanced achievement test scores. Treatment effects are largely explained by enhanced cognitive skills at age 6. Our evidence of pronounced gender differences in response to early childhood interventions contributes t...

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Section: Decomposition Of Treatment Effects At Agesupporting

confidence: 90%

An Analysis of the Memphis Nurse-Family Partnership Program

Heckman¹,

Holland²,

Makino³

et al. 2017

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“…This is important given that there is an ongoing debate about the relative value of interventions designed to enhance self-esteem. The latter group of scholars have been challenged by others who claim that promoting self-esteem is counterproductive for supporting mental health, not least because it leads to narcissism (Bosson et al, 2008; Burr & Christensen, 1992). Our findings do not sit well with that position.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Parenting about challenges and adolescents’ social anxiety, disrupted classroom concentration, and resilience knowledge: The mediating role of authentic self-esteem.

Boulton¹,

Macaulay²

2022

Families, Systems, & Health

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Background: A large theoretical and empirical literature indicates that parenting practices affect young people's well-being and resilience, but there is much still to learn about psychological mechanisms, especially beyond infancy/early childhood. A recent model of authentic self-esteem argues that it arises out of experiences of challenge situations shared with parents and that it can subsequently act as a protective factor that supports well-being and resilience among young people. The aim of the current study is to test (a) if parenting about challenges can predict 3 indices of adolescents' well-being, namely their social anxiety, disrupted classroom concentration, and ability to spontaneously generate resilient strategies; and more substantially, (b) if authentic self-esteem can mediate those associations if found. Method: Adolescents (N = 836) completed a questionnaire that measured all the study variables via self-report with the exception that unprompted open questions were used to gauge their ability to spontaneously generate resilient strategies. Results: Parental discussions of challenges did significantly predict all 3 well-being indices, and authentic self-esteem was found to mediate all these relationships. Discussion: These results support the view that parenting about challenges is a practice that supports well-being and resilience in adolescents. It appears to do so through promoting the development of authentic selfesteem, a capacity to evaluate the self in a positive manner in the context of challenges. The theoretical and practical significance of these findings are discussed.

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“…Furthermore, there are two caveats that need to be applied to the notion of self-esteem and to the nature of the proposed suicidal process. First, self-esteem is being used here to serve as an important indicator of well-being, not to denote a behavior that can be modified to produce a therapeutic outcome – this latter notion being hotly disputed by many (Burr & Christensen, 1992; Seligman, 1991; Smelser, 1989). Second, a number of investigators have indicated that it would be a mistake to consider the suicidal process to be invariant.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%