Formula for Self Esteem: SE=RS-IS

by Jason Huffman
  Special to The Master's Table

It's hard to believe, but fall is in full swing. It's time again for the plethora of extra-curricular activities (i.e. football, cheerleading, band, volleyball, drill team, cross country, just to name a few). It seems that many students don¹t have time to breathe. As I began to ponder this annual phenomenon, I quickly began to realize something‹there are no activities in which our students' performance is not measured on some sort of scale. In school there are A's, B's, and C's, in sports there are starters and bench-warmers, in music there are 1st chair, 2nd chair, and so-on, and in clubs there are officers and regular members. This leads to what I believe is the most common and most unnoticed of all struggles among adolescents‹inferiority. We have become so preoccupied with the numbers of students involved in drug use, alcohol use, premarital sex, and juvenile crime, that we have overlooked a more widespread and possibly more severe problem - low self esteem. The reason I believe this problem is severe is because it leads to aforementioned behaviors.

One of the joys of having a little girl is watching her play with dolls and even on occasion joining in on her playtime. Because she is only 4, she has a much easier time undressing her dolls than she does clothing them in the latest fashions. Therefore at our house we have a large quantity of Barbie dolls whom are quite comfortable being in their birthday suits (not to mention the number of Barbie shoes that can be found inside the vacuum cleaner!). Barbie was introduced into our culture in 1959 and quickly became a cultural icon. Her purpose was to be a doll that was built and proportioned more like a teenager than dolls modeled after infants or toddlers. She was designed to be dressed up and accessorized. There has been much speculation as to what Barbie¹s actual measurements would be were she an actual human. One figure I found said she would be 5'9", 110 pounds, with measurements of 39-18-33. Besides being the knockout of the toy world, Barbie also had a Jeep, a Corvette, a big house, swimming pool, lots of friends and tons of clothes. She had it all (or could have it all if your parents were willing to fork over the cash for it). It is no wonder she became a 40-year fad. In addition to this, Barbie could be purchased as a doctor, an astronaut, a rock star, a veterinarian, an equestrian rider, and many other occupations. Throw in her good-looking boyfriend Ken, and she has it allŠeverything any aspiring young girl could want to have or be. With Barbie's help, many girls can dream of being anything. On the flipside, though, are we teaching our children that in order to be happy, or good, or successful that they should have all of this, including her outrageous figure?

Zondervan has published a book by Dr. Les Parrott III called Helping the Struggling Adolescent. In this book, Dr. Parrott gives some guidelines to deal with inferiority complex. He gives an equation SE=RS-IS. This means Self Esteem equals Real Self minus Ideal Self. The real self is how the student perceives his or her self. The ideal self is a realistic idea of what the student would like to be (excluding things such as "rock star" or "professional athlete"). When these two ideas of one's self are close together, a high self-esteem is achieved. But when the ideal self is seemingly unattainable, or the real self seems too low, the student becomes discouraged and feels like a worthless, careless failure. Believe it or not, in many cases our theology has helped to foster these ideas. In church we talk a lot about humility and selflessness and because we are to put others above ourselves then God actually wants us to be inferior. These ideas can be confusing to a struggling adolescent.

So what do we do? Go on a Barbie-burning boycott? Do we teach our teens to be "lovers of themselves, lovers of money, boastful, proud, abusive, disobedient to their parents, ungrateful, unholy, without love, unforgiving, slanderous, without self-control, brutal, not lovers of the good, treacherous, rash, conceited, lovers of pleasure rather than lovers of God" as Paul warned Timothy in II Timothy 3:1-5? Well, the answer, I feel, is neither. This is not an article bashing Barbie dolls, or knocking the spiritual virtue we call humility. However we must teach our children that they are children of the Almighty God and are hand crafted in his image for a specific purpose (Psalm 139). Dr. Parrott encourages parents and leaders to challenge teens to understand the difference between humiliation and humility, putting down self and putting down sinful self, self-degradation and self-denial, worthless and unworthy, self-conceit and self-affirmation, and self-absorption and self-awareness. We must always make sure that our children have a proper biblical perspective of who they are in Christ - not to the football team, the drill team, the band, the algebra teacher, or any other social group or organization. And we must help them understand that God made them the way he did for a purpose and help them to discover that purpose.