Self-Image: Vice or Virtue?

Self-Image: Vice or Virtue?

Should we teach our children to feel good about themselves for the sake of a good self-image even if it is not an accurate one? Greg shares his thoughts on the balance needed to parent in a world that embraces the cult of self-esteem.

By: Gregory Koukl

While at a doctor’s appointment, I pulled out my iPhone with pictures of my children. Many of you know that I have a four year old that has very, very striking red hair. She gets a lot of compliments on it, which is nice. The female technician who was running some tests on me made the same comment about her hair. I explained that because she gets a lot of comments about her hair, we have to be careful because vanity is a little bit of a concern in a situation like that. We’re trying to keep her attitude balanced. It’s good for her to feel good about her hair, but we don’t want it to be the thing that makes her feel good about herself or become conceited about it.

The lady then said to me that at least it’s better than having a bad self-image. That was quite a provocative comment. The testing was done and I was preparing to leave. A lot of times I am looking for an opening to begin a conversation, but once in a while an opening catches me by surprise, and I don’t know what to do with it. So I just let it slide.

Sometimes the best way to find the clever thing to say, the productive thing to say, or the “one-liner”, is not when you’re under pressure to say it, because most of us are not quick enough on our feet to come up with something on the spot. The best way to prepare for the next time is to think about the situation afterward and ask yourself how it would be best to respond if this comes up in the future. We can become better if we practice like comedians. When they get fed the soft ball they are right there with the funny line because they’ve practiced it. They didn’t just think of it then. You can do the same thing if you think of answers and responses when the pressure is off. When is the pressure off? Two times: before an encounter, and after an encounter.

That’s what I did after this conversation at the doctor’s office. I think what I might have done, was ask for clarification of what she meant, and then said, Let me see if I understand. Are you suggesting that it would be better for my daughter to have a vice of vanity than it would be for her to have a bad self-image? I suspect if I had put it like that, the person might have paused for a moment and said, Well, I’m not really saying that. But I imagine there are a lot of people who do think that way.

Her comment, when you think about it, ought to be pretty controversial. But it isn’t surprising in light of the cult of self-esteem that has seized this country, especially with regard to children. I think it’s an excessively damaging point of view, of almost religious dimensions. It’s the thing that seems to be most important to parents, and it’s really changed the face of children’s sports and even education. Everyone gets a trophy no matter what they did so everybody is the same.
It’s also made its way up into colleges where some institutions don’t give grades anymore because they don’t want to hurt anyone’s feelings. It’s very, very egalitarian in that regard. It bothers me to see that kind of egalitarianism where everyone is treated the same. It bothers me to see this cult of self-esteem because I do not think this is an accurate description of the way the world is.

What the technician essentially said is that it is better to be a vain person, which strikes me as a vice, than it is to be a person who has a bad self-image, which doesn’t strike me as a vice. There is a disadvantage to a bad self-image, but it is not a moral harm, not a moral shortcoming to think ill of yourself. It might be unpleasant; it might make it hard for you to advance and fulfill your potential. (But I don’t know that that’s true at all, quite frankly. There are lots of people who do marvelous things who have a terrible self-image as far as I can tell. And there are people who have a wonderful self-image that have done nothing, and have even done very bad things. So I don’t necessarily see a correlation between a good self-image and a good contribution to society. The only correlation that I can tell with a good self-image is feeling good about yourself, and that’s kind of a tautology. A good self-image is just feeling good about you and that’s the end of it.) I’m troubled by this suggestion that it’s preferable to cultivate a moral vice in children.

I don’t want my children to feel good about being bad. I don’t know your kids, but I know this about them: They are bad. How do I know that about them? Because, they’re all bad. We’re all bad. We’re all sinful. “All have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God.” Of course, if we call them bad all the time that’s not good either. How then do we balance this?

The Bible does not say anything about having a good self-image. It says that we should have an accurate view of ourselves. Paul mentions this. What is the accurate view?

Human beings are made in the image of God. Do you know what that makes you? It makes you something wonderful regardless of what you do or don’t do. There is a nobility about you. It is a fantastic part of the Christian worldview. It’s something that we all know, even if you’re not a Christian. There is something about human beings that makes them uniquely valuable. There is something good and wonderful about every single one of us, which grounds the moral obligations we have towards each other. This is why we ought not take lives without proper justification. We ought to treat each other with kindness, gentleness, goodness, and respect.

But there’s another reality and that is that we’re fallen. We’re broken. There’s something wrong with us. Even though we are noble beings, we are broken and twisted, and the thing that is broken and twisted is a moral problem. We are bad. Each one of us is bad. We don’t want to protect ourselves from feeling bad because it’s the feeling bad about our badness that pushes us to seek the only solution that exists for the badness in us. The answer to guilt, which is our awareness of our badness, is not denial, but forgiveness. Once we get forgiveness, we are redeemed and rescued.
So we are created valuable, yet we are morally broken and bad. So we are good in one way and bad in another. And the badness can be forgiven, and we are rescued and then belong in God’s family again, where we belong.

Our self-assessment ought to entail these things. Do you want your child to feel good about themselves for the right reason and bad about themselves for the right reasons? In other words, they are valuable for nothing, but they shouldn’t be rewarded for nothing. This is the point where the distortion of the cult of self-esteem takes us astray because it teaches us to reward kids for nothing.

As an antidote to this, I saw an interesting line in a fishing magazine. It was an advertisement for a multi-tooled gadget. It had a bunch of guys who were cruising the self-help section of a bookstore. The message of the ad was to “just cut the garbage.” Don’t go poking around in a bookstore reading self-help books to feel better about yourself. Instead, just go find something broken and fix it. And, of course, you can fix it with their tool. Find something broken and fix it.

This is the key to having an appropriate, good feeling about yourself that goes beyond being made in the image of God, and beyond being forgiven for your blame. You do something worthwhile and you will feel good about yourself. You will have a better self-image, but it will be done properly. So if you want your kids to have a good self-image you don’t reward them for nothing. You acknowledge and treat them as if they are someone of value for no reason than they are. You are candid with yourself and them about their brokenness, which is why we tell our children they have to seek forgiveness from us and from God. Then we try to give them something meaningful to do. We help them to do that and then we reward them for it. The reward may be just in what we say. We encourage them for accomplishing something worthwhile.