Читать книгу Lifespan Development - Tara L. Kuther - Страница 413

Young children tend to evaluate themselves positively. That is, they generally have a high sense of self-esteem. For example, 3-year-old Dorian exclaims, “I’m the smartest! I know all my ABCs! Listen! A, B, C, F, G, L, M!” Like Dorian, many young children are excited but also unrealistically positive about their abilities, underestimating the difficulty of tasks and believing that they will always be successful (Harter, 2012). Preschoolers often fail to recognize deficits in their abilities and tend to view their performance favorably, even when it is not up to par (Boseovski, 2010). Even after failing at a task several times, they often continue to believe that the next try will bring success.

Young children’s overly optimistic perspective on their skills can be attributed to their cognitive development, attachment with caregivers, and the overwhelmingly positive feedback they usually receive when they attempt a task (Goodvin, Meyer, Thompson, & Hayes, 2008). These unrealistically positive expectations serve a developmental purpose: They contribute to young children’s growing sense of initiative and aid them in learning new skills. Young children maintain their positive views about themselves because they do not yet engage in social comparison. In other words, they do not compare their performance with that of other children. With advances in cognition and social experience, children begin to learn their relative strengths and weaknesses, and their self-evaluations become more realistic (Rochat, 2013). Between ages 4 and 7, children’s self-evaluations become linked with their performance. For example, in one study, children’s self-evaluations declined when they failed tasks assigned by an adult as well as those they perceived as important (Cimpian, Hammond, Mazza, & Corry, 2017). Sensitive parenting that supports children’s attempts at difficult tasks emphasizes the value of effort and helps children identify and take pride in success that promotes self-esteem.