The self-esteem pouch: the tool of choice for developing self-confidence

19 June, 2017

If there's one thing we want for our children, it's for them to have enough self-esteem to go through life, face new situations, and achieve success. Of course, we spend our time highlighting their efforts, showering them with praise and bravos to make them aware of their strengths (which is an excellent thing, by the way, since children thrive on positive feedback!), but at Les Belles Combines, we like to use a visual aid, and for good reason: visual aids prove to be very effective in our interventions with children! Indeed, since our little ones have not yet acquired the capacity for abstraction, generalization, and therefore symbolization, visual support facilitates their understanding while serving as a reminder. As the saying goes, words fly away, and writings remain!

So we created the self-esteem pouch, which my children, my husband, and I made using this little trick. It was a creative and fun exercise for the whole family! We took advantage of all the situations in our daily lives to fill our pouches with pride tickets that we had printed and laminated at the local printer! When Louis came home from school with a nice comment from his teacher in his reading log, we gave him the "I'm a reading ace" pride ticket and said, "Here, put that in your self-esteem pouch!" The same goes for Laurier: when he explained to us that the great white shark is one of the only animals that has no predators, we took the opportunity to give him the "You're a true naturalist" pride ticket.

The tickets accumulate over time, the pouch fills up, and self-esteem grows! We even got the grandparents involved, who also had permission to give tickets to the children!

The magic really happened the evening when, all together, we opened our pouches! This exercise allowed us to make a great observation: each of us had several pride tickets in our self-esteem pouch, but they differed from person to person! We therefore realized that everyone had strengths that others did not have, which made us different but equal.