The self-esteem pouch: the go-to tool for building self-confidence
19 June, 2017
So we created the self-esteem pouch, which my kids, my husband and I made using this printable. It was a creative and fun activity for the whole family! We then made the most of every situation in our daily lives to fill our pouches with pride tickets, which we'd had printed and laminated at the local print shop! When Louis came home from school with a lovely comment from his teacher in his reading log, we gave him the “I'm a reading ace” pride ticket and said, “Here, put this in your self-esteem pouch!” It was the same with Laurier: when he explained to us that the great white shark is one of the only animals with no predators, we seized the opportunity to give him the “You're a true naturalist” pride ticket.
If there's one thing we want for our kids, it's for them to have enough self-esteem to go for it in life, take on new situations and experience success. Of course, we're constantly acknowledging their efforts and showering them with praise and bravos to help them see their strengths (which is a great thing, by the way, since kids run on positive feedback!), but at Les Belles Combines, we love using a visual aid, and for good reason: visual aids turn out to be very effective when we work with kids! Since our little ones haven't yet developed the capacity for abstraction, generalization and, therefore, symbolization, a visual aid makes things easier for them to understand while also serving as a reminder. As the saying goes, spoken words fly away, but written words remain!
The tickets pile up over time, filling the pouch and boosting self-esteem! We even got the grandparents in on it: they were allowed to hand out tickets to the kids too!
The magic really happened the night we all opened our pouches together! This exercise led us to a lovely realization: each of us had several pride tickets in our self-esteem pouch, but they were different from one person to the next! So we realized that everyone had strengths the others didn't, which made us different but equal.
Sometimes we also look at the tickets missing from our pouch and challenge ourselves to work on those little gaps in our personality, since there's always room for improvement! That's how the kids realized that we parents aren't perfect either, and that we don't have all the pride tickets in our little self-esteem pouch...
Love the idea of the self-esteem pouch and pride tickets? Would you like your little crew to give it a try? You can get them right here, then print and laminate them so they last longer!
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