Adults have the ugly habit of casting  predictions on a child’s future.  They playfully ask, “What do you want to be when you grow up?”, without intending to give any merit to the answer.  Why would they?  We all know from our own experience as children that it’s just a rhetorical question.

When we’re not asking children about their future intentions, we’re telling them what to expect of themselves by painting a fractured picture of their abilities.  For example, when I was young, I was told on numerous occasions that I would become a nun.  For reasons that made no sense to me then or now, I was pegged as a pious cherub.  With all due respect to the vocations, the convent was not on my radar.  I clearly remember thinking that I must not say or do whatever it is that makes people believe that I’m nun material.  My young mind believed that if I acted in a way that made people think that, I would somehow ‘end up’ being that.  It took me decades to recover from that faulted reasoning and  honor my spiritual side.

Thus we see the harm in labeling.  You are this.  You are not that.  Labels limit a tween’s view of herself lock her into our expectations of her. Young people mostly believe what the significant people in their lives tell them.

A better question is, “Who do you want to be?”  This removes the daunting and unnecessary task of determining a conrete plan for the future and replaces it with a statement of values.  The ‘what’ in our lives is changeable.  The ‘who’ is not.  In order to develop healthy self-esteem, we must know who we are.  Without accurate self-awareness it’s difficult to determine our place in the world.   It’s comparable to trying to assess the value of a diamond without even looking at it.

Children need to know that they are valuable for who they are; not for what they do (or don’t do.)

Questions for increasing self-awareness

• “What kind of person are you?”
• “Who do you want to be?”
• “Who do you admire and why?”
• “What are your strongest qualities?”

In the words of Stacia Tauscher, “We worry about what a child will become tomorrow, yet we forget that he is someone today.”  Helping a tween to form a clear picture of who she is will add to the solidity of the foundation upon which she builds her life.