A Psychology Lesson
As children, we needed to feel that we were significant. From our parents we sensed how much we mattered. If we believed we did not matter much, that we were not important in our own right, then our self-esteem got off to a poor start. A person who never acquired a sense of her own inherent significance may suffer guilt about being alive, or may go through life feeling she is nothing but a victim of fate, totally incapable of making a difference in the world.
Adults communicate the “rightness” of a child’s existence to the child long before any language is spoken. The softness of the adult’s touch and manner of holding the child is the infant’s first clue to her significance. The child learns whether she is pleasurable to hold, or a source of worry, tension or unhappiness. Without the warmth that comes from physical affection and the nourishment of food, a child will become overwhelmed by anxiety. Even before she learns to structure her perceptions and senses into patterns of thought and speech, a child can begin to wonder in her own hazy yet crucial way whether she is okay, and what she has to do to be okay.
Many believe that in the earliest stages of infancy, the newborn cannot distinguish between herself, others and the external environment at large. She is aware of no boundaries, and experiences her mother and other caretakers as extensions of herself rather than as separate entities. Hence, the newborn is often said, and correctly so, to be entirely egocentric, for she has not yet become aware that her needs are only her needs, and that others have needs of their own, needs which might not be compatible with hers. Eventually, however, the newborn does become aware that she is a separate being, that the world and others exist apart from her, and when she does become aware of this unsettling fact it can strike her as truly terrifying. For it is then that she switches from her (inaccurate) perception of herself as all-powerful to her (accurate) perception of herself as entirely powerless, completely dependent upon someone else (in our culture, usually the mother) to fulfill her pressing physical and psychological needs. Unless someone else does fulfill those needs, the child’s first, most basic feelings will be those of anxiety, insignificance, worthlessness and perhaps even terror.
With an understanding of language, the child’s sense of self-esteem takes on a symbolic form; what was previously only experienced is now expressed symbolically, through words. Non-verbal communication remains important, but as she grows older, language plays a more and more important role in establishing her sense of significance.