Let's Talk About Self-Esteem

About four weeks ago, I started my Pasos Adelante classes.  Pasos is a course meant to train youth between the ages of 12 and 17 about sexual health, HIV/AIDS prevention, birth control methods, and general leadership skills. I currently have 25 kids who I teach during their normal tutoría class (which is meant to teach the same sorts of topics, but due to the lack of training for the teachers, appears to often become a second recess).  This week, we worked on self-esteem.  What is it?  Why is it important?  How is it affected?  How can we protect it? How does having high or low self-esteem affect how we make decisions?

To start things off, we played a game of sorts.  Everyone blew up a balloon and then tied it to their ankle.  They were then told that they had to try to step on other people’s balloons while protecting their own.  The expected chaos ensued:

We then did an activity where a heart was drawn and then filled with blown-up balloons.  I explained that each balloon represented something that affected my self-esteem—the love of my parents, my friendships, my grades in school.  What happens to my self-esteem when my mother says I’m “malcriada” (a word that translates to spoiled, badly raised, misbehaving, and all-around bad)?  Well that balloon gets popped that’s what, to a very loud and attention-getting effect. When my friend says something mean about me behind my back? POP.  When I get a bad grade on a test? POP.

After the kids come up with other ways of damaging self-esteem, we move on to whether or not self-esteem can be rebuild.  If the heart will ever be filled up with balloons again.  Of course it can! And the new balloons, which are a different color from the originals, are stronger balloons.  A self-esteem that was gone down and back up is an experienced, strong self-esteem.

And finally, we end with an activity where each student has a piece of paper taped to their backs.  Their fellow students have to go around and write something NICE on each of the papers.  There were some issues with students who chose to ignore the nice part. But overall, it worked.  Nice things were written and hopefully they left the class with a little bounce in their step.  More likely they just left feeling about the same, but hey it’s the spirit of things, no?

Besos!