CHAPTER 5

CAUSES AND CONSEQUENCES

OF LOW SELF-ESTEEM IN
CHILDREN AND ADOLESCENTS
SUSAN HARTER

"When I look in the mirror, I don't like what I see; I don't like who I
am as a person."
"I'm usually down on myself; I just don't like who I am."
"I'm a nothing; I have no personality."
"I don't like myself because I'm ugly."
"I'm not living up to the kind of person I want to be."
"If nobody else likes you, how can you like yourself?"
"Let's face it, I have low self-esteem."
The preceding comments from studies of young people by myself and
colleagues are personally very distressing. Theoretically, they are per-
plexing. It is commonly asserted in the literature that the self-concept is
a theory, a cognitive construction, and that its architecture-by evolu-
tionary design-is extremely functional (see Allport, 1961; Bartlett, 1932;
Brim, 1976; Damon & Hart, 1988; Epstein, 1973, 1981, 1991; Greenwald,
1980; Harter, 1983; Kelly, 1955; Lecky, 1945; Lynch, 1981; Markus, 1980;
Piaget, 1965; Rogers, 1951; Sarbin, 1962). One such widely touted func-
tion is to maintain high self-esteem. Considerable evidence now exists

SUSAN HARTER • Department of Psychology, 2155 South Race Street, Denver, CO 80208.
Self-Esteem: The Puzzle of Low Self-Regard, edited by Roy F. Baumeister. Plenum Press,
New York, 1993.

87

R. F. Baumeister (ed.), Self-Esteem

© Plenum Press, New York 1993
88 SUSAN HARrER

that most people do exhibit a modest self-enhancing bias (Taylor &

Brown, 1988).
Given this functional scenario, why should the system falter, lead-
ing certain individuals to experience and so clearly express their feelings
of low self-esteem? What can go awry to undermine the supposed pro-
tective function of the self? In order to address this question, one first
needs to examine the processes governing the construction of self-
esteem. In delving into the causes of self-esteem, it will be necessary to
adopt a developmental perspective as a backdrop against which individ-
ual differences can be understood. These issues will be explored within
the context of our own research program investigating the causes and
consequences of self-esteem in children and adolescents.
Self-esteem or self-worth, within our framework, has been concep-
tualized as the level of global regard that one has for the self as a person
(Harter, 1985a, 1986, 1990), a definition that has much in common with
Rosenberg's conception (1979,1986) of self-esteem. Although the studies
by myself and colleagues have addressed individuals exhibiting the en-
tire range of self-esteem, in the present chapter I will focus on those
individuals reporting low self-esteem, including their propensity for de-
pression and suicidal thinking, a major mental health concern in the
1980s and 1990s.

ORIGINAL MODEL OF THE CAUSES OF SELF-ESTEEM

In developing our original model of self-esteem, my colleagues and

I turned to two historical scholars of the self, James (1892) and Cooley
(1902), for theoretical guidance. Each of these theorists was explicit on
the point that one possesses a global concept of self over and above
more specific self-evaluations. Their formulations, however, put forth
very different determinants of this global sense of one's worth as a
person.
For James, global self-esteem was captured by the ratio of one's
successes to one's pretensions. According to this formulation, individu-
als do not scrutinize their every action or attribute; rather, they focus
primarily on ability in domains of importance, where one has aspira-
tions to succeed. Thus, if one perceives oneself as competent in domains
where one aspires to excel, one will have high self-esteem. Conversely,
if one falls short of one's ideals by being unsuccessful in domains where
one aspires to be competent, low self-esteem will result. It is critical to
appreciate that from a Jamesian perspective, lack of competence in do-
mains deemed unimportant to the self will not adversely affect self-