Labels Hurt

I teach child development at the local community college. Tonight we were having a great discussion in my discipline and guidance class about all of things we adults can do to help build a child’s self esteem. There were many terrific ideas that summarized all the concepts we had discussed during the entire semester. One student reminded us that it was very important to avoid labels.

Yes! We looked at many examples of labeling. Avoiding labels means to stop calling children “bad” or “good” or “an angel” or “a brat.” I believe all children have potential. They are making choices all the time. They can choose to be kind and helpful. Or they can choose to tease another child or knock down a block structure. Our job is to help them learn that they have the power for “good” or not. They can learn to make responsible and respectful choices.

No matter what the label, even the positive ones, they are all judgments. And judgments feel uncomfortable. It is more helpful for children when we offer specific comments that reflect their behavior, not their character. “Thank you for cleaning up together.” or “You used a lot of red in that picture. Can you describe it for me?”

When I was in my first few years of college, I was a teacher’s aide in a kindergarten classroom. Something happened one day that has stuck with me all of these many years, because even as a young adult, I knew it was very wrong. One of the boys was painting at the easel. There were all the usual colors available, but he chose to exclusively paint with black. And he was really into it. He covered the whole paper. The teacher came up and tore his paper off the easel and threw it away. She told him it was awful. All of the colors were there and he needed to use them! She labeled his work as awful.... and he felt awful, too. He had every right to use black. I will never know what effect that one experience might have had on his self esteem. Maybe he got over it pretty quickly, because kids can be quite resilient, in spite of us. But, it stuck with me. And I felt very badly for him.

Sometimes it feels very difficult to see the positive or the possibility in people or in world events when negativity or hurt is crying out to us. There are people who make very hurtful decisions that affect hundreds, thousands. But when I have some kind of negative judgment that rumbles around in my head, I am hurt further by my own thoughts. We all need to be careful about labels, and reach deeper to understand.