Self-Concepts and Self-Esteem, Children and Adolescents

“Am I me?” a thoughtful 2-year-old queried of his parents. Beginning in the second year of life, toddlers begin to talk about themselves. They master self-relevant personal pronouns (I and me) that distinguish them from others. With development, they come to understand that they possess various characteristics, some of which may be positive (“I'm smart”), and some of which may be negative (“I'm unpopular”). Of particular interest is how the very nature of such self-evaluations changes with development and differs between individual children and adolescents across two basic evaluative categories. The first category is domain-specific self-concepts, namely, how one judges one's attributes in particular arenas (e.g., scholastic competence, social acceptance, physical competence, and so forth). A given individual may vary tremendously in how he or she feels across these domains, creating a meaningful profile of scores. One typically does not feel equally adequate across all [Page 973]domains. The second evaluative category is global self-esteem, namely, how much an individual values his or her overall worth as a person (for a complete treatment of self-development in childhood and adolescence, see Harter, 1999).

Developmental shifts in the nature of self-evaluations are driven by changes in the child's cognitive capabilities. Cognitive-developmental theory and findings (see Fischer, 1980; Piaget, 1962) alert us to the fact that the young child is limited to very specific, concrete representations of self and others, for example, “I know my A, B, Cs” (see also Harter, 1999). In middle to later childhood, the ability develops to form higher-order concepts about one's attributes and abilities (e.g., “I'm smart”). There are further cognitive advances at adolescence, allowing the teenager to form abstract concepts about the self that transcend concrete behavioral manifestations and higher-order generalizations (e.g., “I'm intelligent”).