People tend to give inflated praise ("you did incredibly well!") to those with low self-esteem more often than those with high self-esteem. This has the effect of decreasing a person's willingness to challenge themself in the future. The inflated praise actually harms the people with low self-esteem.

Researchers believe that the vocabulary for inflated praise sets high standards for the child (e.g. you must be the best or perfect).

Inflated Praise

Praise is able to increase a person's self-esteem and can encourage people to work hard on their tasks. Praise can be in the form of approval or awards.

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Parents

Peers

Teachers

Age

Physical appearance

Gender

Academic achievement

Sources of self-esteem

Siegler, R., Eisenberg, N., Gershoff, E., Saffran, J., DeLoache, J., & Leaper, C. (2017). How children develop, 5th ed. Worth Publishers.

How Children Develop 5th edition

Effect of praise on self-esteem

Peer victimization is when a student is bullied or aggressed constantly for a period of time by their peers. It varies from student to student on how frequent and when they are victimized. Being victimized by peers has lasting effects for students academically, psychologically, and socially.

Peer Victimization 

parental support and a child's self esteem tends to be both positively correlated reciprocal in that parents effect self esteem as well as self esteem affecting the level parental support reported.

parents and self-esteem

peers tend to boost a person's self-esteem due to the accepting environment they provide that may not be otherwise present in other parts of the student's life.

peers and self-esteem

there seems to not be a significant discrepancy between those who are high achievers and those who are not. This is due to low achievers tending to devote their attention to things that boost their self-esteem (i.e. sports, hanging with peers) rather than school which threatens their self-esteem.

achievement levels and self-esteem 

self esteem tends to increase from childhood into young adulthood, taking a slight decrease during young adolescent years (13-18). Once a person reaches 30 years old, self-esteem tends to stabilize and remains the same for the rest of their lives. Genders also differ on the times when their self-esteem increases and decreases during their adolescent years.

age and self esteem

overall, males tend to have higher self esteem than females, especially throughout young adulthood, however the difference is not very large. 

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