If you have watched ‘Never Have I Ever’ the web series on Netflix, you are definitely aware of the character ‘Ben Gross’. Let me tell you briefly about him. He is a teenager who always used to self-evaluate and push himself hard to be the ‘number 1’ student in his class and get his dad’s love along with attention as he was mostly busy with his work. He had the desire to get admission to an elite college just like his dad because he wanted to make his dad proud.
On his way of self-evaluating, he got so harsh on himself that he was barely eating and put his entire focus on completing his assignments to score good grades. After half a month, he was admitted to the hospital because of extreme pain in the stomach. The doctor diagnosed that the pain was due to improper bowel movements. He was constipated which resulted due to his poor diet and in the end, he had to undergo surgery to remove it.
With the help of this plot, we understood that self-evaluation can be harmful to your teen if it is not done in a healthy way. Let’s see a few other consequences that might come up if your teen engages too much in self-evaluation:
Overly critical self-evaluation: Sometimes teens might become too harsh and go overboard on themselves to improve their performance and behaviour. It can result in more bad than good. It will end up impacting their self-esteem and mental health.
Focusing only on weaknesses: Too much self-evaluation can lead to bringing your teen’s focus only on their negatives and weaknesses than their positives and the improvements that your teen is making.
Comparing oneself to others: While self-evaluating and improving, your teen might start to compare themselves with others and the comparison is done mostly on the basis of the achievements and not on the failures. While comparing, it is important to keep in mind that every child is different and so are their abilities and skills.
Lack of action: Over-evaluating oneself and focusing only on the negatives/weaknesses can give rise to aggression and irritation in your teen that will obstruct them from creating any further improvements or working on themselves.
Lack of objectivity: Being objective is important to be in touch with reality. If your teen gets too much involved in self-evaluation they might not see the reality and start ignoring the root cause of the problematic behaviour or the downfall in their performance.
Self-evaluation is good but excess of everything is bad. Encourage your kids for self-evaluation but also make them aware of not going overboard.
We wish you happy parenting!
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