“I have often wished I had time to cultivate modesty. . . But I am too busy thinking about myself.”

So joked the English poet Edith Sitwell in The Observer newspaper back in 1950, and pretty much ever since, especially during the last twenty years, self absorption in the pursuit of high self-esteem has been something of a Western craze. Teachers, therapists, counselors, business leaders, and seemingly everyone else, have been encouraging it.

Now researchers are taking a second look at self-esteem. Is individual confidence part of the underpinning of a healthy society? Or might it spell trouble for some children? Madhavi Menon and Desiree D. Tobin and their colleagues at Florida Atlantic University, as well as researchers at Lynn University and St. John’s University in the US, have been investigating.

Their study, which involved 189 seventh graders (average age 11), looked at the relationship between self-esteem and physical aggression. By enquiring about the children’s self-esteem and about their own and their peers’ tendencies toward aggression over the course of a school year, they learned that children with high self-esteem were more likely to seek to justify their aggressive behavior. Over time, they focused more on how their behavior was rewarded (for example, in terms of their social status) and they were more inclined to disparage their victims.

Aggressive kids with low self-esteem, on the other hand, did not tend to see their behavior in these self-serving, aggression-encouraging terms.

The authors say their findings should be a warning to anyone working in programs that aim to elevate kids’ self-esteem. Building the self confidence of an aggressive child, they argue, might only aggravate an underlying behavioral problem.

For more research that reconsiders the value of self-esteem, see: Can a cool look at self-esteem rescue children from a fool’s paradise?

• Summary of “The Developmental Costs of High Self-Esteem for Antisocial Children” by: Madhavi Menon, Desiree D. Tobin, Brooke C. Corby, Meenakshi Menon, Ernest V. E. Hodges, and David G. Perry in Child Development, Nov 2007, Vol. 78, Issue 6, pp1627-1639.