Do you ever wonder why you have lower self-esteem or higher self-esteem than others? It may be due to the way you perceived yourself by the time you reached kindergarten. A new study conducted by the University of Washington states that,”By age 5 children have a sense of self-esteem comparable in strength to that of adults” (UW).

Lead researcher,David Cvencek, says that University of Washington’s work provides the earliest glimpse to date of how preschoolers sense themselves. Using specific techniques, Cveneck and other researchers were able to measure self-esteem. Cvencek, Andrew Meltzoff and Anthony Greenwald created a self-esteem task for preschoolers called the Preschool Implicit Association Test (PSIAT) that measures how strongly children feel positively about themselves.

There were an even mix of 234 boys and girls, age 5, from the Seattle area that were involved in this observation. They first learned to distinguish their set of flags (“me”) from the other set of flags (“not me”). Then, using buttons the on the computer, they responded to a series of “me” and “not me” flags and to a series of “good” words from a loud speaker (fun, happy,good,nice) and “bad” (bad,mad,mean,yucky). To measure self-esteem, the children had to combine the words and press the buttons to indicate whether the “good” words were associated more with the “me” flags or not” (University of Washington). One of things many people question is whether or no 5 year olds have sense of themselves. People change all the time. You learn from your experiences which shape you into the person you are. It is unlikely that your self-esteem at age 5 is similar to your self-esteem now. There are many things could have influenced your self-esteem.

The results showed that 5-year-olds, boys and girls, equally associated themselves with more “good” than with “bad.” Researchers did two more tests to analyze the different aspects of the self with a gender identity task and a gender attitude task, which measures the children’s preference for kids their own gender. The results show that “self-esteem is not only unexpectedly strong in children this young, but is also systematically related to other fundamental parts of children’s personality, such as in-group preferences and gender identity”(University of Washington. “Self-esteem appears to play a critical role in how children form various social identities. Our findings underscore the importance of the first five years as a foundation for life,” Cvencek said.

According to Andrew Meltzoff,“Some scientists consider preschoolers too young to have developed a positive or negative sense about themselves” (University of Washington. Their findings suggest that self-esteem, feeling good or bad about yourself, is fundamental. “It is a social mindset children bring to school with them, not something they develop in school.” He also states that the essential question to these finding is “What aspects of parent-child interaction promote and nurture preschool self-esteem?” If they can figure out the answer to this question, they will be able to determine where an individual develops their self-esteem (University of Washington).

The researchers are following up with the children in the study to examine whether self-esteem measured in preschool can predict outcomes later in childhood, such as health and success in school. They are also interested in the malleability of children’s self-esteem and how it changes with experience.

As of right now, we are not able to confirm that our self-esteem pretty much stays the same since the age of 5 because the kids involved in the experiment have not grown up yet. One of the most interesting parts I find about this experiment is that Andrew Meltzoff says that self- esteem is fundamental, meaning that it is related to biological factors such as genetics. However, self-esteem is also social. According to NCBI, “Genetic factors explained 40% and non-shared environmental factors 60% of the correlation in general self-worth”(NCBI). Genetics play a role in ourself esteem but our experiences most likely have have a more significant impact on our self-esteem. This is why I think that our self-esteem is most likely not determined at age 5. As we get older we experience more things that could either build up our self-esteem or break it down. These experiences could be negative like getting bullied or failing to do what is expected or positive such as succeeding in school and being good at a sport. I believe that more things you experience the more your self-esteem changes. At age 5, you have not experienced much making it easy to have a higher self-esteem. It will be interesting how much or how little these 234 five year old self-esteem has changed.