Articles

Low self-confidence/esteem in childhood affects relationships in adulthood

Often people have been talking about the poor self-confidence and self-esteem in young children, but many have failed to realize the impact of these poor self-enhancing factors on the later stages of one’s life. If we look at many people closely, we will realize that many relationship problems that couples often face is a result of what and how things have happened in their past, specifically in their childhood. Not just relationships, but also acts like criminal activities of child abuse, rape, molestation, etc, are most often done in order to boost their own self-confidence.

Impact on the relationship in adulthood is a very obvious fact as the child undergoes many important changes during his/her young years, where they are very proactive and can learn many things from the environmental stimulus given to them. However, poor parenting can result in many effects in the later years of one’s life.

Research shows that self-esteem can influence your relationship satisfaction just as much as it affects your partner’s. When you feel bad about yourself, your insecurities can start to creep in to the way you act with your significant other — and that can have a negative impact on both of you.

Plus, low self-esteem can distort your perception of your partner, according to research in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. In the study, researchers asked more than 500 men and women to complete questionnaires about their self-esteem and then asked them how threatened they felt by their partner’s flaws. Those with low self-esteem were not only more threatened by their partner’s imperfections, but they were also more likely to view their relationship in black-and-white terms: as all good or all bad.

Erol and Orth (2013) did a study which indicated that self-esteem predicted the individual’s own relationship satisfaction (i.e., an actor effect) and the relationship satisfaction of his or her partner (i.e., a partner effect), controlling for the effect of the partner’s self-esteem.  The results also showed that attachment-related anxiety and avoidance independently mediated both the actor and the partner effect of self-esteem on relationship satisfaction.