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Dr. Bobbie has been featured on: |
 How Acne and Depression Feed Each Other |
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 Motivation Meets the Mouse |
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 Five Steps to Being a Confident Lover |
 Keeping it in mind: how the subconscious associates and stores information |
Radio interview on “Conscious Shift” |
Dr Bobbie’s blog "Live Life Unlimited" makes |
Parenting Article featured by Quite A Parent Organization |
Featured in Academy of Hypnotic Science |
http://www.academyhypnoticscience.net/hypno/newsdetails/viewall |
Featured on (video clip) |
http://www.fastdietfatloss.com/fat-loss-wlx/unconscious%20behavior |
Featured in L'ovest Magazine |
Raising Confident Kids: Developing Your Baby's Self-Esteem |
Self-esteem is a personal quality that is correlated to psychological health and wellbeing. There are many psychologists who view self-esteem as a core component to fulfillment and success in the human experience. In fact, there are theories of psychology that focus on self-esteem as a basis for psychological wellbeing and disorder and that the development of healthy self-esteem can help to eliminate psychological disorders and issues. High self-esteem has been connected to productive coping strategies, higher motivation, and a positive mind state, while low self-esteem has been shown to put an individual at risk for emotional and behavioral disorders. Virginia Satir, a psychologist at the forefront of psychological theory based in self-esteem, defines it as: the ability to value oneself and to treat oneself with love, respect and dignity. Self-esteem can be a crucial component for a healthy individual from infancy throughout one’s existence. Rather than being a fixed quality, self-esteem is something that must be inferred and internalized by an individual and can be more malleable in its nature over the course of time. In fact, research supports that an individual’s self-esteem can vary significantly within their lifetime. It is a dynamic and changing value depending on one's expectations and successes. And as a learned and internalized quality, even infancy is a critical time for the development of the foundations of self-esteem. Research of the infant brain has shown that early environmental influences are determinant of the establishment of specific neural networks. Depending on the nature of these environmental influences, positive or negative, they can lead to the development of healthy behavioral neural pathways or to the creation and maintenance of aberrant neural pathways. In summary, early social, emotional and environmental influences exert significant effects on the internalizing of self concept or self-esteem and the externalizing of behaviors even in the stages of infancy. Many theorists of developmental psychology believe that the development of self-esteem begins in these earliest stages of life through infants’ interactions with their environment. Research has shown that infants, even in their first hours of life, can distinguish smells and voices and show a marked preference for the voice and smell of their mother over other individuals. Attachment to this preferred individual is part of the process of identity formation for the infant. According to renowned psychologist Erik Erikson, in the first year of life babies depend on their primary caregivers for food, warmth, and affection. If these basic needs are met consistently and responsively, infants develop a secure attachment and also learn to trust their environment; if these basic needs are not met, the baby will develop mistrust towards people and things in their environment, even towards themselves. There is further compelling evidence that the role of the environment and the primary caretakers present in the baby’s environment are critical to the personality development that begins in the infancy stages. It is apparent that a child’s sense of self and therefore self-esteem is developed from birth through interactions with the primary caregiver. Further research has proven that if the caregiver is attentive, loving and responsive, then the infant has a sense of being important, valued, and loveable. This translates into the baby’s positive image of self and a developing positive self-esteem. As parents, this does not necessarily mean that we must indulge every desire, whimper, or demand of our infant or baby in order to ensure a healthy self-esteem in our child. It does, however, stand in direct opposition of the idea of letting your young infant “cry it out” or the idea that picking up your baby too much will spoil the child. Infants are merely seeking reassurance and security and demanding it the only way they know how, through their cries. As you offer your child the type of consistency that comes from hearing his (or her) cries and responding, a level of trust in the world around him begins to build through these first experiences with his world, you. As you help your baby to develop this reliable foundation, he can explore the world around him with a greater sense of security in his environment and confidence in himself. As parents our instincts are to respond to the cries of our baby, and now we know that there is more value to this instinctual response than just the soothing of the baby; it is a response that is strengthening the very core of our baby’s sense of self, his self-esteem. |
