Willpower

this genre, whether it’s Nanny 911 or Supernanny. It begins in a home with children running wild—crying, screaming, spitting, pulling hair, flinging sippy cups, scrawling crayon graffiti on sheets, smashing toys, punching parents, strangling siblings. They’re literally climbing the walls of a ranch house in suburban St. Louis at the start of a classic Nanny 911 episode titled “The Little House of Horrors.” Then, and none too soon, a British nanny arrives at the home dressed in full Victorian regalia—black skirt, pin-striped black vest, black stockings, burgundy cloche and matching cape with gold buttons and chain—as the narrator makes a solemn announcement: “Parents of America, help is on the way!”
    How did it come to this?
    You might think the programs are hyping the children’s misbehavior, but the producers will tell you that the restrictions of prime-time television prevented them from showing some of the worst moments, like when a four-year-old on Long Island looked up at the woman who’d given him life and said, “Fuck off, Mom!” What’s gone wrong? The immediate impulse is to fault the parents, and we’ll get to the ones in that St. Louis home shortly. But it’s not fair to put all the blame on them or any of the other parents seeking foreign aid. America’s parents couldn’t have produced these brats all by themselves. They had lots of help from the nation’s leading educators, journalists, and, above all, psychologists.
    The theory of self-esteem was a well-intentioned attempt to use psychology for the public good, and it did indeed seem promising at first. Baumeister spent much of his early career on the self-esteem bandwagon. He was impressed by research showing that students with high self-esteem had high grades, while students with low-self esteem tended to struggle in school. Other studies revealed that unwed mothers, drug addicts, and criminals had low self-esteem. The correlations weren’t large, but they were statistically significant, and the results inspired a movement led by psychotherapists like Nathaniel Branden. “I cannot think of a single psychological problem—from anxiety and depression, to fear of intimacy, to spouse battery or child molestation—that is not traceable to the problem of low self-esteem,” Branden wrote. Andrew Mecca, the drug-treatment expert who became chairman of California’s task force on self-esteem, explained that “virtually every social problem can be traced to people’s lack of self-love.” All this enthusiasm led to a new approach to child rearing imparted by psychologists, teachers, journalists, and artists like Whitney Houston. She summed up this philosophy in her 1980s hit song “The Greatest Love of All,” which was revealed to be none other than . . . oneself. The key to success was self-esteem. For children to succeed, she explained, they simply need to be shown “all the beauty they possess inside.”
    It was a novel but irresistible idea to the millions who began trying to improve children’s academic skills by encouraging them to think, I’m really good at things. At home, parents practiced dispensing extra praise. Coaches made sure everyone got a trophy, not just the winners. The Girl Scouts adopted a program called “uniquely ME!” In school, children made collages of their favorite traits and discussed what they liked best about one another. “Mutual admiration society” used to be a disparaging phrase, but today’s young adults grew up with it as the social norm. Whitney Houston’s message was carried to the next generation by Lady Gaga, who reassured her fans at a concert, “You’re a superstar no matter who you are or where you come from—and you were born that way!” The fans cheered her right back, naturally, and then Lady Gaga reciprocated by lifting a bright torch and sweeping its light across the audience. “Hey, kids!” she shouted. “When you leave tonight, you don’t leave loving me more. You leave loving yourself more!”
    All these mutual affirmation exercises were pleasant enough, and they were supposed to do even more long-term good than conventional lessons. When the state of California asked researchers to evaluate the evidence on self-esteem, the news seemed promising. Neil Smelser, the distinguished sociologist at Berkeley who edited the report, declared on the first page that “many, if not most, of the major problems plaguing society have roots in the low self-esteem of many