“It’s unclear, actually, just how important self-esteem may be in terms of predicting healthy outcomes,” says Grace Cho, a developmental psychologist at St. Olaf College, in Minnesota, and the co-author of Self-Esteem in Time and Place: How American Families Imagine, Enact, and Personalize a Cultural Ideal. “The literature is actually really kind of messy and mixed.” In an exhaustive review of the research literature, the Florida State University social psychologist Roy F. Baumeister and his colleagues concluded that “raising self-esteem will not by itself make young people perform better in school, obey the law, stay out of trouble, get along better with their fellows, or respect the rights of others.”

Healthy self-esteem cannot be universally essential for another reason too: It is largely an American construct. Many other countries, including Japan and China, do not give self-esteem much, if any, consideration (some languages don’t even have a word for it). “Even in very modern societies, cultures that we think are very similar to ours don’t necessarily view self-esteem with the same set of ideals that we do,” Cho told me.

America’s obsession with self-esteem makes evaluating and encouraging it difficult and messy. U.S. parents often have a hard time estimating how much self-esteem their children have. “It’s a really complex construct in our day-to-day lives,” Chris Barry, a developmental psychologist at Washington State University, told me. For instance, some American kids (and adults) with low self-esteem outwardly project confidence in an attempt to appear self-confident. On top of that, parents tend to overestimate their children’s self-esteem—perhaps both because kids are adept at hiding their issues, and because parents assume that healthy self-esteem is crucial and desperately want to believe their kids are doing fine.