For more than a generation, the idea that children need nurturance of a high self-esteem in order to be developmentally healthy has had wide acceptance in Western psychology. A generation of parents has been told that one of their key tasks is to increase their children's self-esteem, and teachers have been trained to give accolades, gold stars, and the occasional trophy to foster self-esteem in their students. The emphasis on self-esteem is an outgrowth of the perception that global self-esteem is almost synonymous with mental health. Though numerous scholarly articles have been written about self-esteem arguing that it relates to adaptive outcomes, the idea that self-esteem brings well-being alone has been increasingly questioned, in part because in some cases, people engage in counterproductive or dysfunctional behaviors to nurture high self-esteem in others and to produce it in themselves. High and inflated self-esteem may have its perils, and to avoid them, self-compassion is proposed as an alternate construct. In this article, the author discusses how to foster self-compassion in youth. This article begins with a comparison between self-esteem and self-compassion. Then, it describes key characteristics and corollaries of self-compassion and the strategies that are designed to increase self-compassion.