Things They Should Invent: indoctrinate children in boosting their peers' self-esteem

When I was a kid I had no self-esteem, mostly as a result of the way I was treated by my peers. Now I have better self-esteem (I'm hesitant to state in objective terms that I have good self-esteem because 10 years from now I might look back and laugh), mostly as a result of being treated decently by the vast majority of people I encounter, and that makes me a more pleasant person. A lot of the chips have fallen off my shoulders; I can be humble, I can be flawed, I don't feel the need to constantly prove myself worthy because I have a sense of self-worth. I don't need to be right - in fact, I try to always admit when I'm less than certain I'm right* - and that makes me much more pleasant to deal with.

Since the original problem was the treatment at the hands of my peers, and since this isn't an uncommon experience, that got me thinking: what if there was a way to explain to kids - to get them to really grok - that if they don't go around destroying their peers' self-esteem, those peers would be more pleasant to deal with? When I was a kid we got the "you should be nice to people" message and the "if you're good to people you'll go to heaven and if you're mean to them you'll go to hell" message and various storybooks and cartoons where the kind and cheerful heroine always wins everyone over and saves the day, but it was just there as a thou shalt. I wonder if it would be more useful to explain to the kids what the specific benefits to them would be instead of just the general message that if you're nice to people there will be certain nonspecific benefits in the future.

When you're really little they drill in please and thank you and you're welcome and excuse me and I'm sorry, but they don't teach the meanings and motivations behind them. They were at best magic words and at worst burdens (like when the parents made me apologize to people for stuff I wasn't sorry for) and for the longest time I didn't use them with my peers because they were just tricks the grownups wanted us to do. I wonder if that would have worked out differently if they'd been able to explain the reasoning to me better than "You have to be polite."

*I started doing this as part of translation brain. I tell my colleagues who look over my work how certain or uncertain I am about various things, so they know where to focus their attention. In my line of work it's not important for me to be right, it's important for the text to be right; if everything in the whole text has to be corrected before it can be sent out, that's a far better outcome than if I convinced everyone that the text was perfect and sent it out flawed. Then I started doing it in other areas of life too, and I like it so I'm keeping it. I keep reading where people think it's a sign of weakness to qualify your every statement, but I find in the long run it gives me a certain authority. Since I normally qualify everything and have been doing so for years, when I make an outright declarative statement people tend to listen.