Self-esteem has become an essential element of individual success in different life domains: work, social relations, sport, physical appearance, behaviour. However, context plays a particularly important role. This article unveils the role of family context in the structuring of self-esteem. Children brought up by single mothers live in a particular context, where parental identification exhibits quite serious defects coupled with the emotional deprivation of one parent, the father. After correlating self-esteem with age, we got a negative value (-0.117), which shows that the more these children grow, the more self-esteem declines. Yet, the said children already exhibit a low self-esteem with differences that are not significant to sex and age (9-12 years and 13-18 years).