Perfectionism: The Damage We Can Do To Our Kids

"My parents were perfectly happy with getting Bs and Cs in college, but they expect me to get As." This from a college student whose parents demand more of their children than they did of themselves. In a recent article in Psychology Today, mostly inspired by a new book, A Nation Of Wimps, are quotable highlights:

• Perfectionism lowers the ability to take risks: it reduces creativity and innovation. Is this what we want from our kids?


• Perfectionism is an endless report card, an endless self-evaluation: you are absorbed in what you want to avoid. This undermines performance because the child is oriented toward failure. What do we reap from our kids? Endless frustration, anxiety and, yes, even depression.


• Perfectionist children feel that approval depends on performance, which leads them to believe they are only as good as they achieve.


• Perfectionist students do poorly on writng tests because they know it'll be critiqued, which is why they avoid courses in writing.


• Perfectionism comes from a parent's psychological control of the child's world, due to either the parent's exceesive concern for making their own mistakes, or from a parents' fear of separating from the child when going away to college is looming on the horizon.
  

The article makes some suggestions on what to do.

• Recognize the effort, not the end result. If your student went from an F grade to a C, that's a huge improvement. Shifting the focus to effort energizes a child to reach for a goal that's meaningful, not one that the parent expects or demands. When a good grade is achieved, resist the urge to say, "You're brilliant." Instead, you could say, "You're a good thinker," or, "It's terrific that you did X to achieve Y."
• Praise for effort produces positive moods states in what is now a positive environment for meaningful things to be done.
• Congratulate your kids. Ask why things worked out well and what they attribute their success to. Kids need to know what actions pay off in which situations. Material rewards don't work - not achieving signals a taking away of something to which you attributed value.

The most revealing moment in the article was from an executive of a major investment group. She hires only young people with the following profile: they must be first-generation immigrants because they are:

• resourceful
• hardworking, and
• good at problem-solving.

Why?

These kids have parents who don't speak English well and have to learn to figure things out for themselves; they can't rely on their parents. Their "disadvantage" made them stronger.

This article reminds me of one of my clients who's an executive at a major corporation in Massachusetts. He told me that his company's hiring criteria once included what college you went to. The company has since abandoned that criteria (HINT to Perfectionist Parents) and instead use an applicant's GPA as the most valuable criteria. Why? The company wants to see how you used your time in the last four years, not where you went to college (HINT to students).

To reinforce this point of view, the investment group executive made this remarkable statement:

"The 'fancy kids' are not perservering, not willing to work hard, not clever at problem-solving, not resourceful."