How to Help Your Perfectionist Kid
The way we parent shapes how our children respond to mistakes and challenges.
Welcome to Is My Kid the Asshole?, a newsletter from science and parenting journalist Melinda Wenner Moyer, which you can read more about here. If you like it, please subscribe and/or share this post with someone else who would too.
Dear Is My Kid the Asshole,
My daughter has turned into a perfectionist. If she doesn’t get her drawing right on the first try, she melts down into a mess of screams and angrily rips up her paper. I’m worried she might stop doing art entirely just to avoid the possibility of mistakes. What do I do?
Sincerely,
Nobody’s Perfect
Dear Nobody’s Perfect,
I remember a time a few years ago when my son decided that he had to read a book aloud to us — perfectly. If he stumbled over a word, he started reading the book all over again. But of course, every time he messed up he got more agitated. You can imagine that this did not end well.
So I hear you. And unfortunately, we’re not alone. According to a meta-analysis of studies published in 2019, perfectionism — defined as setting an almost unattainably high standard and valuing only success — has become more common since the 1980s. It’s unclear exactly why, but the researchers point to cultural changes — an increased emphasis on individualism, meritocracy and competitiveness, as well as shifting parenting practices that put more pressure on kids to perform well and avoid mistakes (rooted in understandable concerns about ensuring that our kids succeed in an increasingly competitive world). “There are increased pressures on young people to succeed, and be better than their peers,” said Jennie Hudson, a clinical psychologist at the Black Dog Institute in Australia who studies perfectionism.
I have also heard, anecdotally, that perfectionistic behavior has been increasing since March 2020. When I spoke with clinical social worker and child development specialist Claire Lerner a few days ago, she said she’s been seeing a rapid rise in this behavior among kids she’s worked with. “I've seen this real uptick in parents observing kids really struggling with perfectionism,” she said.
On some level, this makes sense. Because of the pandemic, kids have been dealing with tons of changes and transitions, so they feel out of sorts. In response, they may crave a sense of control — and perfectionism could be a manifestation of that need. “The more kids feel out of control on the inside, the more controlling they get on the outside,” Lerner explained to me. They may suddenly feel the need to play their favorite video game perfectly or kick a perfect soccer goal every time. Getting things right is one way to prove to themselves that they are, in fact, in charge.
Or it could be that perfectionism is just another form of anxiety, Hudson said. Kids “may be engaging in these behaviors because they believe that something bad might happen if they don’t get it right,” she said. In other words, kids may start to catastrophize mistakes as being somehow dangerous or threatening — in addition to the other things they might be nervous about, like returning to school or re-connecting with friends.
And lest you think perfectionism is good thing — that maybe it’ll make your child more successful — research contradicts that notion. Kids who are perfectionistic are also an increased risk for anxiety, depression, eating disorders, and other mental health problems. Interestingly, too, research suggests that perfectionist kids generally don’t do better in school than other kids do, and that they actually have a harder time mastering skills compared with non-perfectionist kids.
So what can we as parents do to ease perfectionism in our children? Read on for science-based strategies.
Acknowledge your child’s frustration.
Sometimes, as parents, when we feel our kids have gotten overly upset in response to something minor, our instinct is to contradict them in an attempt to make them feel better. We might say Oh, no, sweetie, your giraffe looks perfect! I don’t see any mistakes! But this kind of response is not particularly helpful, because we’re essentially telling our kids that they’re wrong, and that their feelings are invalid. “That rarely is an effective strategy,” Lerner explained, “because avoiding or minimizing or discounting does not make feelings go away. In fact, they tend to fester and get bigger and have to be acted out more.”
Ultimately, yes — our goal is to help our kids re-think their reactions and recognize that maybe, yes, they are overreacting. But to ensure that our kids are able to listen to us when we start that process, our children need to feel that we understand and accept how they’re feeling. “It starts with reflecting and validating their experience, not judging their experience,” Lerner said. “One of the greatest gifts you can give to kids is ‘I'm here. I hear you, I honor and value your feelings so much that I'm not going to try and minimize or gloss over them or talk you out of them.’”
So when your kid freaks out after making a mistake, start by saying something like Oh my gosh, you sound so frustrated. I see you looking at your picture, and that you don’t like what you see. Tell me more about that.
Once your child has calmed down a bit, you can go into a bit more detail about what you see and how you think your child feels. Lerner suggested something like this: I get it, sweetie — you have such fixed ideas about how you want things to look. And when it doesn't happen that way, it's really really uncomfortable to you. And sometimes that just makes your whole mind and body fall apart because it just feels so bad. I totally see that. Or you could say You have really these high expectations of yourself that sometimes get in the way of you doing the things you really want to do that make you happy, right?
Ask your child’s permission to offer your perspective, and then help them understand why mistakes are OK.
Recently, Lerner was trying to help a perfectionistic preschooler who was becoming increasingly frustrated as he built a block tower. But every time Lerner tried to help, he refused to listen. Eventually, after giving him some space, she came back to him and said, “I have some ideas about how we might rethink this. Would you like to hear them?” He immediately said yes, and then she was able to give him suggestions. But asking permission seemed to make all the difference. “When we jump in with solutions, it's intrusive to kids,” Lerner explained. “Kids experience that as a boundary crossing, because they haven't asked you for your help.” So if you catch your child in a perfectionistic moment and want to offer guidance, start by asking their permission to help — then they will be more receptive.
Once your child has invited you to help, you can start the process of trying to re-frame the situation. Let’s say they’ve been trying to draw Pete the Cat, but their attempt doesn’t look anything like the cat in the book, and they’re frustrated. You might explain that the person who illustrates the Pete the Cat books is a grown-up who’s had decades of practice drawing cats, and has probably made thousands of mistakes along the way.
Lerner gave an example of what she did recently when she was working with a child who couldn’t draw a perfect letter “O” like she could. She explained that she’s been working on making O’s for 40 years, whereas the little boy had only been practicing for 5 years. Then — and I love this — she and the child counted out 35 marks on a piece of paper to illustrate how many more years of practice she’d had. “You can say, ‘what do you think of that? Who's had more time to practice — you or me?’ You're basically partnering with your child now to give them a new perspective,” she said.
When Hudson works with perfectionistic kids who spend a really long time on a task — constantly erasing, re-writing, or re-doing it — she sometimes uses what she calls a stepladder approach that helps kids face their fears. First, she begins by slowly reducing the amount of time the child has for a task. If it normally takes the kid two hours to write a short story when it should only take them ten minutes, she slowly gives them less and less time to do it — maybe 90 minutes the first day, then 70 minutes the next. Also, she encourages them to deliberately get things wrong, so that they can see that nothing terrible happens when they do. “The idea is that that child gradually learns that it is OK not to be perfect and there are no major consequences they cannot handle,” she explained. (She also recommended that parents check out the Coping Cat workbook, which I mentioned in my last newsletter.)
Ease up on the pressure you might be putting on your child to succeed and achieve, and foster a growth mindset.
As I mentioned earlier, researchers speculate that the pressure parents put on their kids to succeed could be driving the development of perfectionism. In fact, in 2013, Hudson and her colleagues conducted a study that showed that how we parent has a direct and immediate influence on our kids’ perfectionistic behavior.
In the study, which I’m going to simplify slightly for the sake of clarity, Hudson’s team invited 7- to 12-year-olds and their mothers into a lab and asked the kids to copy sets of pictures from books as accurately as possible. Before they started the task, though, the researchers split the kids and moms into groups. The researchers asked the moms in one group to point out the errors their kids were making when they copied the pictures, and to give lots of helicopter-y feedback on what they should do to avoid making mistakes — like No, don’t do it that way or you’ll mess it up! In another group, the researchers asked the moms to look relaxed and calm and to not focus on the errors that their kids were making. The moms were told to provide encouragement to their kids, but not to critique their drawings. “We would encourage parents to say, ‘it doesn’t matter if you get it right. Just do the best you can. It is OK to make mistakes,’” Hudson explained to me.
As you might guess, the kids whose moms fretted over and criticized their drawings displayed more perfectionistic behaviors during the task. (Interestingly, too, those kids performed less well.) What we can take from this is that the less hovering we do as parents, and the less pressure we put on our kids to do well, the less perfectionistic they will be, and the better they will do. In other words: Relax, and let your kids be. (As I discuss in detail in chapter 6 of my book, the pressure we put on kids to excel also undermines their self-esteem — because kids being to think our love for them is contingent upon how they perform and what they achieve.)
As I see it, the research on perfectionism dovetails beautifully with the research on growth versus fixed mindset. I talk a lot about these mindsets and the science behind them in chapter 2 of my book, but here’s a short summary: It is really helpful to kids when we praise them for effort rather than ability or skills. When we praise for skills — for instance when we say things like you’re a really good artist or you’re so smart — we foster a fixed mindset, implying to our kids that skills and smarts are something you either have or you don’t, and that there’s not much you can do about it. When kids get into a fixed mindset, they consider challenges and mistakes to be signs of ineptitude; if they make a mistake while drawing, for instance, they start to doubt the idea that they’re good artists, and then they feel like failures. They avoid challenges, because challenges are seen are threats to their reputation. If succeeding means I’m smart or good at something, then failing must mean I’m dumb or bad at it — so they avoid failure by avoiding hard things.
If, on the other hand, parents praise kids for effort and tie effort to outcome — by saying things like Oh, I love that cat picture; it’s clear to me that you’ve been practicing your drawing so much and have learned a lot! — then kids consider skills and smarts to be malleable. (It helps if we as parents model a growth mindset, too — if we also embrace our own mistakes and challenges and frame them as learning opportunities.) Kids then start to see mistakes and challenges as opportunities to learn, grow and improve. Research shows that kids who have been praised for effort are more resilient and are less likely to buckle in the face of mistakes and setbacks. They work harder and they don’t give up as easily — and are less likely to feel the restrictive chains of perfectionism.
Want to read more about fostering resilience, motivation, and healthy self-esteem in kids? Read my new book! I include a lot of science-based strategies on these issues and many, many more.