How To Help My Child Overcome Perfectionism?

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Hi, welcome to Talking Sense a podcast with me, Dr. Marta. Every week I answer one of your real life questions to give you some psychological psychological understandings, suggestions and ideas to guide you. Before we begin I always like to give you a moment to pause something to help you settle into our conversation. And today I just want to invite you to think about one thing that you can do this week that will bring you some joy. Just a moment to protect for yourself. What can you commit to doing for you? Just have a think and when you're ready, let's begin.

Today's question is about perfectionism in children and what we can do about it. Let's have a listen.

Hello Dr. Marta, I would like some help to navigate my seven year old daughter's need for perfection. She is very self critical and very hard on herself especially when it comes to homework tasks. For example, she will.

Think that her handwriting is not good enough. It will take her ages to complete a task just because she thinks that she Needs to rub off every letter that she writes because it's not good enough. She becomes very explosive in the way that she expresses this and that causes a lot of friction between the two of us. I even struggle to help her with tasks because she keeps comparing herself to me and thinking that I do things in a great way, but she cannot do it the way I do. So it's really hard to see her believing those things for herself and blaming herself so hardly. So I'd really like some ideas on how to support her because that makes me very sad to see. Thank you.

I wonder how many of you resonate with this question just for yourself, not just for your children. I think we often carry perfectionism into our adulthoods and we often think of perfectionism as something that is self motivating, Self improving is going to help us do better. When actually the reality is that perfectionism is characterized by setting extremely high, if not impossible standards for yourself and becoming really self critical if these standards are not reached. And one of the things that we know about perfectionism is that it's not about striving to be our best. Because instead of focusing on inwardly on our skills and our abilities and our competencies, perfectionism actually steels us of curiosity. It views our mistakes as failures. And it therefore gets in the way of us learning from our mistakes. And it takes away the opportunity of trying something different. Because what perfectionism does is give us this thought of what will people think? And it can be an all consuming question. So rather than focusing inside of us and thinking about what our skills are, what we are trying to achieve, how we can improve things, perfectionism steals us of those opportunities by telling us that we have to know everything or we're going to look less than to other people. Other people will judge us, other people will laugh at us or think that we are not good enough. So one of the things that we need to recognize about perfectionism is that rather than it being fully self motivating, one of the kind of dark sides of perfectionism is that it makes your mistakes and your failures personal defects. So what perfectionism does is rather than make you strive to do better, it's trying to make you avoid making mistakes and feeling like a failure. So one of the ways that I think about perfectionism is that it's a bit of a shield or you know, kind of like a protective cloak. It is protecting you from having to feel these difficult emotions of kind of shame or embarrassment or feeling less than others. And when this happens to children, I think as adults we have a huge responsibility in how to guide them to look outside of perfectionism. Because often perfectionism is a very strong voice. It often tells children how to do things. And within the context of children's lives, particularly school, it can be really, really challenging. One of the reasons why it can be really challenging is that often in school the messages that children are receiving are about success and achievement and failure. And what happens when you get something wrong? Do you get told off or do you get a lower grade? Or how do your friends perceive you? How do the teachers talk about your failures and your mistakes? Are they seen as points of reflection and sense self growth? Or are they seen as failures, things that you end up internalizing as I'm not good enough because I didn't do as well as somebody else. And this is really key because it's really important that we recognize that the messages that we give our children are extremely important, but they're also receiving messages out there in the outside world. Now I know that can make some people feel like, well, this is a drop in the ocean and it's not going to work well. But we know that perfectionism is something that we can work with. It is something that sometimes children and young people do go to therapy for. And I believe that when your child is little, this is the best way of kind of preventing perfectionism's voice from getting too loud and too strong. Because of course there's a lighter side to perfectionism. It can be self motivating, it can make you want to do better, but it has to be in a way that doesn't provoke this anxiety at getting things wrong, like in this question today. So if your child is working on a task and they're writing or drawing or whatever they're doing, and they just keep breaking it apart, tearing off the paper or starting again because it's never quite good enough, then to me that is unhelpful, right? That's an unhelpful side of perfectionism. And if on top of that you can hear the self critical voice kind of often saying that they're not good enough or they're not doing well, then that's when you really have to think, how can I support my child to move away from this expectation of kind of trying to meet these unachievable standards and instead move them through towards a more growth mindset place? So I am going to talk about growth mindset, but I'm also going to talk about your role because it's really, really key. And this idea that children look to us and Compare themselves to us is a very real idea. And we can have a really powerful role on our children in ways that as adults, we don't really think about it because we can do things. And therefore the idea of making mistakes when you're doing a task that you know how to do might seem really odd. But it can be so powerful and helpful to children to see adults make mistakes, to see adults keep trying to better themselves, to role model what it's like when you want to do something well and you don't do it as well as you'd like to just yet. So what we're modeling is hard work rather than perfectionism, getting things right straight away. So if we're able to think about perfectionism not as self improvement, not as striving to do our best, but instead, at its core, about trying to earn approval and acceptance from others, then we can start to see more clearly the kind of distorted and rigid ways in which perfectionism can make children and adults think about things. So often trying to meet these impossibly high standards, you know, I must get all the questions right or my writing must look perfect. What you might notice as well is that they start to overgeneralize when they fail. I'll never do well. I'm so bad at writing. Right? Any kind of slightly lower score from the one that they were aiming for, which will be the impossibly high standard of getting everything correct, will be met with something like, I'm terrible at maths or whatever it is. So it's very black and white. It's very kind of concrete thinking. If I make one error, then I'm a complete failure. And the focus on the negatives, whilst discounting the positives of, you know, I actually did pretty well on this test. Like, I got eight out of ten. That's pretty good. Next time I just need to remember and learn these other two bits that I didn't quite get right or, hey, my writing is my own personal style and you can see my style through my writing. So that's quite nice. You know, I like the way that I draw my A's, or I like the way that I cross my T's a bit differently from other people. None of that gets absorbed with perfectionism because it's basically distorted thinking and it acts like a filter. So perfectionism is a filter through which children can start to see the world.

It's.

And they see themselves in comparison to their peers and also sometimes in comparison to you. And anytime that they make a mistake, it's perceived as a failure that confirms their underlying fear that they're never going to be good enough. And this is what fuels those critical self beliefs and that makes avoidance behaviors escalate and children become less sure of themselves over time and less willing to try new things. So let's think about all of this from the perspective of parenting and from the perspective of adults around children. What can we do to support children who have these high standards for themselves? How can we overcome the voice of perfectionism? And what kind of skills and abilities can we teach them and through ourselves, firstly via role modeling and then, you know, with them? What is it that can really help them understand that they can move away from perfectionism and actually grow, learn and develop in ways that perfectionism is holding them back from?

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Can I just let it go?

Thank you so much.

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So firstly for me, the most powerful thing is you. You are your child's most powerful tool and you are the person that can support your child best to overcome perfectionism. So here are some questions for you, which is really hard. And I know some of these questions might be tough, but really, really think about them. Can you self reflect or on these ideas, how perfectionistic are you? Are you constantly frustrated? Do you often compare your abilities with others? Do you often avoid things that are difficult or that you don't think you're very good at because you don't want to fail? Or you don't want to show others that you're not as good as they are? And when you do a task, any kind of task, what's it like when it doesn't end up looking or being as perfect as you'd hoped? So you know, I'm going to use some examples and some of these may or may not fit for you. They're just kind of ideas to kind of give you a flavor of what I'm talking about. And I'm going to use different kinds of examples because you're all different kinds of people. So I don't know who you are. Which of these is going to make most sense? But for example, are you the kind of person who would have a go at a sport or a game that you've never played before, whilst knowing that everybody else can play this game and they're actually really good at it? Would you have a go? Would you be willing to learn? Would you be willing to show up imperfectly as somebody who is learning something for the first time? Or would you say, nah, I'd don't really want to give that a go. I don't want to play. If you bake a cake or make a meal, do you look for it to look perfect? So thinking about a cake is a little bit easier. Do you want all the icing to look really lovely and perfectly straight and flat and shiny? And what happens when it doesn't look that way? Are you still able to enjoy the cake and see it for what it is, something that we eat, not something that we admire by its beauty? Or does it make you want to start again? Do you feel like, I've got to start this cake again because it didn't work out, or I've got to redecorate it because it doesn't look right? Which one of these are you feeling most pulled to? Of course, there are lots of other examples, but just really reflect on this because the attitude that you take in these moments gives really powerful messages to your children. The enjoyment of learning and making mistakes and seeing them as positives has to be something that your child witnesses in others. For them to see that it is possible to make a mistake and to not crumble. But if what they see is either that you always make the perfect cakes or that you are an incredible sports person and you always get things right, you always do well, you know, you have these amazing skills in certain areas, then your child is going to find that really hard. Because when children look at us, we can do things that they can't. And that's always going to be true for a long time, particularly during childhood where they're still learning. And there's a really important part of this which is about being able to role model to your child, that you can make mistakes. So my first idea for you is to begin making mistakes. Now, this sometimes comes with thoughts around it's disingenuous or that's, you know, I Can't make mistakes when I know how to do things. So you need to do this in a way that feels right for you. One of those ways might be to explicitly name when you get something wrong. Children don't see our mistakes because we don't talk about them. And they may not see them in that moment. They may not see that you've tweaked the cake. They may not see that, you know, you didn't play as good sport as somebody else because they weren't there when it happened. So talk about your mistakes, talk about the things that you find hard and, and consider times where you're practicing things. Okay. And can you show your child that making a mistake and practicing is okay? So I'll give you like a really simple example, a simple and also very easy one. So I don't know if this has ever happened to you, but if you've ever written a card for somebody, a birthday card, a Christmas card, a thank you card, and, and you've actually written something and then thought, oh God, that's not really what I wanted to say, or that bit's grammatically incorrect, anything like that. I wonder whether you've again restarted writing the card or whether you've been able to cross it out and carry on and still send it. So, yes, you've sent out an imperfect card with some markings on it that might include crossing out. Now, genuinely, this has happened to me. I've sometimes when I'm trying to write things really quickly, often Christmas cards and things like that kind of got the wrong name or misspelt something or, you know, got the wrong phrase because I've been writing it so long that it's kind of coming as wrote and it doesn't come out quite right. And that kind of the pull to kind of go, it doesn't matter, you know, just put that in. Recycling, start again is so, so easy because you think it's a Christmas card and you want to make it look pretty. But one of the things that I've started to like, really reflect on is this is an opportunity to show my child that I've got something wrong and I can cross it out and I can still send it to somebody and somebody will still appreciate that I sent them a card and we can make something of it. So this is not a made up example. This is a real example. This happened and I crossed something out and I showed my child and some of it was because I'd kind of written a letter in a not a very kind of clear way. And she decided to do a little drawing around it. She drew some flowers around it and some like little love hearts, I think it was. And it just brightened it up. And we kind of wrote a little note saying, oops, sorry I had to scribble this out. And firstly, I probably didn't need to apologize. Fact, you know, self reflection live on this podcast, probably did not need an apology because it was very clear that I'd got something wrong. But secondly, something lovely came of it. Like my daughter drew on a card that actually probably made that card a little bit more special than all the others that were just me plain writing. And my daughter is also kind of learning that like to cross something out and start again on the same page is okay. Now, she doesn't quite write yet, but she is very interested in letters and numbers. And I do want to teach her that it's okay to cross things out and to keep going, that she doesn't have to make things perfect. But in order for me to teach her that, it's not enough that I tell her so, it's important that I show her that I do it, that I am able to post this imperfect card and be okay with it and feel like that's a good enough card. It does not have to be perfect. So think about that. And obviously that's just one example. And what that looks like in your everyday life will be different for all of you. But I really want you to focus on that because it is the most powerful thing. Think about trying a new hobby or trying something hard and letting your child see you move through a challenge, whether it's learning a language or learning a sport or doing something difficult that you're just not very good at. Can you find humour in it? Can you find beauty in it? Can you show your child that there's something really rich about making mistakes and learning, that learning is a lifelong process? And thinking about what I'm going to share with you next, can you really explicitly name for your child that not getting everything perfect and not being good at everything is actually more than okay? We should all be feeling good enough. And I know that's a really hard feeling sometimes because we often do, whether we acknowledge or do it, secretly, feel like we should be perfect and better than most. I think the sense of achievement and competitiveness is just something that people strive for in our society. So I completely understand if you are one of those people. And what your child needs to see more than anything is that being good enough means making mistakes and keep going. It does not mean getting everything right. All the time. Because that is an unattainable and unachievable standard.

Next, I really want you to try and help your child focus and think about their distorted thinking. And one of the things that kind of perpetuates anxiety and avoidance around perfectionism is the unhelpful ways in which they think about their failures. So helping children develop more positive self talk is key. And one of the things that can really help is first of all that they hear you do more positive self talk around yourself and that you talk them through some key questions to help them. So as well as hearing you say things like, huh, that didn't come out just the way I wanted, but I think it's okay. I think it's good enough. I have to keep working on this. I know I need practice those kind of words. It's really helpful when your child is doing a task and they're starting to get frustrated and they're ripping it apart to just slow things down. So this might be a moment to take a break and you may want to ask your child some key questions that might include things like, you know, how do you know that this is true, that your writing is the worst from everybody in your classroom? Or how do you know that you are really bad at maths? Or you're really bad at running? Where did you learn that? And you do want to go a little bit deeper. You want to try and ask them what's good about thinking that you're not very good at maths and what's not so nice about it. Now I know for some people this question sounds really odd. Like what I would need to ask my child what's good about being bad at something? Yes. Because there is something good for them about being bad at something. Okay. If they can just give up or avoid it, they are avoiding a feeling. And children from around the age of 5 upwards are able to think about this, right? Like what is good about me feeling this way? Why do I carry on saying these things? What do I get from saying this? You know? So it is about a feeling more often than not. But it might also be about getting your reassurance or getting validation from others or having a sense that others are saying, you're not that bad, you can do better. So we need to help our children really think about the self critical voice and what is it offering them, both in terms of things that don't feel so great and in things that might actually give them something positive that they're not fully conscious of at the moment. You want to Tap into what's the worst possible thing that could happen? If they were the worst in their class with writing, if their handwriting is the worst of all their friends, then what's the worst thing that would happen? And on a scale where 0 is nothing bad would happen and 5 is, is the world would end, how would they rate it? If they had the ugliest writing style of all, what is the worst that would happen? Can you get your child to really think about this thought for what it is, a distorted, unrealistic, unhelpful thought, and can you help them replace it with something more realistic? Right. So if they're able to rate it, and sometimes children will go a bit hyperbolic and say, you know, it's a five because it'll be like the ugliest handwriting in the world, then you can move into a more realistic place, which might be about if your handwriting can still be read. Does it matter that people think it's ugly? Or does it matter that they understand the messages that you're writing and the things that you want to say? Which one is more important? We want to help our children find that balance, and we want to help kind of bring their brains to a place where it's a lot more realistic. Finally, when your children say things like, but I can't do this, make sure that you use the word yet. Yet is such a powerful word. Children are often learning, all the time learning, and they're improving their skills day by day, as long as they keep practicing and don't allow something like perfectionism to get in the way. So when your child says, but I can't do this as well as you, or I can't do some activity or whatever it is, remember to repeat what your child has said, but end it with the word yet. So that might sound like, you're right, you can't write as good as me yet. You're only whatever age your child is. You know, it's taken me many, many, many years to write this way. Lots of practice, lots of writing, lots of getting things wrong, writing things wrong, getting my grammar wrong. But over time, because I've carried on writing, it's come out like this. This is how it looks. And who knows, maybe in five or 10 years time, my writing will change again and it will look a little bit different. What do you think? You want to open this up? You want to show your child that things are not set in stone, that how you do something right now, today, is not necessarily how you will do it tomorrow, yet opens up possibility. It opens up hope. And it helps children see that what they need to do is persevere and keep trying to and keep making mistakes because they are the kind of vehicle for learning, not as perfectionism tells them the kind of truth of their failure. Finally, and importantly, you really need to help your child develop some coping strategies. And when it comes to perfectionism, you know, it's often linked with anxiety and it's often linked to a kind of sensitivity to frustration. So these are areas to focus on and work on. And there's two strategies that you can use for both of these, which are about breaking down goals and supporting your child to problem solve. So children may avoid tasks such as homework or writing or even speaking in front of a classroom because they feel like they're not going to be able to do things perfectly. And often it might be something new or something that brings up anxiety. So in order to help support your child through this, make sure that what you're doing is breaking things down with them. Help them complete smaller amounts of homework at more regular intervals. Make sure that you help them problem solve. So if they're trying to write something and they don't feel like it's coming out in the way that they want, take a break, breathe, maybe go back to some of the questions that I offered in this podcast to evaluate their self critical voice. And then when you go back to the task with your child supporting them through it, try and begin somewhere different. So if they were starting at the beginning, which is often where we start, tell them, what would you like the end of your story to be? Let's think about the ending, let's come back to the beginning, let's think about how it ends. Similarly, with something like drawing, can they begin the drawing in a different angle? So rather than beginning with a head, can they begin with a feet? I know this sounds really strange if you've not done it before, but what you're actually doing is helping your child learn that they can get to an end point a finished goal from a different angle by seeing things with a different perspective and kind of defining the issue, the problem that they have and considering multiple solutions. It's same with maths. They don't have to start at the beginning of the sheets, they can start in the middle. Can they look at every single question and think about which one they think they can work out which one is easiest? Which one do they feel like, I know this answer and I can do this and then move to the harder sections. We want to equip our children to confront problems and for that, we sometimes need to support them in breaking things down and looking at things from a different perspective, which is about problem solving. And this can really shrink overwhelm and this idea of perfectionism because looking at things from like a different angle can just position your child, child differently. And of course, do focus on emotional regulation. If frustration tolerance is very low for your child, do think about ways that you can support them in asking for help. Because often children who have perfectionistic traits also really struggle to put their hands up and say, I'm struggling right now, because it exposes them to others noticing that they can't do something or that they don't know something. So helping your child in a safe place such as your home to reach out to you and say, I can't do this, I need some help, rather than, I can't do this, I'm a failure, I'll always be bad at maths, for example, is a very different thing. And we want to help our children understand that seeking support and help can actually make them learn things and do better in the future. So do teach your child, when frustrated, to ask for help. And if you're interested in this, I did another podcast on exactly this topic so you can have a listen. And we're coming to an end. This is a very big topic and there are lots of other things that we could focus on here. And if you think you would like to learn a little bit more about how to help little ones learn skills positively through encouragement and helpful motivation that hopefully shrinks perfectionism, do have a look at my Confident Parent course. It's available on my website, www.doctrormarterpsychologist.com. as always, I like to end with a little mantra to hold you for the rest of the week. And this week, my mantra to you is, I am enough. Sometimes we don't hold that for ourselves very tightly. We are still going with perfectionism. And if we don't work on that for ourselves, it can make it really difficult to support our children with their perfectionism that gets in the way of learning. So just remember, you are good enough just as you are. And your mistakes are opportunities for learning. I hope you'll join me again on another Talking sense. Until then, see you soon.

This holiday season, millions of families will pack their bags, load up the car, and head off for a family vacation. But not every trip is going to be somewhere fun. The American Red Cross responds to about 7,000 emergencies during the holiday season alone, from home fires to natural disasters, providing families a safe place to go when the unthinkable happens, but they can't do it without your support. Please donate@redcross.org you know you've reached peak.

Couple energy when your undies match Meundies Match Me has you both covered, literally in super soft ultra modal undies, socks, PJs and and loungewear. Festive prints? Check. Cozy vibes? Double check. And right now, it's deal season. Get up to 50% off site wide for Black Friday and Cyber Monday. Take your couple game to the next level with Meundies Match Me. To get deals up to 50% off, go to Meundies.com acast Enter promo code acast that's Meundies.com a acast code acast.

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