Perfectionism

Your child is seven, and they’ve been doing a maths worksheet after school for forty minutes. They have done the first question three times. Each time they have looked at it and decided the handwriting wasn’t right, or the working-out wasn’t lined up, or they had only got the answer by guessing and hadn’t understood it. On the third attempt their pencil slips and the four comes out the wrong shape. Your seven-year-old tears the worksheet down the middle, something they’ve been building up to for the last twenty minutes. For a second there’s no sound at all. Then they’re on the floor next to their chair, sobbing, and nobody in the family can understand why, because the work was fine and the answer was right.

Watching from across the room, you slowly realise that something bigger than the maths is going on. It has been building for longer than this one worksheet, and the worksheet is just where it has spilled over.

We hear about scenes like this often in our counselling work with parents. Sometimes it’s a boy of six in tears over a drawing he crumpled up before anyone had a chance to admire it. Sometimes it’s a girl of ten copying out the same paragraph of homework for the fourth time. Sometimes it’s a boy of fourteen in his bedroom with a B+ on a piece of coursework, and for two days he tells nobody at home that he hasn’t been able to eat since the mark came through. The ages are different, but the pattern is recognisably the same.