Perfectionism

It is a Wednesday after school. The maths worksheet is on the kitchen table, and the child, who is seven, has been doing it for forty minutes. She has done the same first question three times, because each time, on looking at it, she has decided the handwriting was not right, or the working-out was not lined up, or the answer had come because she had guessed rather than understood. On the third attempt, the pencil slips slightly, the line of the four becomes the wrong shape, and the worksheet gets torn down the middle by a small hand that has been working towards the tearing for the last twenty minutes. There is no sound, then a sound, and then the child is on the floor next to the chair, sobbing in a way that no one in the family understands, because the work was fine, and the answer was right.

The parent, on the other side of the kitchen, registers slowly that the meltdown is not about the maths. The maths has been the surface of it. Whatever is underneath has been gathering for longer than the worksheet, and is now bigger than the worksheet can contain.

In our counselling work with parents, this kitchen comes up often. In some families the child is six, weeping over a drawing she has crumpled before anyone has had a chance to admire it. In others, ten, recopying the same paragraph of homework for the fourth time. In others, fourteen, sitting in her bedroom with a B+ on a piece of coursework, telling no one in the household for two days that she has been unable to eat since the result came through. The age changes. The shape is recognisably the same.

We are not the definitive book on perfectionism, and the word itself we use carefully, because it covers a wide range from the developmentally normal to the clinically concerning. The parent’s first task is to know which of those is at her kitchen table.

What is actually happening

Perfectionism, in the form that brings parents into our work, is rarely about wanting to do something well. Almost every child wants to do something well; that is not a problem. The thing that turns aspiration into the kind of perfectionism that costs the child something is the connection she has begun to make, often without anyone meaning to teach it, between how well she does the thing and how acceptable she is to the adults around her. The worth has become conditional on the performance. The pencil that slipped on the maths worksheet is not, to the seven-year-old, a small slip but evidence of something she is afraid of about herself, evidence she cannot, at seven, yet put into words.

What the child has internalised is that she is loved when she is doing well, and that the parts of her that are not doing well are parts the adults around her have less time for. This is almost never something the parents have actually said; the child has assembled it from a long series of small data points: the comment about her sister’s mark, the relief in her mother’s voice when she came home with the spelling test, the way her father puts his phone down for the report card but does not put it down for the story she is telling about lunch.

A second thing is also happening in the more entrenched presentations. The child has internalised an inner voice that is harsher about her than any adult around her would dream of being. The drawing crumpled before anyone has seen it is the work of a critic the child carries inside her head. She is not yet, at six or seven, in any position to question this voice; she does not yet have the cognitive scaffolding to think about her own thinking. The inner critic, for now, simply is the inner experience.

This matters because the parent’s instinct, when the worksheet is torn, is to reassure: “it was fine, the answer was right, you are good at maths.” The reassurance is loving and well-meant, and it does not, in our experience, do what the parent hopes it will. The voice the child is contending with is not a voice she is going to hear over.

Helpful aspiration, corrosive perfectionism

High standards are not the enemy. The child willing to work hard, to try the harder thing, to redo the writing she knows is sloppy, is a child developing competence and eventually mastery, which is part of what makes a childhood feel meaningful. We are not arguing for lower standards, only for the careful separation of two things that look superficially similar and are, clinically, very different.

Helpful aspiration looks like this. The child is engaged with the task, not with herself. She is interested in whether the drawing has worked, not in whether she is acceptable. She can tolerate the version that is not yet right, because the version not being right does not mean anything terrible about her. She can stop when she has had enough. She can return to it the next day. She has separated her own worth from the worth of the work.

Corrosive perfectionism looks different. The child is engaged not with the task but with what the task is going to reveal about her. She cannot tolerate the version that is not yet right, because, to her, the version not being right is evidence about who she is. She cannot stop until it is right; the unfinished work cannot be put down. She often cannot start, either, because starting means risking being not-yet-right, and the not-yet-right is intolerable. Her relationship to feedback is brittle: the most generous correction is heard as a verdict, the smallest praise has to be exceeded next time. She is not, in her own experience, doing maths. She is being weighed.

The bridge between the two is the conditional clause. “I am acceptable if I do this well.” Until the child has internalised the unconditional one, in which she is acceptable, full stop, and the work is something she does in addition, the standards she sets for herself will function as the terms of her acceptability, and the work will continue to feel, to her, like the test she has to keep passing.

For the wider literature, the book we put into the hands of parents of adolescent girls in this stage most often is Lisa Damour’s Untangled, which has unusually careful writing on the way perfectionism develops in girls through the secondary years. For younger children, and for the regulation side of things, Siegel and Bryson’s The Whole-Brain Child sets out the integrative frame parents have found most useful. Karen Treisman’s writing on conditional worth and felt-safety covers the trauma-informed end of the territory for the families where the worth-conditionality has roots in a harder developmental history.

The parent’s own contribution

At some point this chapter has to turn the lens back towards the adults in the household. The right register here is not the register of blame.

Children read their environments. The environment the perfectionist child has been reading is, in the great majority of families we work with, an environment in which the adults around her have themselves been carrying conditional worth. The mother who is, on her own assessment, worth what she produces. The father whose own childhood was about achievement and whose adult life has continued the pattern. The household in which the conversation about how the day went tends to be a conversation about what got done. None of this is anyone’s failure, just the family system the parents themselves grew up inside, transmitted forwards without anyone choosing to.

What the child has been picking up, in the small daily exchanges, is the moral weight her parents place on performance. The slight tightness in the parent’s voice when she asks if the homework is done. The visible relief when the school report is positive. The disappointment, not said out loud but registered by a child reading every micro-expression. The language of clever, good at maths, the bright one. Children whose parents use the language of clever and not clever sort themselves into the two boxes early.

The contribution is also the wider language about achievement in the household. The way schools are talked about as places where some children win and others lose. The comparison made or implied, even between siblings, even gently, in the form of “your brother had this exact problem at your age”. A child does not, at seven, know that comparison is meant to reassure. She knows that someone has been weighed against her and the weighing has been made out loud.

The parent who has come this far and recognised herself in any of the above is the parent in a position to do the repair, which is the most important thing this chapter is for. The pattern travels through generations until somebody decides to look at it. The looking is, in the families we sit with, often the moment the pattern stops travelling.

What helps, what does not

What helps in this territory is smaller and slower than parents tend to want it to be. No single conversation does it; what changes things is the cumulative weather of a household in which the unconditional message slowly displaces the conditional one.

The first move is to separate praise of the child from praise of the work. That is a beautiful drawing is praise of the work; you are so creative is praise of the child. The second sounds warmer; in practice, the second is the one that builds the conditional structure. The child praised for being creative learns there is a category called creative children and that her membership of it depends on her continuing to produce evidence. The child told the drawing is beautiful has been told something about the drawing. The next drawing is a fresh question. Carol Dweck’s writing on praise and growth is the place parents who want to read further usually start; the underlying move, in our voice, is “say more about what you can see and less about what you are deciding she is”.

The second is to talk about your own mistakes, out loud, in front of her. “I have left the chicken in too long again, that is annoying, we will see what we can salvage.” “I am not very good at this jigsaw, I am going to have another go after supper.” The child watching her parents make mistakes calmly and recover from them is learning, faster than any conversation can teach her, that mistakes are part of the texture of being a person, not a moral failing she is uniquely vulnerable to.

The third is to ask, at the end of the day, what was interesting and what was hard, rather than what was good. What was the best bit is a question the perfectionist child finds difficult, because the right answer feels like a performance. What was the hardest bit and what was the most interesting bit are questions she can answer without being weighed. Over weeks, she stops auditioning at the kitchen table.

The fourth is permission to make mistakes the child can actually take in. The sentence it is okay to get it wrong, said in the abstract, does not reach a perfectionist child; the inner critic has already dismissed it. What reaches her is the parent who, when she does get it wrong, responds without weight. The maths worksheet with three wrong answers handed back across the kitchen without a sigh. The piece of writing that has missed the point, looked at together, with the parent saying “I can see what you were going for there, let us think about how to get closer to it next time”, in the same voice she would use to talk about the weather. The repetition, more than any single instance, is what convinces her.

What is rarely useful is the reassurance that she is the cleverest, the loveliest, the most. The perfectionist child knows this is being said, and her internal economy has already discounted the comment. Adding more compliments does nothing; what she needs is a different kind of attention, in which she is not, this evening, being assessed at all.

At different ages

Perfectionism looks different at each age, and what helps differs meaningfully across the bands.

If your child is between four and seven. Perfectionism in this band tends to look like meltdowns over small things: the crumpled drawing, the tower that fell, the line on the page that was not quite straight. Keep your own response soft and matter-of-fact. “That is a shame, let us see if we can pick it up.” Avoid making a big rescue out of it, because the rescue tells her the spilled milk was, in fact, worth the size of the response. Keep the language about her, in the rest of the day, about who she is and not about what she does. “I am glad you are here.” “I love you.” Said for no reason, at no transition, with no condition attached.

If your child is between seven and nine. The perfectionism in this band starts to attach to schoolwork. The handwriting redone three times, the spelling test rehearsed late into Sunday evening, the small comment that her work is not very good. Lower the temperature around school output specifically. The child who has been doing the homework for half an hour and is producing tense, small work is the child who needs to hear “that is enough for today, let us stop”. The parent who can interrupt the work is the parent giving the child evidence that her love is not contingent on the work being finished tonight.

If your child is between nine and eleven. Pre-secondary self-consciousness intensifies the picture. The child is now comparing herself to peers, and the perfectionism often takes the form of secrecy: the test result she will not show, the piece of writing she will not let anyone read. Step back from the pursuit of information. The conversation that helps is the sideways one. “What are you reading at the moment? What did you and Sophie talk about today?” The questions that are not about her output are the ones that re-establish her as a person, not a performer.

If your child is in early secondary, eleven to thirteen. The peer-group pressure is now full weather. The perfectionism here can become brittle: visible distress over what would, to an adult, look like a strong piece of work. Praise the qualities you most value in her that are not performance-based. Her kindness to her brother, her thoughtfulness about her grandmother, her willingness to try the new club. These are sentences she will, over a term, begin to take in as evidence about who she is that is unrelated to what she has produced.

If your child is mid to late secondary, thirteen to sixteen. GCSE perfectionism is the band in which the perfectionist child is most at risk of tipping into anxiety, low mood, or disordered eating. Watch for the cluster: sleep changes, appetite changes, social withdrawal, sustained low mood, talk about her body or about food that has acquired a moral weight. None of these in isolation is alarming; the cluster, sustained over weeks, is the moment to involve the GP. The Anna Freud parent-facing resources on perfectionism and anxiety in adolescence are the right next read for a parent wanting something more clinically anchored at this stage.

If your child is in sixth form, sixteen to eighteen. Late-teen perfectionism is the perfectionism she has been carrying for years now meeting the high-stakes context of A-levels and applications. The conversation in this band is adult-to-adult. Ask her, when she will let you, what she would do if she could spend an afternoon on something that did not have a grade attached. Take her answer seriously. She needs, more than she did at twelve, to remember the parts of herself that are not in the gradebook.

The longer arc

What we keep learning, in our counselling work with adults who came of age perfectionist, is that the conditional structure does not, on its own, dissolve. Adults who never internalised that they were loved unconditionally tend to spend a great deal of their working life producing evidence that they are acceptable, and a great deal of their inner life adjudicating whether the evidence is sufficient. This is exhausting and slow to undo, and the undoing tends to take longer than the people attempting it had hoped.

We say this not to alarm the parent reading at home but to give weight to what this chapter is asking for. The Wednesday afternoon at the kitchen table with the torn worksheet is, in the longer view, one moment of weather in a system that, if the parent can begin to alter it, will be a different system by the time the child is fifteen. The praise aimed at the work and not at the child. The mistakes the parent makes out loud. The supper at which the question is what was interesting and not what was good. The sentence “I am glad you are here”, said for no reason, often. Over a year, the conditional structure begins to soften. Over five, the child has, in her own internal economy, unconditional worth available to her when she needs it.

One more thing. If you have recognised yourself, with some discomfort, in the description of the household, the repair is yours to make, and saying it out loud, gently, is part of it. “I think I have sometimes been more interested in how you did at things than in how you were doing in yourself. I am sorry about that. I am going to do it differently.” That sentence, said once, with no expectation of an answer, does more in a perfectionist child’s inner world than the parent saying it can quite believe. The child does not have to respond. She has heard it. The conditional structure has been named out loud by the very adult whose approval she has been working to earn, and the conditionality has, in that moment, begun to lift.

The torn worksheet is still on the kitchen floor. Pick it up. Sit on the floor with her. Say something small and warm about something other than the maths. The Wednesday will pass. The pattern will take years. You are allowed to be the somebody who interrupts it.

NOTES

1. Damour, Lisa. Untangled. Atlantic, 2017. The developmental tasks of adolescence framework: Damour’s reading of the seven landings teenagers move through.
2. Siegel, Daniel J. & Bryson, Tina Payne. The Whole-Brain Child. Bantam, 2011. The “name it to tame it” move and the upstairs/downstairs brain model both originate here.
3. Dweck, Carol. Mindset: The New Psychology of Success. Random House, 2006. The fixed/growth mindset distinction and the place of praise for process over outcome.
4. Brown, Brené. The Gifts of Imperfection. Hazelden, 2010. The wholehearted-living frame and the letting go of who-we-should-be.

Where to go further

Carol S. Dweck, Mindset: The New Psychology of Success The book that introduced the fixed-and-growth-mindset frame and its application to praise. Named in the body of this chapter; the chapters on praising process rather than person are the ones to read first.

Brené Brown, The Gifts of Imperfection A research-grounded primer on the difference between healthy striving and the perfectionism that runs on shame. The cleanest writing we know on what a parent is, at her own kitchen table, modelling for her perfectionist child.