Perfectionism Isn't High Standards. It's Hurting Your Kid

0:03Aliza Pressman:Welcome to Raising Good Humans. I'm Dr. Aliza Pressman and today is Professor Thomas Curran, who's a professor of psychology at the London School of Economics. His expertise is in perfectionism and he just wrote a book called The Perfection Trap, Embracing the Power of Good Enough. It's so brilliant. And today we're talking about parental expectations and perfectionism. and the focus is the relationship between caregivers, parents, and children. If you enjoy this episode and you feel like it, go ahead and give me a five-star rating, maybe even write a review. What are the myths, the big myths about perfectionism?

0:46There's loads of myths around perfectionism. The first one is that perfectionism is the high standards. It's not high standards. It's a relational trait. It's a way of existing in the world. And it's a form of deficit thinking. so extreme, as I said, that we live our lives in the shadow of shame. So worrying about how much less than we appear to others. This is what perfectionism is. Okay. It's not high standards. High standards are a part of perfection of a component, but they come from that sense of deficit and lack. And that's the important part. It isn't the high standards that drives the perfectionism.

1:16It's the lack. So that's the first myth. And I think it's important because that unlocks a lot of other myths down the line. The second is that perfectionism is necessary for success lots and lots of research has been done on this area and there is very little relationship to perfectionism success and the reason for that is that perfectionists overwork they overextend so they burn out a lot but they also do self-handicapping things too particularly things don't go well so they withhold effort they procrastinate to save face right and so you tend to find that instead of pushing themselves forward they can hold themselves back and that's the reason we don't see very strong relationships with perfection and performance and that's problematic because of course, we also know it's got a lot of emotional baggage and mental health issues and complications that come alongside it.

1:58So you have all this pain for very little gain. So again, this kind of idea that perfectionism holds us up in the world, that it's important for success, is a really important myth to bust. One of the most important, actually. And I guess, finally, and particularly in the modern culture, I think there's an idea that perfectionism is desirable, that in some way it's also obtainable and particularly among young people you get this sense and this is where a lot of the problems among the youth are coming from because they're seeing perfection everywhere and all around them you know it's up on billboards in movies it's social media feeds and for young people themselves and it's even their peers at school who are acing their tests right you know we make all these comparisons and we think perfection is something that is eminently desirable and eminently obtainable and it's that obtainable element the desirable is problematic but it's that obtainable element that really, really has harm for young people.

2:53Because no matter how hard you try, we can never be perfect. And it's a completely irrational goal for us to set because it's not something that any of us can achieve as mere mortals. So for me, the third myth, I think if young people need to hear is that perfection isn't obtainable, it is an impossible goal. And it offers only all but misery really for those who try to attain it.

3:16Aliza Pressman:Just to start very basic and broad, and then we can get specific. Will you define perfectionism? Because I want to start with a common understanding about what we're talking about. So the way I like to think about perfectionism is as a way of existing in the world, but a way of existing in the world that includes a kind of deficit thinking, which is so extreme that we go through life living under the shadow of shame. So shame about what we don't have, how we don't look, how we're not performing, or how much less than we're appearing to other people. And I think that's a really important starting point because a lot of people, when they think about perfection, they think about an energizing personality characteristic, this kind of inner drive that pushes us forward, when actually it's not an individual characteristic at all.

4:15It's very much a relational trait. And how we interact with others has a massive impact on how we think and feel as a perfectionist. And the validation and approval that we receive from others is so important for our self-esteem. So for me, when I talk about perfectionism, I think it's important to remember that there's this kind of deficit mindset. And if you understand it from that starting point, you can begin to see the reasons why it can be quite problematic.

4:40Aliza Pressman:So then the things that I want to cover today are how parents in their relationship with their kids can help minimize, recognize perfectionism and support kids who kind of bend in that direction. I'm so curious if in the field thinking about perfectionism, if there are, are there parts of perfectionism that are so positively adaptive that there are some people that might not want to let go of it? The thing is with perfectionism is, and I'm a perfectionist, one of the reasons I did this work was because I suffered from perfectionism. And perfectionism was the one thing that I used to hold me up in the world when everything and all around me was collapsing.

5:24And I truly believed that it was the perfectionism that was keeping me on my two feet. And what I didn't understand and what time of a therapist was able to reveal to me was that it was actually the perfectionism itself.

5:38Aliza Pressman:It was creating the problems. So I've been through this journey myself. And for anyone listening to your podcast, I hope that that's validating because for me, the epiphany was really this thing that you believe is really holding you up when And actually it's the thing that's causing the most distress in your life. And the reason is because perfectionism has an aggressive vulnerability built into its core. So, you know, we go around the world trying to prove to other people that we're worth something, that we matter, that we're good, that we're proficient, that we're attractive, that we're healthy.

6:12All of these things that we believe society expects us to be. And we feel that perfectionism allows us to do that, allows us to project those things. but what happens when things go wrong which they will do and we will fail and we will fall short and we will encounter situations and scenarios where we don't appear in ways that we think we should have appeared and we don't behave in ways we feel we should have behaved we don't look in ways that we feel we should have looked that vulnerability then really starts to have an incredibly profound impact on our mental health so we feel a lot of shame as i talked about earlier we feel like we haven't lived up to some ideals so we cast against ourselves a very self-critical

6:51Aliza Pressman:why could you be so stupid how could you look like that and of course layered on top of each other you know daily experiences of this kind of shame really have a profoundly negative impact on our mental health we start to feel very low mood and that low mood turns into depression and it can spin over into anxiety and panic in my case until you have kind of this kind of almost complete breakdown where your perfectionism is pushing you through moments where you should really be stopping and releasing yourself and allowing yourself to recuperate but it keeps you moving forward and it's that kind of vulnerability combined with this idea that it's holding us up in the world that creates a really a perfect storm for mental health problems so the answer to your questions I have thought deeply about this because I've been personally affected myself and for me having gone through that journey and having understood this work intimately as a researcher too.

7:39I don't think there's anything positive that we can say.

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10:02Aliza Pressman:my sneaking suspicion is that you know how I mean I don't know if this is still true but when you would go to job interviews back in the day you had to say a weakness you know what are your strengths and weaknesses and the answer was often I'm a perfectionist like that's my weakness but they were saying it as a humble brag because there was some message. If you get yourself a perfectionist as a kid, as a colleague, as an employee, that somehow they're going to work harder and do better, but that's not actually the case. So how did that myth come to be? And given the fact that there is no positive to perfectionism, how can we shift the conversation to what that really means?

10:52Aliza Pressman:Like, what is it that people are trying to capture when they're saying that humble brag or wanting that out of the kid? It's a really good question. And one of the things I've been thinking about long and hard over the last few years is why on earth do we live inside a culture that kind of lionizes the perfectionistic person? And I think there's many reasons for it. and it always to some extent has been the case you can go back to early clinical case notes master clinicians particularly karen horney who talked about affectionism as a response to culture and so she talked about how in broader culture particularly for women to look and behave in a certain way right so that we have to kind of change ourselves we have to be somebody else somebody perfect in order to fit in those clinical insights are fascinating because if you read it what karen's saying is she's essentially saying that perfectionism comes from trying to ape an idealized image in our mind's eye that we can never achieve because it's an idealized image of ourselves.

11:52And I think today, if we kind of borrow those ideas, a similar thing is going on, but almost on steroids. And you have this kind of sense that in broader culture, we value, appreciate, reward, the overextender, the overachiever, the person who looks, appears, and behaves perfectly. Those are the kind of images and moving pictures that we see all around us and that society itself rewards. And so if we lean into that, we find ourselves gaining recognition, gaining approval. And those are the things, of course, that we need and require as a society of perfectionists. So I think it's a cultural phenomenon.

12:30And I think it goes through all sorts of things. I don't know, probably if we have time to talk about all of them, but schooling, of course, young people, high expectations, you've got to ace your test, you've got to do exceptionally well to get into college. We've got social media where images, moving pictures of perfection just kind of come at you from all angles. You've got parenting too, where parents feel the pressure to push children because they understand that the economy is becoming much more difficult for young people. And unless they do well in school and college, then it's going to be tough for them in the future.

12:59So you have all these kind of cultural pressures that are pushing on different people from all sorts of different angles, and they all point towards perfectionism. and so for me that is the reason why we kind of have this image of perfectionism as being this kind of lionized quality and something we should be shooting for but of course it's a fool's errand because ultimately perfectionism is going to hold us back rather than push us forward

13:24Aliza Pressman:and when people say well i turned out okay i'm a successful fill in the blank or whatever the definition of what is okay is probably what's the problem here well you know as the apex of society has narrowed and things have got tougher. It's okay to have these ideals if the economies are supportive to some extent, right? And in the past, there's been opportunities to ascend and a certain generation has done very well materially, actually, over the last 30, 40 years. And of course, in their minds, they can carve a life narrative that says, I worked really hard and here's my reward. The problem is for young people is that those opportunities are no longer available and it's ready to supply.

14:02It doesn't mean you can't do it. There's some excellent examples of

14:05Aliza Pressman:young people that have done fantastically well, set up businesses, great performers, whatever. But what I'm saying is at the aggregate level, it's becoming much more difficult. So from both angles here, you've got this pressure and people are saying, don't worry, work hard, it'll all be okay. There's economic pressures that are kind of showing young people the opposite. And of course, if they believe that what they're told, that if they work hard, they should get these things and find that it's becoming tougher and tougher, they're going to blame themselves. And that's where these kind of psychological pressures and self-criticism come in.

14:32Young people in particular think that it must be their fault. Well, again, perfectionism is something much broader than the individual.

14:39Aliza Pressman:Where is the balance or the sort of space between perfectionism and the cultural construct of laziness or not being motivated or whatever it is that worries parents when their kids are not performing well. Because what's so interesting is I hear from parents whose kids are perfectionists that perform, and then they have perfectionists who appear to not be performing because that's stopping them from even wanting to try. So we can get into that. And I want to hear from you about that. But I'm so curious, like how to talk about achievement without it being inextricably linked with perfectionism or is it?

15:32No, it's not. The problem is you're absolutely right, by the way, to say that you kind of see very different outcomes. And I would say, so if you've got two perfectionistic children and one's achieving and one isn't, the reason is probably competence or development or greater levels of maturity at the same stage in life.

15:48Aliza Pressman:We know that young people develop biologically in different speeds, right? And if two people have perfectionism but one's a little bit more developmentally mature then they find it easy to achieve and of course for a perfectionist that's really good because when things are going well it's not necessarily too much of a problem so you see these kind of perfectionistic tendencies particularly on rote learning tasks where you need a lot of attention a lot of energy expenditure and effort tend to find that we do find small amounts of performance benefits from perfectionism the problem comes as i said earlier when things don't go quite so well and if you're a perfectionistic young person but perhaps you're biologically a little bit more immature and this happens all the time you know i was a very late mature and i think my perfectionism came a lot from those early experiences where i'm working super super hard but it's just not happening and so what i then did is what some perfectionists do is they realize that putting forward all of their effort exposes them as somebody who's less intelligent less able whatever is it then withhold that effort because the shame that they feel from showing themselves in that way is so catastrophic to a sense of self-esteem that they then just withdraw from it altogether because you can't fail at something you didn't try.

16:55So there's this paradox that you start to see and the interaction is all predicated upon ability and competency. And different young people develop at different ages. Some young people are better able in certain areas and certain skills and some have skills and gifts in other areas. And you know, every child is different, right? We can never know until they're sort of more developed as where those skills, talents and abilities lie. But this is why I think we start to see these issues that you're talking about is if things are going well, it's okay. But if things aren't going well, things become really problematic.

17:26And that's where you see those two kinds of different people. They have the same perfectionism. It's just that the outcomes they're experiencing are different, if that makes sense.

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18:18Aliza Pressman:And there's just like a gazillion different dining options, all of it under one roof. And so you can bring your pack together at a lodge near you. Learn more at greatwolf.com and strengthen the pack. When you're thinking about raising kids, if you could tell people, which you can right now, If you could tell them thinking about messages, modeling and choices in those relational interactions in the toddler years and then moving along up, what would you want to put out there? okay i need to caveat this with a couple of things one i've not parented a toddler before my sort of real world experience is limited and also i'm a social psychologist and most of my research has dealt with more older young people so teenagers and young adults however what i would say is a couple of things on parenting more broadly if that's okay the first thing is that parenting's hard really really hard it's not just young people themselves that feel pressure to excel it's the parents in many ways the parents more pressure because they understand what's going on they can look out into the economy and they can see that things aren't great at the moment opportunities for young people are starting to dwindle and if they do not work hard at this critical stage in their life it's not 40 years ago where you can recover you can get into the bottom rung of a manufacturing plant or whatever and you can work your way up those days are gone like you need a college degree and actually you probably need an advanced college degree in order to achieve the college premium these days.

19:51That's a lot of pressure from a really young age. So I think the first thing to say, parenting's hard. Try where you can to not pass that pressure onto your children, particularly when they're young. And the way that you can do that is not foster a focus on outcomes, metrics, and grades. They're going to be bombarded with those things at school. Don't add to that pressure. What's important is to try to facilitate a joy and almost a kind of spontaneous interest in learning itself and exploration, in going into the outside world and finding out things about nature and teaching them about issues in the globe and what's happening out there in the real world and things like climate change and issues around social justice and things that are really important for young people these days that spark an interest in the world around them.

20:43And it doesn't matter what those things are, but I just gave a couple of examples, but there could be anything but for me that's the important thing it's about the love and enjoyment of learning things and finding out things about the world around them rather than hitting metrics grades and targets because you know learning comes from a sense of purpose and joy and the grades will come it doesn't need to be the focal point of our attention so I think for me particularly from a young age that's a really important message and one that I would be strongly advocating I mean I can give you some others that we've looked at for children later on in life particularly around parental expectations well parental expectations so as children develop and of course pressures start to ratchet up and this is just natural and this is just inevitable in the modern world expectations then become really important because of course young people need scaffolding they need structure you know we want our kids to do well at school of course we do so no one's saying take the foot completely off the gas you know there needs to be some kind of structure for young people so that's why expectations are really important and they need to be really carefully calibrated for young people so that they're not too high that they're constantly standing on their tiptoes to achieve them and this is important because young people learn if they find that they're continually falling short of really high standards that their whole sense of worth in the world is pinned to how well they can achieve right and that's really dangerous.

22:08That conditionality of approval from parents is really dangerous. It happens a lot, but I would encourage you parents to be aware of what, if that's going on, to make sure that that isn't something that children feel. And that actually, even if they fail, there's love, there's acceptance, there's a hug, there's a kiss. You know, that failure isn't the bogeyman that their culture was going to teach them it is, but actually it's his own enlivening experience. And as parents, I think it's so important to teaching people that. So try not to, with expectations, keep young people on tiptoes. It's tempting to do that in this world.

22:41Is this a certain idea to say it's actually essential? But for me, it's really important to make sure that standards and expectations are calibrated, because if there are too high, young people are going to take on perfectionist tendencies. They're going to feel like they're only worth something when they've achieved. And that can spiral into some, you know, quite negative mental health outcomes or associated perfectionism later down the line. So guess in a nutshell, those are my two major bits of advice.

23:03Aliza Pressman:I mean, those are big pieces. I had an advisor once in graduate school who studied achievement pressures and she always said, you just want to make sure that your children don't feel that your love for them rests on the splendor of their accomplishments. But it's hard because then when they accomplish something and you beam at them, it can be confusing. The message can be confusing. Well, there's a consistency, right? Like it needs to be consistent. There needs to be an unconditionality of love and approval. Now, that's not to say that parents can't express disappointment when children are misbehaved or they've actively sabotaged some area of their development that, you know, they need reminding that, you know, come on.

23:49Like this is the everyday realities of parenting. Children will do that because they're children, they're kids. I think what's important is this whole idea that never shows disapproval or whatever is kind of, you know, the spectacle of shameless kids is almost as terrible as the spectacle of shame ridding kids, right? So there's a line to tread here. But what I'm saying is that one or two minor isolated incidents of disapproval are fine and almost certainly not going to have a negative impact on young people's development. But when you layer those experiences one on top of the other, stack them up, and that's a consistent part of young people's lives, that's when it becomes a problem because that communicates young people that they're never enough that there's always another goal to reach for that no matter how well they do there's always more right and it's that kind of expectation management that i'm talking about here that we just need to be really careful about calibrating and what your professor said was absolutely the case you know pinning love and approval to achievements is it's going to be problematic and so it's important to be consistent You know, win or lose, did well, didn't do well.

24:56The main thing is to try. The main thing is to throw ourselves into something, learn and enjoy the experience. And that there's a consistency of our approval across those experiences.