Speaker 1Your child has been sitting at that homework for two hours and hasn't written a word. They cried for 20 minutes over a mistake that seemed tiny to you, and they gave up on something they used to love because they weren't instantly brilliant at it. Or they hand nothing in at all because handing something in means it can be judged. This isn't stubbornness, this isn't laziness, this is perfection, and it's making your child miserable. Today I'm going to show you exactly what's happening and what to do about it. This is the How Not To Screw Up Your Kids podcast. I'm your host Dr Mary Han, so pour yourself a cuppa, find a comfy seat and enjoy the conversation. This episode is about perfectionism. What it actually is, why it develops, and the tools that will help your child break free from it. Now, before we go any further, I want to ask you something and answer you honestly. Have you ever said or thought, she's such a perfectionist with a quiet note of pride? Because it sounds like a compliment, doesn't it? High standards, attention to detail, takes pride in her work. And here's the thing, high standards aren't the problem. I want to be clear about that, because this is where parents often get confused. A child with healthy high standards is a truly wonderful thing. They try hard, they care about doing well. When something doesn't go perfectly, they feel disappointed, and then they recover and they try again. Their sense of who they are stays intact, even when a result doesn't go their way. The difference isn't how much, but it's how much. The difference isn't how much they care, it's what happens when they fall short. So a child with healthy high standards has an internal toolkit. The emotional resources to sit with disappointment, take feedback on board, and get back up. They separate what they did from who they are. A missed goal is a missed goal. It's not a verdict on their worth as a person. A perfectionist child, an anxious child, hasn't built that toolkit yet. For them, every piece of work, every test, every tryout, every conversation with a new person isn't just an activity, it's evidence. Evidence about whether they are enough, and when the result doesn't go their way, it doesn't feel like disappointment, it feels like a collapse. The simplest way I can put it, healthy high standards are aspirational, perfectionism is defensive. One child is reaching for something, healthy high standards, the other is running away from something, perfectionism, and what they're running away from is the feeling of not being good enough. And here's how you can start to tell the difference. Ask yourself these simple questions. How does my child respond when they get something wrong? Can they take feedback without, without falling apart? Will they try things they might not be brilliant at? Is their mood, their whole sense of self, tied to how things go? And if the answer to that last question is yes, that is not high standards, that's anxiety, and it needs a different response. Because perfectionism isn't a character trait, it's an anxiety response. And once you understand that, your child's behaviour stops, stops looking like stubbornness or over-sensitivity, and starts making a completely different kind of sense. And here's what's happening inside your child's brain. Their nervous system has learnt to treat anything that might result in failure, a test, a project, an audition, a homework question, the healthy way nervous system treats a genuine threat. Heart rate goes up, thinking brain goes offline, body in some version of fight, flight, or freeze. So fight looks like the meltdown over the wrong answer. Flight looks like the child who refuses to try anything new. And freeze looks like two hours staring at a blank page. And at the centre of all of this is one core belief. My worth depends on my performance. That unless I get it right, unless it's the best, the top, the most, I am not enough. And psychologists call this the approval trap. The child has internalised the idea, not necessarily because anyone told them explicitly this, but they've internalised the idea that love, praise, and safety are available only when they succeed, and slightly less available when they don't. Here's another way to think about it. And this is one of the most useful reframes I've come across. Perfectionism isn't something your child has. It's a placeholder for everything it's costing them. The friendships that they're not making because they're scared of looking silly. The activities they're quietly walked away from. The hours of sleep they're losing. The joy that's been replaced by constant monitoring of how they're being perceived. And here's the hardest part. You can't worry your way to success. All that self-criticism, all that striving, it doesn't produce the thing it promises. It just makes everything harder. So, how do we, as parents, spot it before we start looking at what might be causing it and then how we might be able to help our children? Because perfectionism is an anxiety response, the signs look like anxiety, not like what most of us picture when we hear the word perfectionist. That's why parents often miss it or misread it as laziness, defiance, or just going through a phase. The word perfectionism, in lots of ways, has lots of positive connotations. We don't think of perfectionism really as an avoider, as being sort of defined by fear and, in essence, an anxiety response. So, let me just give you some of the things that you might notice and what to look for specifically with your child. So, the first one is the blank page child. Yeah, they sit down to do their homework. Two hours later, nothing is written. Not because they don't know what to do, but because they can't start. Because starting means it can be judged. And if it's judged, it might not be good enough. And so, they're kind of recoiling in that. They're going through that over and over again. And that's what's creating that particular bit of tension. So, that's the blank page child. It could be that that is also coupled with the eraser. They write something, rub it out, write it again, rub it out again, tear the page out of the exercise book, scrunch it up, throw it in the bin, start over. The work itself might be perfectly good or good enough. They just can't see that. They can only see that it isn't right yet. So, quite often the blank page and the eraser go hand in hand. You may well find that you're seeing both at different points of the time that they're doing some work. You also see the shutdown. A small mistake, a wrong answer on a quiz, a fumbled line in the school play triggers a response that seems wildly out of proportion. Tears, rage, complete shutdown. You're thinking, God, it's just a question. They're experiencing it. But for them, it's not just a question. They're experiencing evidence that they're not enough. And so, hence why we get that shutdown. And that sits hand in hand with the self-critic. I'm stupid. I can't do anything right. I'm rubbish at everything. And I want you to see this as not fishing for reassurance. This is a genuine, in-held belief about their own inadequacy. I know it sounds like they're fishing for reassurance, but that is genuinely where they see themselves. That self-critic is insanely loud and insanely present. Then it's also the one, it'll be the child who can't take feedback. Even gentle, kind feedback. A small correction from a teacher, a suggestion from you, lands as an attack, rather than the sort of the support that it's intended to be. They go quiet or they argue or they cry because to the perfectionist brain, when we say in any shape or form that they intimate and perceive as that could be better, it translates to them as you are not enough. So it's not that you're saying that they're not enough, but the way that their perfectionist brain is operating, because it's operating from a place of fear and because any feeling that they're having is about me and internalized as me as a person, then any gentle feedback or correction is taken as a, is literally translated as I'm not enough. And then the final way that we might spot it is our child is the quitter. You know, they were doing brilliantly, maybe at gymnastics or guitar or French. Then they stopped, said that they didn't like it anymore. What they actually couldn't tolerate, not that they don't like it anymore, is that they couldn't tolerate the moment they went from being, a natural and being, you know, being seen as a natural and being good at it to having to work at it because work. working at it means being seen to struggle and that's unbearable. Now, I worked with a family quite a while back now whose daughter had been in ballet since she was four. And at the age of 10, she just simply refused to go. Mum thought that she probably just lost interest. But what she'd actually lost was the feeling of being effortlessly good and just being able to turn up and just nail it week after week. And instead, she'd hit the point where it actually now took real effort and her brain couldn't hold that I'm working hard at this and I'm okay at the same time. So that's perfectionism as anxiety. It's not losing interest. It's protecting herself from the feeling of not being enough. Now, one more thing worth knowing before we look at where this sort of perfectionism might come from, is that there's a lot of things that we can do to protect ourselves from not being enough. The beliefs that drive perfectionism often embed to themselves earlier than you'd think, or maybe even earlier than you notice. So it could be a throwaway comment, a teacher's red pen, a moment, sometimes as young as five or six, where it became clear to them that getting it right got them something. Approval, praise, a feeling of safety and getting it wrong cost them something. Children are wiring themselves, brain and neurologically, constantly. And sometimes the belief that my worth depends on my performance is already well established before any of us realize it's there. And so often when we're picking up on these signs of perfectionism, we could be picking up on those signs and the behaviors long after that perfectionist belief and that fear of judgment has long established itself. So let's look now, let's turn to where does this anxiety come from? And there are a few threads, and I want to be clear, these are not a checklist of ways you as a parent have got it wrong. They're the context in which this type of anxiety tends to grow. And knowing the context is how you start to change it. So let's look at, there are three that I want to look at before we then dive into the practical bit, the five things that you can do. So the three threads are, the first is praise, when praise is given for ability and not effort. Now, when we praise children for being clever, talented, naturally gifted, you're so smart, you make it look so easy. We accidentally build their identity around innate ability. The message they internalize then is I am clever and clever people don't struggle, because if it's innate, if they've just done it without having to work at it, then of course, the connection is I'm really good at something. And I'm good at something that I don't need to struggle with. So it goes the flip side is therefore, if I struggle, I'm not clever anymore. The research on this is consistent and compelling. When we shift from praising what children are to praising what they do, it's one of the highest leverage moves available to any parent. So not you're so smart, but you've worked really hard at that, regardless of the outcome, process that we are praising. So that's the first one. The other thread tends to be the skills gap. You know, I talk about skills gaps all the time. So perfectionist children haven't yet built the emotional skill of tolerating imperfection, of sitting with good enough, of understanding that mistakes are information. They're not verdicts on who they are. It's a learnable skill. And that's the third thread that we tend to see in terms of where this comes from is the emotional climate at home. Children are extraordinary barometers of the homes they live in. If the climate at home carries a strong undercurrent of high standard, if right rarely feels quite enough, children absorb that even when nothing is ever said explicitly. Now, I'm not saying your home is like that. I'm saying it's worth a moment of honest reflection. Now, let's get to the practical bit. Here are five things that work, and I'm going to give you enough detail to actually start today. So number one, model imperfection loud and every chance you get. This is the one I come back to more than any of the other four, is your child is watching you, not listening to you, watching you. If you tell them failure is fine, but they never see you fail, the lesson lands as failure is fine for other people. So narrate your own mistakes out loud in real time deliberately. I tried to make that recipe and it went completely wrong. I tried to make it sound like it was a mistake, but it was a mistake. I'm going to look up a different one and try again. I said something clumsy in that conversation, and I've been thinking about it. Next time I'd say it differently. I got something wrong at work today. I felt awful for a bit, but I figured out what I'd do differently. Notice what you're doing there in those three examples. You're not pretending it felt fine. You're modeling the whole arc. I made a mistake. I felt something about it, and I survived it. The complete sequence, and obviously use your own words, you know, the complete sequence includes the discomfort, and that's what your child needs to see most. So you create your own if you want to. I made a mistake, whatever that is. I felt something about it. What's the feeling? And I survived it. And if we take this one step further, we can create experiences where the process is the point and there is no right answer. Cooking a new recipe together, making something out of clay, painting for fun, activities where trying is the whole thing and getting it right is actually irrelevant. Perfectionist children desperately need practice being in that kind of space where the messy, experimental, not quite right version is just fine. So that's the first thing that we can do. The second is around separating their worth from their performance, and we want to do this again explicitly and repeatedly. So comments like, I don't love you because of how you do things. I love you because of who you are. Now you might get that eye roll that, oh, God, of course you're going to say that you're my parent. You know, but it does need to be said often and not once, but in a really meaningful moment that has some context rather than just being randomly repeated. And then assumed, you know, it's got to be in that meaningful moment. And we need to do that often. And here's the harder part you have to really mean it, which is why it needs to be in a meaningful moment where it feels natural. If your approval, even subtly, even unintentionally, is slightly more available when they do well, they will feel it, which is why we've got to be super intentional with this. Because of course, it's really easy to congratulate and praise our children and to acknowledge them when they have done something really well, even if they haven't done something really well. And so I think it's we try and do that from the perspective of a process. What we're trying to do to reframe for ourselves is we want to intentionally remind our children that their self-worth, nothing to do with their performance. And we have to almost reprogram ourselves to notice the effort, regardless of what the outcome is. And so that's a really important one. Children are exquisitely sensitive to the process. And so this one starts with a bit of honest self-examination. Are there moments when your warmth or pride is more visible when they succeed? And that's a normal human response. Just notice it and then look to correct it some of the time. Your approval trap is broken, not in one conversation, but in hundreds of small ones. Moments where your child gets something wrong and your reaction tells them without any words that they're still completely fine. That's number two. Number two. So number three, change the question you ask when they come home. You know, we've all fallen into this trap. How was your day? How did it go? And that really tends to put weight on the outcome, doesn't it? So we can instead try and reframe the question so that we create without intentionally explicitly saying it, that we're looking for the difficulties that they've experienced during the day. So what was the hardest part of today? Is there anything you do differently? What did you learn that you didn't know this morning? Use your own language. These are just suggestions that have come off the top of my head. But these questions make difficulty normal. They make it expected. They make it part of learning. And they tell your child without ever saying it directly. The struggle is not something to hide from. That's a more important message than it might initially sound. Because what you're doing is you're building the scaffolding that makes it safe to be imperfect. and that scaffolding is built one small question at a time. So number three, is about changing the questions that we ask. Number four, and this is one of my favourites that I can return to in almost every context that relates to any conversation that our children have in their head, and it's to use the best friend question. So when your child says, I'm so stupid, I can't do this, I'm rubbish, try this. If your best friend came to you and said exactly that, I'm stupid, I'm rubbish, I can't do anything right, what would you say back? And then be quiet and let them answer fully. Don't rush it. They will almost always be far kinder to the imaginary friend than they are to themselves. And then gently say, can you try saying something like that to yourself? The gap between how your child would treat a friend and how they treat themselves is exactly where that anxiety lives. This question makes the gap visible because the critical voice to themselves and what they would say to their friends. And it makes it visible to both of you. And often just making it visible is enough to start to shift it. Because we've all been like that. Once we've verbalised something, it's like, oh my goodness me, I can see whether that disparity is. The perfectionist brain is not logical because once you start poking holes in it, those holes tend to grow and that's where we're able to tackle it. So that's number four, which is the best friend question. And number five is celebrate effort specifically and in the moment. Not well done, not good girl, good boy, but you kept going even when you wanted to stop. That took real grit. You tried something that scared you. That matters more than how well it went. You noticed you'd made a mistake and you went back and fixed it. That's what learning looks like. Specific effort focused praise tells your child exactly what you're noticing. And children grow in ways that we reinforce. If we pay attention to outcomes, they only value outcomes. If we make the effort visible, if we name it out loud in the moment, the effort becomes something worth having. And over time, this shifts the whole story your child is telling about themselves from I have to get it right to I have to keep trying. That is not a small shift. It's the whole game. And fundamentally, that's what we want to be able to be doing. Now, what I want you to remember is your sort of takeaway is a couple of things. Perfectionism isn't your child trying to be the best. It's your child trying to feel enough. The anxiety underneath it is real. The beliefs that drive it are embedded early and they feel very solid, but they are not fixed. With the right support from you and your child, you can do it. You can do it. You can do it. You can do it. You can do it. You can do it. You can do it. You can do it. You can do it. You can do it. You can do it. You can do it. Starting this week, those beliefs can shift. Now, not overnight, I'll be honest, but they can. And I'll be back on Monday with this week's bucket emptying episode, because if you're living with a perfectionist child, there is one moment that trips parents up more than almost any other. And that's the moment your child looks at you and says, I'm not good enough. Monday's episode is exactly what you say back. So until next time, I'll see you then.
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