Aim High, Not Perfect
Helping Your Kid Strive Without the Trap
With the rates of perfectionism among young people on the rise, let’s talk about how to help our children aim for achievement without the punishing price.
In this week’s episode of the Raising Good Humans Podcast, Thomas Curran, Professor of Psychology at the London School of Economics, and author of The Perfection Trap: Embracing the Power of Good Enough, explains how perfectionism is often confused with high standards, but the two are not the same. Perfectionism is “a way of existing in the world,” one rooted in a kind of deficit thinking so extreme that the child lives “in the shadow of shame.”
The worry isn’t really about reaching a goal. It’s about how much less than they appear to others if they don’t. A child can have high standards, work hard, and still feel okay when things don’t go their way. That’s not perfectionism. That’s healthy striving, and it’s worth protecting.
Many of us may have perfectionist tendencies, but it’s worth outlining the characteristics that we are talking about here. Perfectionists aren’t simply aiming for success, they’re operating from a place of fear and insecurity around their own abilities and self-worth and in some cases, may be doing so for the external validation of others more than themselves.
There are three types of perfectionism outlined in the research. “Other-oriented” perfectionists who set unrealistic standards for others; “self-oriented” perfectionists who impose these standards on themselves; and “socially prescribed” perfectionists who feel these standards are placed on them from external sources, like parents or community.
For all perfectionists, the following features may be present:
Perfectionists often establish unrealistic goals and place enormous pressure on themselves to achieve them.
Perfectionists view anything short of their achieved goal to be a complete failure. In some cases it prohibits them from trying at all (why bother if I will only be mediocre), in other cases, even “successes” are not enough.
Even when “successful,” perfectionists often struggle to enjoy their accomplishments, and increase the pressure and worry around whether they will be able to repeat success in the future.
It’s worth naming what perfectionism is not. A child who shoots for excellence, misses the mark, and is able to let it go isn’t a perfectionist. That’s conscientiousness, or a love of mastery. The clearest signal of perfectionism isn’t the size of the goal. It’s the size of the emotional fall when the goal isn’t met.
Why does perfectionism keep getting rewarded?
You know the job interview question where someone asks about a weakness, and the candidate says, “I’m a perfectionist”? That answer lands as a humble brag because culturally, we’ve come to associate perfectionism with drive and work ethic. Curran traces this back to broader pressures: a narrowing economy, schools that reward over-achievement, social media full of curated images, and parents who understandably want to prepare their kids for a harder world. The pressure to be perfect reaches children from many directions at once, and the message they absorb is that perfection is both desirable and within reach. It is neither.
One of the most persistent myths about perfectionism is that it produces success. The research tells a different story. Perfectionists tend to overwork and burn out, and when things don’t go well, they often self-handicap, withholding effort or procrastinating to save face. The logic, according to Curran, is simple: you can’t fail at something you didn’t try. So what looks like a kid who has no motivation may actually be a kid frozen in perfectionistic tendencies, protecting themselves from the shame of falling short.
Perfectionism has been linked to many negative outcomes, including anxiety, stress, withdrawal, and isolation. The pressure to succeed leads to fear, hiding, and the mental health effects of prolonged and untreated stress. Children who are perfectionists may exhibit many different symptoms, including difficulty completing assignments and procrastination, sensitivity to criticism, low self-esteem, indecision, and excessive critiques of others.
Research tells us that there are many factors that contribute to perfectionism in children. These include academic demands, biological factors (like history of mental health challenges), low self-esteem, parental pressure, traumatic events, and media representation. The story is not hopeless. Studies also show that parents can reduce perfectionism with their children at home, first by recognizing behaviors if they exist, and by openly discussing perfectionist thinking regularly.
One note before the strategies. Parenting is hard right now, and that’s worth naming. Opportunities for young people have narrowed, the stakes around school and work feel higher, and that the urge to push your child isn’t irrational. It’s a response to a real environment. The work of these strategies isn’t to remove pressure from your life. It’s to make sure that pressure isn’t passed straight through to your kids.
Strategies:
Check your own expectations. Curran offers a useful test for calibrating them: ask yourself whether your child is constantly on tiptoes to reach what you’ve laid out for them. Some structure and ambition is good and necessary. Expectations set so high that a child is permanently stretching to meet them teach a different lesson, that their worth is pinned to whether they can reach the bar. Make sure your child knows that your high hopes for them are separate from your love and support. If they believe your love is wrapped up in their accomplishments, they may strive to keep achieving in the hopes of keeping your love. Talk about goals for the long-term, including realistic language about how achieving goals takes time, patience, and hard work. When you talk about others, make sure you also focus on these values. Notice that it is not just about how you perceive or value their accomplishments, but also the way you talk about the accomplishments of others.
Set goals together. Talk with your child about what they are interested in, what they wish to pursue, and what they hope to achieve. Help them to understand what they can control (vs. what is outside of their control), and to set attainable and realistic goals to work toward.
Model making mistakes and recovering. Ditch the idea that parents are perfect and try modeling your own challenges. Talk about forgiving yourself, learning from mistakes, and recovering from disappointment or failures. Give your children strategies about how they can recover and regulate after feeling disappointed, too. Every time you have a parenting fail and you forgive yourself, you are showing your child that perfect is off the table. Curran reminds us that failure doesn’t have to be the bogeyman culture makes it out to be. With the right framing at home, it can be one of the most enlivening parts of a child’s growing up.
Build self-esteem. Children are already getting plenty of pressure around grades, metrics, and outcomes at school. Home doesn’t need to add to that. What home can do is foster a love of learning for its own sake, and a spontaneous interest in the world around them, whether that’s nature, music, building things, or asking big questions about how the world works. Find activities your child loves, and that help them to feel good. Focus on enjoying the process and not the end result. Use growth-mindset language, like adding “yet,” to the end of a sentence about goals. This helps them focus on improvement over time and realistic expectations around performance. Ditch the phrase “practice makes perfect” and pivot to “practice makes progress!”
Focus on self-compassion. Model forgiveness for your own mistakes, and talk about how to replace your critical inner voice with a more understanding and supportive one. You can suggest specific bounce back statements, like “mistakes are just a part of learning,” or bounce back strategies like making a “beautiful oops” out of what at first appears to be a mistake (check out the Beautiful Oops book for younger kids).
Such an important post. My youngest is extremely intelligent and very perfectionistic. It’s a lot sometimes.