How Do I Combat My Kid’s Perfectionism?

The Ask Lisa Podcast does not constitute medical advice and is not a substitute for professional mental health advice, diagnosis or treatment. If you have concerns about your child’s well-being, consult a physician or mental health professional.

The following transcript has been automatically generated by an AI system and should be used for informational purposes only. We cannot guarantee the accuracy, completeness, or timeliness of the information provided.

Reena Ninan:
Lisa, do you think the parents are overreacting when they say the negative self-talk and the worry about being so perfect could lead to depression? Are they overreacting?

Dr. Lisa Damour:
I don’t think they are.

Reena Ninan:
Episode 135, how do I combat my kid’s perfectionism?
When you go back and you kind of wish you could relearn some skills in your teenage years, for me, it’s organization. Why am I not better organized?

Dr. Lisa Damour:
Well, Reena, I do think you’re organized, but I don’t think you’re organized in conventional ways. And by conventional, I mean my boring, want my desk perfectly clear.

Reena Ninan:
But I want to be that person who has everything perfect and organized and I don’t know, but I also feel like being so organized boxes me in a little.

Dr. Lisa Damour:
That’s the issue, right? That’s why I like the way you’re organized, which is that you’ve got this kind of creative flow that I don’t always have or I often don’t have. And so I sort of feel like let’s just be into each other’s yangs here.

Reena Ninan:
I love that.

Dr. Lisa Damour:
I will be my super clear desk and maybe track my little details in my little way and you will bring your brilliant creativity and flow that I think together works quite well.

Reena Ninan:
You always help me see. You always make the silver lining in the cloud that’s gray. I love it.
We got this letter from this mom who is talking about her kids’ perfectionism. And I just thought this was really fascinating.
It says, “Dear Dr. Lisa, I’ve listened to all your podcasts and I’m grateful for your expertise, wisdom, and empathy towards teens and parents. My 13-year-old daughter battles perfectionism. When she does not succeed in an oftentimes unrealistic goal she sets, she’s extremely hard on herself. Goals range from academics to basic trick shots. She drowns in harmful self-talk and tells me she hates herself. She says night is the worst because she lays in bed and cries about her failure. My husband and I worry about this leading to depression and other harmful actions. What strategies can I teach or language that I can use to help when her brain gets stuck on obviously working toward a goal, obsessively working toward a goal? Thank you so much.”
It’s so easy. It’s just so fascinating to me in this letter about why do you think the kids have this perfectionism that they have to get it right and perfect? How does that even begin in the brain?

Dr. Lisa Damour:
So sometimes it’s because we’ve encouraged it, whereas sometimes we’ll have, this child’s 13, but maybe an eight, nine, 10 year old who is really taking a lot of effort with their homework and doing a really good job and starting over if they make mistakes and turning in beautifully polished projects. And we’re like, “Look at you. This is fantastic. We love it.” So we’re essentially reinforcing it. So sometimes that’s what’s happened. That said, Reena, I can tell you there are a lot of times where I thought, “Oh, somehow the parents encouraged this or somehow the parents have egged this on.” And I meet the parents and they’re like, “Honest to goodness, this is not coming from us.” And they’re telling me the truth. I know they’re telling me the truth. They’re like, “We are pretty easygoing. We have always told him. We’ve always told her kids. We told her that we just want you to give it a good effort. We want you to learn. We want you to enjoy school.” And this sort of iron grip on getting everything exactly right, we don’t know where it came from, but it is not us. And I think that’s really true. Kids can get really, really attached to this idea of, I’ll call it flawlessness, of having no chinks in their armor, no errors at all. And the letter uses the word obsessive and become obsessive about it, have sort of a can’t stop feeling like they think about it all the time.

Reena Ninan:
But why do you think this, if it’s not the parent, then where does it come from about needing to be so perfect? And then, I mean, we all know when you lay in bed and you’ve got a thousand things to do, it is the worst feeling at night. And I see exactly why this parent wrote in to you.

Dr. Lisa Damour:
Yeah. I mean, you really ache for this kid.
I mean, this sounds really like she’s sort of tortured by it.
In terms of the why, there can be that it’s been encouraged or reinforced, but it’s also sometimes kids just kind of get stuck on this, this idea that perfection is available to them. And Reena, I think what’s interesting, and this is embedded in the letter, but it’s important to sort of pull it into the light, perfectionism is a game of extremes. And what I mean by that is people who get into what I would call toxic perfectionism as this kid for sure, either it is totally perfect. And often there are these really, really unattainable standards, and that’s also referred to in the letter. These are very, very high level standards. So it’s this extreme of very, very high standard and extremely perfect outcome. And if that is not achieved, then the person feels worthless, lousy, like there’s nothing good, that they’re a total failure.
And I think that the way we try to approach bringing perfectionism down a few notches into something much more sustainable and livable is to actually go at both extremes, both the over expectation and also the sense that falling short of this outrageous expectation makes you basically dirt, like worth nothing. And that’s how we want to try to find some middle is by pushing on both extremes.

Reena Ninan:
Lisa, where do you think perfectionism comes from to begin with?

Dr. Lisa Damour:
I think that it’s very hard to say. Actually, I will say on this one, I can’t say, oh, it’s always this or it’s always that. But I do think it brings to mind something that I often will say clinically, like when I’m caring for somebody in my practice, if they’re really, really stuck on a topic and I’m like, “Where’s this going? Or why are we preoccupied with this? Or why are they driving down this road that to me seems to go nowhere?”
Usually it’s because there’s something else they’re trying not to deal with or trying not to focus on. Yeah. And so the construction I’ll often use clinically is I’ll say when I realize like, oh, I see why we’re going down this road is I’ll say, “If you think about,” it can fill in the blank, whether or not you’re going to get into that program you are waiting to hear from or if you think, whatever it is they’re obsessing about, “then you don’t have to think about the fact that you’re about to go visit a family member that you find very painful to see.”

Reena Ninan:
It’s like a distraction is what you’re saying.

Dr. Lisa Damour:
It’s like a distraction. It’s like a mental distraction.
So one place I would be curious about for families where they’re aware that one of their kids is struggling with perfectionism is that at work where if they focus on making sure that there’s absolutely no mistakes in this little not big deal assignment that they don’t have to worry about so much, does it mean they don’t have to focus on the fact that they don’t know if they’re going to have any plans this weekend and they’re feeling really stressed about it? So that’s a construction I just want people to have available to them as they’re trying to make sense, especially a behavior where you’re like, “I don’t get it.This doesn’t seem worth the amount of mental energy that it is taking up.”

Reena Ninan:
Lisa, in this situation, as this parent writes in talking about how they’re worried this could lead to depression, other harmful actions being so focused on being perfect, what do you think it is that parents can do to help?

Dr. Lisa Damour:
So I’ll tell you what they shouldn’t do because I’ve seen it backfire so many times is they shouldn’t tell the kid like, “Ease up cutie, don’t be so hard on yourself.” Of course, this is incredibly loving and well-meaning. I have never seen it work and I’ve usually seen the response from the kid to be like, “Okay, you guys don’t get it. You have no standards. You have no morals. Why would I listen to you?” So it’s important, I think, to not pursue that aggressively as an approach because it’s not going to work.
And instead to actually go down the line of helping kids to be strategic and tactical. And so what I will often suggest we do when talking about a kid just like the one in the letter is to first admire the very excellent work ethic they have developed because this kid, whatever else has a work ethic. She really wants to get it right and say, “That is fantastic. You can get nowhere in life without a work ethic. This is amazing. You’re 13. You’ve got a heck of a work ethic. Well done.” And then say to them, “The next step for you is to become tactical in how you deploy your efforts.” So rather than framing it as a scaling back or easing up, to frame it as now, if you really want to show us what you got, show us that you can be a tactician. And I like the words tacticians, strategic, which is, okay, you’ve got a lot of energy, but we want to see you deploy it in ways that make really, really good sense. So you want an A in this class. Okay, fine. We’re not going to fight you on that. How strategic can you be? Where do you really have to work to get the A? Where can you coast to get the A? And coasting not because you’re lazy or bad or somehow incapable, but because you are being an efficient person who is saving your energy so that you can deploy it in all sorts of other places too.

Reena Ninan:
Lisa, it sounds like you’re getting them to rethink their perfectionism and kind of channel it in other directions, other areas as well. Do I have that right? Why do you think this works? Why does this work for someone who’s focused on perfectionism?

Dr. Lisa Damour:
Well, it gives them a way to think about between us easing up that doesn’t look like giving up. I mean, I think that you’re like, oh no, no, you’re not giving up. You’re actually getting smarter. So it’s actually pushing in that direction. The other opening it gives the parent involved in this is something new to praise. And one of the nice things about kids who are perfectionistic is they often do like praise. And actually all kids like praise. And so I sort of feel like, well then use your praise well. When a kid is polishing something to a high shine that does not require it, don’t praise that because you’re just going to encourage that behavior. But when your kid sits there and calculates like, wait a minute, I’ve got a 99.999 in this class. I would like to go to this party. You know what? If I get a 78 on the next test, I’ll still keep my A. Praise that. Okay.
Now this is very counterintuitive often for parents.

Reena Ninan:
I’m struggling as a parent as you’re saying this. I would never encourage, get the 78 or it’s okay if you get a 78. No, in my book it’s not.

Dr. Lisa Damour:
I know. Reena, you got to get there. You got to get there. And I will tell you as the mother of two daughters, I have gotten there while holding my nose the whole way because part of me is like, oh my gosh, what? I was such a little brown nursing student. Of course I want you to get great grades on every single thing every single day. But having cared especially for girls, but they’re also very perfectionistic boys, having done this for my whole career and watching as, let’s just stick with girls for the moment, girls who become attached to this overwork approach
In middle school and nobody says anything or actually people encourage it. If they come into ninth grade, they can kind of sustain it. If they’re serious about school and they stay serious about school, the workload by the time they are 10th or 11th grade, if they are taking this approach to the workload, they become crushed by the workload. So I will tell you, as soon as any kid, any kid of any gender has a good work ethic in place, if they are academically ambitious, it is really important to start saying, “Great. Now show me how you can be tactical.” Because if that kid ends up taking often the kind of academic schedules that ambitious students are taking as a junior, they will need to be tacticians and they need to start that process as early as possible.

Reena Ninan:
Wow. That is a skillset I never knew my children needed to have.

Dr. Lisa Damour:
They do.

Reena Ninan:
That’s really good to know. Know when you can coast and when you need to put your foot on the accelerator. I’m also just so troubled by the mom. I know I brought this up a couple times about the negative self-talk. How do you stop that? Especially we all know what it’s like to obsess over stuff in our lives, right? We get that. How do you break that cycle?

Dr. Lisa Damour:
Okay. So this is good. So we’ve talked about how you attack the extreme of it’s got to be perfect, that you actually shift that to no, it’s got to be efficient or tactical or strategic. Now at the other extreme, which is I am a piece of garbage because I am not perfect. How do we attack that? How do we push that towards a gentler view of things? So when kids are engaged in negative self-talk, like I’m so lousy, I’m so terrible, I hate myself, I want to give a few different tactics because different families are going to need different things for different kids on different days. So one thing you could do is you could actually just be like, “Whoa, whoa, whoa. I love you and no one gets to talk about you that way, not even you.” So basically be like, “You’re not allowed to talk that way about yourself because I won’t let anyone talk that way about you, yourself included.” So just basically be like, “Stop. Stop.”
Another thing you can do is to say, “I get it. That is your first reaction when you make a mistake. I don’t love it as your first reaction. I hate that you feel that way, but I’m going to hang here for a second. Let’s see if you can have a second reaction.” So to create space for them to be like, “Okay, yeah. So my first though is I’m terrible, but my second though is actually that was a really hard project or whatever.” So to make room for the kid to get themselves there on their own.

Reena Ninan:
So walk me through this. If my kid is having negative self-talk, you acknowledge it is what you’re saying, but then you give them the space to have a second opinion. So how do you foster that to happen?

Dr. Lisa Damour:
So I think you could say, “All right, I hear you. I hear you that you’re upset with yourself about what you feel to be a mistake.” And you can even use that language of what you feel to be a mistake. You’re already inserting space between their perception and what you think the reality may be. And then you can say, “And I get that that may be your first reaction to think that, but I actually think you may also soon have a second reaction. You may be able to see this situation in a different way. So I’m going to wait for that second reaction.” So you’re just creating it.

Reena Ninan:
And do you offer other things to get them to rethink like, “Oh, look at this and look at this and look at this,” so then you can have the second once over about the situation?

Dr. Lisa Damour:
You totally could. If they look at you like, “What are you talking about?” You could say, “There’s a lot of ways to see what just happened. You could see it this way, this way, this way, this way. Those are the various reactions I have to it, but I’m also wondering if you might have a reaction yourself.” And I think one of the things I’ve learned as a psychologist is there’s more value in having people say the words themselves as opposed to having us say them to it, say the words to them. So if you can kind of lead the kid to the water of saying, “Well, actually, I don’t know that anybody understood the assignment,” it’s better for them to say it than for us to say it.

Reena Ninan:
Because they process it then. You know they’ve internalized it.

Dr. Lisa Damour:
Somehow, yeah, it’s organic to them. Okay. Here’s another option for when kids are engaged in negative self-talk, which is to say, “You and I both know that’s not true,” so just put that stake in the ground, “but I bet it’s awful to even think that.” To actually empathize with how painful it must be to have that thought about oneself is, again, you’re not endorsing it, but you’re getting to a tender place of offering compassion that that’s even where their mind goes.

Reena Ninan:
And then they feel you’re sympathizing with them, so you must get where they’re possibly at at this point.

Dr. Lisa Damour:
Yeah. And you must get how bad it feels to even think that thought. But I think it’s really important to say, “You and I both know that’s not true, but it must be awful to feel that way.” And what we’re going there for there, Reena, is an interesting universe of self-compassion, right? Self-compassion. And what we want, and we want this in always for our kids, is for them to actually be able to take a tender stance toward themselves. And it’s interesting around negative self-talk because what we’re actually asking for is a split. There’s a part of you that talks to yourself in that really nasty way, and there’s another part of you that can be like, “Oh my gosh, this is really painful to even have these thoughts or feelings, even if they’re mine.” And again, and it’s funny, Reena, all of these themes emerge as we move through our seasons and we move through topics. There are no quick fixes, there are no instant solutions, but there are cultivations of ways of being and ways of thinking that we can foster over time. And what we can do here is try to foster a gentleness towards oneself in our children.

Reena Ninan:
A gentleness to oneself. 10 years ago, I would not think that that is a parenting thing or a necessity. And coming through out of a pandemic and just life in general with social media, boy, that is something to keep in mind.
Lisa, do you think the parents are overreacting when they say the negative self-talk and the worry about being so perfect could lead to depression? Are they overreacting?

Dr. Lisa Damour:
I don’t think they are. And I hate saying that, but we do have research showing that this kind of perfectionism, especially with this really brutal standards and really harsh and critical reaction to falling short of these outrageous standards does seem to be a contributing factor for some depression, not all depression. And it’s not a huge leap to make sense of this, that we all have to live our lives. We are all trying to do things. These are kids who are trying to succeed in school. And if your life is school and you hold yourself to these high standards and then you feel like you’re falling short of them, and then when you do, you basically just berate yourself, you can see it’s a short step to starting to feel depressed.

Reena Ninan:
Totally.

Dr. Lisa Damour:
So they’re right to take this seriously and they’re right to try to intervene. And I will say there’s a lot they can do and it’s the stuff we’ve talked through, but if it doesn’t feel like it’s working, therapy for perfectionism is actually a pretty well-developed universe. We tend to use cognitive behavioral therapies. They tend to be very effective. And what they do is they just work in a very systematic way at bluntly sticking up for reality. How good do you have to be and how bad are you really? And can we continue to measure and assess those things and bring it to a more just human and generous place?

Reena Ninan:
That’s so great. I love the kindness and the gentleness and how important also that you’d said earlier is so critical. Is there anything else the parent should keep in mind that might help?

Dr. Lisa Damour:
My advice in general would be watch what you praise. Watch what you praise and be careful about praising extraordinary efforts that are inefficient and unnecessary and don’t miss an opportunity to praise when a kid, this is a negative way of talking about it, but kind of phones it in or it doesn’t try as hard because it’s not necessary. And I think that that’s actually, we tend to get more success with changing behavior through praising behavior as opposed to punishing behaviors we don’t want. So obviously you’re not going to punish a kid like this, but if you look for a moment where they’re like, they did an okay job because an okay job is all that needed to be done and be like, “That’s exactly what I’m looking for. I am so impressed. Way to go. More of that. Know when you need to bring it and when you don’t,” that can actually go pretty far.

Reena Ninan:
That is such a good gem to remind parents that praising goes much further than the yelling and the complaining.

Dr. Lisa Damour:
100%.

Reena Ninan:
That’s really good. So Lisa, what do you have for us for Parenting to Go?

Dr. Lisa Damour:
There’s one more strategy I want parents to have in their toolbox, whether your kids are perfectionist or not, which is watch how you talk about yourself. If when you make a mistake, it becomes a parade of running yourself down or self-flagellation, that’s not good for you and it’s also not good for your kid to watch. We can work against perfectionism, but we can also just help kids with overall self-esteem if when we make errors, which we do, which I as a mother do on an hourly basis, I would say, if we say, “You know what? You’re right. I made a mistake. I’m thinking it through. I’ll try to avoid it going forward.” But we do it in a way where we’re not shattered, where we make it clear like I can absolutely look in a clear-eyed way at my own shortcomings and still maintain a sense that I’m a valuable and worthy person.
If we can model that by how we live, and especially if you have teenagers, you’ll have a lot of opportunities because they will constantly point out your shortcomings. You can then really show mistakes get made, we’re all human, we’re all here to try to be better, but making a mistake does not mean I’m a worthless person and it doesn’t mean you’re a worthless person. So again, my favorite quote in all of parenting comes from the inside of a Dove chocolate wrapper. Don’t talk about it, be about it. So you can be about it here.

Reena Ninan:
Love it. I love it. Oh, this is so good. And we will make mistakes millions and billions of times over the course of our lifetime. So it’s an important lesson to learn.
Speaking of lessons, clothing, next week we’re going to be talking about whether what do you do when your child loves to wear crop tops, clothing and when do you draw the line and what’s important and what doesn’t really matter? See you next week.

Dr. Lisa Damour:
I’ll see you next week.