Is your child a perfectionist? How to help. | Integrated Learning Therapy

The world needs perfectionists. We appreciate this trait in our brain surgeon, the person responsible for building our home, the person working on the assembly line of our next car. Yet extreme perfectionism brings its own challenges to individuals. We see the signs of developing perfectionism in some young children: those who refuse to colour in because they can’t keep between the lines, or those who try to avoid a school task because it seems too daunting to complete to their exceptionally high standards.

The more extreme forms of perfectionism can be exhausting and unhealthy for some children. If they can’t cope with a flawless performance, they become extremely self-critical, which prevents them from actually accomplishing what they would otherwise like to do.

Perfectionism has been divided into two forms (Westrupp, King and Sheen, writing for The Conversation):

Perfectionistic strivings, characterised by a determination to meet goals and achieve highly
Perfectionistic concerns, shown when a child frets about being able to meet high standards, and self-criticism about performance.

While perfectionistic strivings can be positive and lead to high achievement, perfectionistic concerns can lead to a higher chance of children developing eating disorders or anxiety and depression, and having lower academic achievement.

You can help by trying to develop a growth mindset rather than a fixed mindset in your children (Ginsburg, American Academy of Pediatrics). He writes that praise and criticism can lead to a “fixed mindset,” rather than a healthier “growth mindset.” For example, when children are constantly praised for being ‘smart’ or ‘clever’ they are more likely to grow to fear being seen as anything else, while those who receive approval for the effort they put into their tasks develop a passion for growth.

Young people with a growth mindset believe their intelligence can be developed with effort. When they don’t do something as well as they hoped, they don’t see themselves as failures, but as learners. In contrast, people with a fixed mindset (including perfectionists) may believe people are either smart or not, and that failure proves you’re not. They may even believe that having to work hard at something suggests a lack of natural intelligence.

People with a growth mindset feel successful when they can do something they couldn’t do before, whereas those with fixed mindsets feel successful when they avoid errors or task that seem too challenging.

To help your child build a growth mindset, praise the effort, rather than the product. Do be mindful of the amount of time the child needs to put effort into a task. Time and energy spent on a project may deprive them on needed sleep, exercise, play or social time. They need to learn how to balance the demands of their daily lives otherwise they could feel overwhelmed and find it difficult to focus on any one activity.

Ginsburg suggests that the best antidote to an unhealthy sense of perfectionism is unconditional acceptance. The most essential ingredient in raising resilient children is the connections you create when you love or accept your children unconditionally and hold them to high but reasonable expectations. School results or performance should not be the focus of your expectations but rather effort, integrity, generosity, empathy and other attributes valued by our societies.

Image supplied by Freepix.

← Previous Next →

Martin Doherty, writing for The Conversation, says that at the age of about four, children reach important milestones in brain development.

One of these is a huge improvement in understanding others’ thoughts and feelings. This is the start of empathy. Another is in spatial thinking—understanding how objects are positioned and related. This is the beginning of the ability to read maps.

Martin and his colleague, Catherine Sayer, conducted a study with 175 two to five-year-olds to explore how children are able to use scale models to figure out where something is in the real world. At about four, children are able to use a scale model of a room to work out where something is. We thought that this might result from children’s understanding of how one thing can represent something else. But we actually found that four-year-olds’ ability to use scale models came from their spatial abilities.

At the same age, children start to understand that someone’s behaviour is due to what that person believes, not necessarily what is really the case. This has interesting consequences.

If you’ve played hide-and-seek with young children, you may have noticed that they aren’t always very good at it. They love the ritual of looking in all the wrong places first, but beforehand they may tell you where they are going to hide, hide in the same place every time, or not be especially hidden.

After their fourth birthday, they get much better at hide and seek. They understand that the seeker looks in the wrong places because they don’t know where the hider is.

At about three to four children also start to tell lies. They realize they can make someone believe something that isn’t true.

Understanding symbols

Martin’s earlier research with fellow psychologist Josef Perner suggests that four-year-olds don’t just start to understand how others’ minds work. Figuring this out is part of the development of an understanding of “representation”—that symbols, like thoughts, words, or pictures, can be used to stand for something else.

Children start to think about how words relate to objects. This means, for instance, knowing that “animal” can refer to something you already have a name for, such as “rabbit”. This might help children learn the new word.

Their ability to use a understand the components of pictures also improves around this age. Very young children use a lot of trial and error to complete a jigsaw, picking up random pieces to see if they fit. By the time they are about four years old, they start to use the picture as a guide, trying to connect lines and match bits of colour, while checking the guide picture on the box lid.

Developmental experiments

Another ability children develop at around four is using scale models. A classic set of developmental experiments involved a model of a regular household room. The real room had typical furniture—sofa, table, cupboard and so on—and the model had miniature versions laid out in the same way.

Children were shown where something was hidden in the model and told to find an object hidden in “the same place” in the room. Children of around four can find the object using the identical layouts. If shown a sticker under a particular chair in the model room, for example, they can go straight to the “same” chair in the other room. This is the fundamental understanding required to read maps.

Adults see scale models and maps as representations. Maps represent a town or a country. A scale model of, say, the Eiffel Tower represents the real thing. At first, Martin suspected children’s ability to use scale models is more evidence of understanding representation at this age.

He was wrong. Instead, the researchers found that this ability is based on a development in children’s spatial abilities that also occurs at about four. This is the ability to think about spaces and where objects are within them. Spatial abilities help with maths skills, and good spatial ability is linked to an interest in science, technology, engineering and mathematics.

Their experiment was simple. They compared the model room task with a test of understanding how representation works. The two abilities develop around the same age, but they found they were not related. Children who could do one task couldn’t necessarily do the other.

They also had a test of purely spatial ability. Children who passed the model room task also passed the spatial task. So it looks like the model room task relied on children‘s spatial thinking.

They don’t yet know why two important but apparently unrelated abilities arise at the same time. Perhaps it’s related to changes in the growing brain at this interesting age.

Provided by The Conversation.

Image supplied by Freepik.