My kids have perfectionist tendencies, but they don’t look like stereotypical perfectionism. No homework gets erased 10000 times, no papers are crumpled and thrown into the recycling for a stray mark.
In my house, perfectionism derives from having the mental construct of perfect. Because there is no way to achieve that mark, my kids give such a half-hearted effort that's obvious to everyone next-to-no-effort went in. It's almost as if they’re being purposely sloppy and non-attentive to protect themselves from admitting they couldn't produce the perfect product. The result is something that looks like underperformance, or performing below ones abilities.
As a parent, I’ve got two aims: One is to describe the perfectionism to the teacher so that it can be recognized as such. The second is to help my kids manage it.
Caveat: I don’t this to mean a replacement for confusing “can’t” and “won’t.” Sometimes things are simply too hard because of a disability or an expectation inappropriate for the child. When “I won’t” is covering for an “I can’t,” it’s time to get an evaluation.
Since perfectionism looks so different in different kids, I'll describe our approach, and hopefully something will give others ideas. The below came after a particularly stressful school year with my daughter, shortly before it became clear to me that we needed outside help. The approach below helped enough that we nearly didn’t seek help. In the end, we discovered that we were very close to that line between "can't" and "won't due to perfectionism."
First, we've named it. We call it perfectionism. I had been avoiding this term for some reason, but it is something that their school gifted program names and discusses. We acknowledge perfection isn't possible, and at the same time, there are sometimes things that should be close to perfect (recital performances, tests, major school projects). That level of achievement, however, requires too much effort to sustain for every single task.
Our theme has been that effort begets achievement. 100% effort is the kind of effort that makes your brain and hand hurt and leaves you exhausted. This isn't really a realistic target for day-to-day work and practice. Too little effort though, leaves you unsatisfied and likely not learning. Too little effort leads to the teacher not knowing whether or not you have learned the lesson. Just the right amount of effort leaves you with enough energy to move onto the next task, and gives a "good enough" performance.
In my house, perfectionism derives from having the mental construct of perfect. Because there is no way to achieve that mark, my kids give such a half-hearted effort that's obvious to everyone next-to-no-effort went in. It's almost as if they’re being purposely sloppy and non-attentive to protect themselves from admitting they couldn't produce the perfect product. The result is something that looks like underperformance, or performing below ones abilities.
As a parent, I’ve got two aims: One is to describe the perfectionism to the teacher so that it can be recognized as such. The second is to help my kids manage it.
Caveat: I don’t this to mean a replacement for confusing “can’t” and “won’t.” Sometimes things are simply too hard because of a disability or an expectation inappropriate for the child. When “I won’t” is covering for an “I can’t,” it’s time to get an evaluation.
Since perfectionism looks so different in different kids, I'll describe our approach, and hopefully something will give others ideas. The below came after a particularly stressful school year with my daughter, shortly before it became clear to me that we needed outside help. The approach below helped enough that we nearly didn’t seek help. In the end, we discovered that we were very close to that line between "can't" and "won't due to perfectionism."
First, we've named it. We call it perfectionism. I had been avoiding this term for some reason, but it is something that their school gifted program names and discusses. We acknowledge perfection isn't possible, and at the same time, there are sometimes things that should be close to perfect (recital performances, tests, major school projects). That level of achievement, however, requires too much effort to sustain for every single task.
Our theme has been that effort begets achievement. 100% effort is the kind of effort that makes your brain and hand hurt and leaves you exhausted. This isn't really a realistic target for day-to-day work and practice. Too little effort though, leaves you unsatisfied and likely not learning. Too little effort leads to the teacher not knowing whether or not you have learned the lesson. Just the right amount of effort leaves you with enough energy to move onto the next task, and gives a "good enough" performance.
We've settled on 85% effort necessary to make progress towards our goals of allowing her to show what she knows. We agreed to reserve the 100% effort for those things that should be close to perfect. We drew little thermometers to visualize the effort and achievement links. I marked where I thought her cuttlefish project fell (100% on both -- it was really an amazing performance) and what low effort communicated to her teachers ("I don't care" and "I don't respect you as my teacher"), and wrote descriptions of what solid efforts looked like according to her strengths (clarity, accuracy) and weaknesses (handwriting and spelling).
We started this conversation in the summer when my daughter was chagrined to discover she'd forgotten her multiplication tables. Her instinct was to practice 45 minutes a day. With the effort-achievement construct in front of us, we agreed that the appropriate action would be to practice multiplication for 5 minutes a day at 85% effort. The goal was to do this every day until school started, about 35 days (=effort) and aim towards the goal of doing 100 problems in 5 minutes (=achievement). She earned two separate awards for meeting each the achievement and effort goals.
We started this conversation in the summer when my daughter was chagrined to discover she'd forgotten her multiplication tables. Her instinct was to practice 45 minutes a day. With the effort-achievement construct in front of us, we agreed that the appropriate action would be to practice multiplication for 5 minutes a day at 85% effort. The goal was to do this every day until school started, about 35 days (=effort) and aim towards the goal of doing 100 problems in 5 minutes (=achievement). She earned two separate awards for meeting each the achievement and effort goals.
For this child, this turned out to be an excellent demonstration of the 85% effort-achievement link as math is one of those things that come easily. We recorded and plotted her performance, and it took just 16 days to go from ~40 to 100 problems, and by the end of the summer she was solving a number of problems at the limit of her ability to write the answers (160-170). We also noted a couple of interesting trends that seem consistent for her across activities – there will be steady improvement and then a sudden, soul-crushing drop. Inevitably, the next day would show a huge gain. Plotting the results helped show this trend very clearly. Soon, she started wondering how big her leap would be after a particularly poor performance.