← Raising Good Humans
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- [00:04]
A
Welcome to raising good humans. I'm Dr. Eliza Pressman and today is Professor Thomas Curran, who's a professor of psychology at the London School of Economics. His expertise is in perfectionism and he just wrote a book called the Perfection Embracing the Power of Good Enough. It's so brilliant. And today we're talking about parental expectations and perfectionism. And the focus is the relationship between caregivers, parents and children. If you enjoy this episode and you feel like it, go ahead and give me a five star rating, maybe even write a review. What are the myths, the big myths about perfectionism?
- [00:46]
B
There's loads of myths around perfectionism. The first one is that perfection is the high standards, not high standards. It's a relational trait, it's a way of existing in the world and it's a form of deficit thinking. So extreme, as I said, that we live our lives in the shadow of shame. So worrying about how much less than we appear to others. This is what perfectionism is. Okay? It's not high standards. High standards are a part of perfectionism component, but they come from that sense of deficit and lack. And that's the important part. It isn't the high standards that drives the perfectionism, it's the lack. So that's the first myth, and I think it's important because that unlocks a lot of other myths down the line. The second is that perfections are necessary for success. Lots and lots of research has been done on this area and there is very little relationship between affections and success. And the reason for that is that perfectionists overwork, they overextend, so they burn out a lot. But they also do self handicapping things too. Particularly things don't go well, so they withhold effort, they procrastinate to save face. Right. And so you tend to find that instead of pushing those forward, they can hold themselves back. And that's the reason we don't see very strong relations, perfection and performance. And that's problematic because of course we also know it's got a lot of emotional baggage and mental health issues and complications that come alongside it. So you have all this pain for very little gain. So again, this kind of idea that perfectionism holds us up in the world, that it's important for success, is a really important myth to bust. One of the most important actually. And I guess finally, and particularly in the modern culture, I think there's an idea that perfectionism is desirable, that there's some, in some way it's also obtainable. And particularly among young people, you get this sense and this is where a lot of the problems among the youth are coming from, because they're seeing perfectionism everywhere and all around them. You know, it's up on billboards, in movies, it's social media feeds, and for young people themselves, and it's even their peers at school who are acing their tests. Right? You know, we make all these comparisons and we think perfection is something that is eminently desirable and eminently obtainable. And it's that obtainable element, the desirable is problematic, but it's that obtainable element that really, really has harm for young people. Because no matter how hard you try, we can never be perfect. And it's a completely irrational goal for us to set because it's not something that any of us can achieve as mere mortals. So for me, the third myth I take it, for young people need to hear is that perfection isn't obtainable. It is an impossible goal and it offers only all but misery, really, for those who try to attain it, just
- [03:17]
A
to start very basic and broad and then we can get specific. Will you define perfectionism? Because I want to start with a common understanding about what we're talking about.
- [03:31]
B
So the way I like to think about perfectionism is as a way of existing in the world, but a way of existing in the world that includes a kind of deficit thinking which is so extreme that we go through life living under the shadow of shame. So shame about what we don't have, how we don't look, how we're not performing, or how much less than we're appearing to other people. And I think that's a really important starting point because a lot of people, when they think about perfection, they think about an energizing personality characteristic, this kind of inner drive that pushes, pushes us forward, when actually it's not an individual characteristic at all, it's very much a relational trait. And how we interact with others has a massive impact on how we think and feel as a perfectionist. And the validation and approval that we receive from others is so important for our self esteem. So for me, when I talk about perfectionism, I think it's important to remember that there's this kind of deficit mindset. And if you understand it from that starting point, you, you can begin to see the reasons why it can be quite problematic.
- [04:41]
A
So then the things that I want to cover today are how parents in their relationship with their kids can help minimize, recognize perfectionism and support kids who kind of bend in that direction. I'm so curious if in the field, thinking about perfectionism, if there are Are there parts of. Of perfectionism that are so positively adaptive that there are some people that might not want to let go of it?
- [05:12]
B
The thing is with perfectionism is, and I'm a perfectionist, one of the reasons I did this work was because I suffered from perfectionism. And perfectionism was the one thing that I used to hold me up in the world when everything and all around me was collapsing. And I truly believed that it was the perfectionism that was keeping me on my two feet. And what I didn't understand and what time of a therapist was able to reveal to me was it. It was actually the perfectionism itself that was creating the problems. So I've been through this journey myself, and for anyone listening to your podcast, I hope that that's validating because for me, the epiphany was really this thing that you believe is really holding you up, when actually it's the thing that's causing the most stress in your life. And the reason is because perfectionism has an aggressive vulnerability built into its core. So, you know, we go around the world trying to prove to other people that we're worth something, that we matter, that we're good, that we're proficient, that we're attractive, that we're fit, healthy, all of these things that we believe society expects us to be right. And we feel that perfectionism allows us to do that, allows us to project those things. But what happens when things go wrong, which they will do, and we will fail and we will fall short and we will encounter situations and scenarios where we don't appear in ways that we think we should have appeared and we don't behave in ways we feel we should have behaved, that we don't look in ways that we feel we should have looked. That vulnerability then really starts to have an incredibly profound impact on our mental health. So we feel a lot of shame. As I talked about earlier, we feel like we haven't lived up to some ideals, so we castigate ourselves. A very self critical. Why could you be so stupid? How could you look like that? And of course, layered on top of each other, you know, daily experiences of this kind of shame really have a profoundly negative impact on our mental health. We've started to feel a very low mood and that low mood turns into depression and it can spin over into anxiety and panic in my case, until you have kind of this kind of almost complete breakdown where your perfectionism is pushing you through moments where you should really be stopping and releasing yourself and allowing yourself to recuperate, but it keeps you moving forward. And it's that kind of vulnerability combined with this idea that it's holding us up in the world that creates a really perfect storm for mental health problems. So the answer to your questions. I have thought deeply about this because I've been personally affected myself. And for me, having gone through that journey and having understood this work intimately as a researcher too, I don't think there's anything positive that we can say
- [07:42]
A
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- [11:01]
B
It's a really good question. And one of the things I've been thinking about long and hard over the last few years is why on earth do we live inside a culture that kind of lionizes the perfectionistic person? And I think there's many reasons for it, and it always, to some extent, has been the case. You can go back to early clinical case notice, master clinicians, particularly Karen Horney, who talked about affectionism as a response to culture. She talked about how in broader culture, particularly for women to look and behave in a certain way, right? So that we have to kind of change ourselves. We have to be somebody else, somebody perfect, in order to fit in. Those clinical insights are fascinating because if you read what Karen's saying is essentially saying that perfectionism comes from trying to ape an idealized image in our mind's eye that we can never achieve because it's an idealized image, the perfect image of ourselves. And I think today, if we kind of borrow those ideas, a similar thing is going on, but almost on steroids. And you have this kind of sense that in broader culture, we value, appreciate, reward, the overextender, the overachiever, the person who looks, appears, and behaves perfectly. Those are the kind of images and moving pictures that we see all around us and that society itself rewards. And so if we lean into that, we find ourselves gaining recognition, gaining approval. And those are the things, of course, that, you know, we need and require as a society of perfectionists. So I think it's a cultural phenomenon, and I think it goes for all sorts of things. I don't know, probably, if we have time to talk about all of them. But schooling, of course, young people, high expectations, You've got to ace your tests, you got to do exceptionally well to get into college, you got social media where images, moving pictures of perfection just kind of come at you from all angles. You've got parenting too, where parents feel the pressure to push children because they understand that the economy is becoming much more difficult for young people. And unless they do well in school and college, then it's going to be tough for them in the future. So you have all these kind of cultural pressures that are pushing on different people from all sorts of different angles. And they all point towards perfectionism. And so for me, that is the reason why we kind of have this image of perfectionism as being this kind of ionized quality and something we should be shooting for. But of course it's a fool's errand because ultimately perfectionism is going to hold us back rather than push us forward.
- [13:24]
A
And when people say, well, I turned out okay, I'm a successful fill in the blank or whatever, then the definition of what is okay is probably. What's the problem here?
- [13:35]
B
Well, you know, as the apex of society has narrowed and things have got tougher, you know, it's okay to have these ideals if the economies are supportive to some extent. Right. And in the past there's been opportunities to ascend and a certain generation has done very well materially, actually, over the last sort of 30, 40 years. And of course, in their minds they can carve a life narrative that says, I worked really hard and here's my reward. The problem is for young people is that those opportunities are no longer available in this ready supply. It doesn't mean you can't do it. There's some excellent examples of young people that have done fantastically well, set up businesses, great performers, whatever. But what I'm saying is at the aggregate level, it's becoming much more difficult. So from both angles here you've got this pressure and people are saying, don't worry, work hard, it'll all be okay. There's economic pressures that are kind of showing people the opposite. And of course, if they believe that what they're told, that if they work hard they should get these things and find that it's becoming tougher and tougher, they're going to blame themselves. And that's where these kind of psychological pressures and sort of self criticisms come in. You know, young people in particular think that it must be their fault when again, perfectionism is something much broader than the individual.
- [14:40]
A
Where is the balance or the sort of space between perfectionism and the cultural construct of laziness or not being motivated or, or whatever it is that worries parents when Their kids are not performing well. Because what's so interesting is I hear from parents whose kids are perfectionists that perform and then they have perfectionists who appear to not be performing because that's stopping them from even wanting to try. So we can get into that, and I want to hear from you about that. But I'm so curious, like how to talk about achievement without it being inextricably linked with perfectionism. Or is it?
- [15:32]
B
No, it's not. The problem is you're absolutely right, by the way, to say that you kind of see very different outcomes. And I would say so if you've got two perfectionistic children and one's achieving and one isn't, the reason is probably competence or development or greater levels of maturity at the same stage in life. You know, we know that young people develop biologically in different speeds, right? And if two people have perfectionism but one's a little bit more developmentally mature, then they find it easy to achieve. And of course, for a perfectionist, that's really good because when things are going well, it's not necessarily too much of a problem. So you see these kind of perfectionistic tendencies, particularly on rote learning tasks where you need a lot of attention and a lot of energy expenditure and effort, tend to find that we do find small amounts of performance benefits from perfectionism. The problem comes, as I said earlier, when things don't go quite so well. And if you're a perfectionistic young person, but perhaps you're biologically a little bit more immature, and this happens all the time. You know, I was a very late maturer and I think my perfectionism came a lot from those early experiences where I'm working super, super hard, but it's just not happening. And so what I then did is what some perfectionists do is they realize that putting forward all of their effort exposes them as somebody who's less intelligent, less able, whatever is it, then withhold effort because the shame that they feel from showing themselves in that way is so catastrophic to the sense of self esteem that they then just withdraw from it altogether. Because you can't fail at something you didn't try. So there's this paradox that you start to see and the interaction is all predicated upon ability and competency. And different young people develop at different ages. Some young people are better able in certain areas, in certain skills, and some have skills and gifts in other areas. And you know, every child is different, right? We can never know until they sort of more developed as where those skills, talents and abilities lie but this is why I think we start to see these issues that you're talking about is if things are going well, it's okay, but if things aren't going well, things become really problematic. And that's where you see those two kinds of different people, they have the same perfectionism. It's just that the outcomes they're experiencing are different, if that makes sense.
- [17:34]
A
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- [18:55]
B
Okay, I need to caveat this with a couple of things. One, I'm not parenting a toddler before. My sort of real world experience is limited. And also I'm a social psychologist and most of my research is dealt with more older young people, so teenagers and young adults. However, what I would say is a couple of things on parenting more broadly, if that's okay. The first thing is that parenting is hard. Really, really hard. It's not just young people themselves that feel pressured to excel. It's the parents in any way. The parents more pressure because they understand what's going on. They can look out into the economy and they can see that things aren't great. At the moment, opportunities for young people are starting to dwindle. And if they do not work hard at this critical stage in their life, it's not 40 years ago where you can recover. You can get into the bottom rung of a manufacturing plant or whatever and you can work your way up. Those days are gone. Like you need a college degree. And actually you probably needed an advanced college degree in order to achieve the college premium these days. That's a lot of pressure from a really young age. So I think the first thing to say, parenting is hard. Try where you can to not pass that pressure onto your children, particularly when they're young. And the way that you can do that is not foster a focus on outcomes, metrics, and grades. They're going to be bombarded with those things at school. Don't add to that pressure. What's important is to try to facilitate a joy and almost a kind of spontaneous interest in learning itself and exploration in going into the outside world and finding out things about nature and teaching them about issues in the globe and what's happening out there in the real world and things like climate change and issues around social justice and things that really important for young people these days that spark an interest rate in the world around them. And it doesn't matter what these things are, but I just gave a couple of examples, but they could be anything. But for me, that's the important thing. It's about the love and enjoyment of learning things and finding out things about the world around them rather than hitting metrics, grades, and targets. Because, you know, learning comes from a sense of purpose and joy, and the grades will come. It doesn't need to be the focal point of our attention. So I think for me, particularly from a young age, that's a really important message and one that I would be strongly advocating. I mean, I can give you some others that we've looked at for children later on in life, particularly around parental expectations. Well, parental expectations. So as children develop and of course, pressures start to ratchet up, and this is just natural and this is just inevitable in the modern world, expectations then become really important because of course, young people need scaffolding, they need structure. You know, we want our kids to do well at school. Of course we do. So no one's saying take the foot completely off the gas. You know, there needs to be some kind of structure for young people. So that's why expectations are really important. And they need to be really carefully calibrated for young people so that they're not too high, that they're constantly standing on their tiptoes to achieve, achieve them. And this is important because young people learn, if they find that they're continually falling short of really high standards, that their whole sense of worth in the world is pinned to how well they can achieve, Right? And that's really dangerous. That conditionality of approval from parents is really dangerous. Happens a lot But I would encourage parents to be aware of if that's going on, to make sure that that isn't something that children feel and that actually, even if they fail, there's love, there's acceptance, there's a hug, there's a kiss. You know, that failure isn't the bogeyman that their culture is going to teach them. It is that actually it's his own enlivening experience. And as parents, I think it's so important to teaching people that. So try not to with expectations, keep young people on tiptoes. It's tempting to do that in this world. There's a certain argument to say it's actually essential. But for me, it's really important to make sure that standards and expectations are calibrated. Because if they are too high, young people are going to take on perfectionistic tendencies. They're going to feel like they're only worth something when they've achieved. And that can spiral into some, you know, quite negative mental health outcomes or associated perfectionism later down the line. So, yes, in a nutshell, those are my two main bits of advice.
- [23:04]
A
I mean, those are big pieces. I had an advisor once in graduate school who studied achievement pressures, and she always said, you just want to make sure that your children don't feel that your love for them rests on the splendor of their accomplishments. But it's hard because then when they accomplish something and you beam at them, it can be confusing, the message can
- [23:31]
B
be confusing, but there's a consistency, right? Like it needs to be consistent. There needs to be an unconditionality of love and approval. Now that's not to say that parents can't express disappointment when children are misbehaved or they've actively sabotaged some area of their development that, you know, they need reminding that, you know, come on, like, this is the everyday realities of parenting. Children will do that because they're children. They're kids. I think what's important is this whole idea that never shows disapproval or whatever is kind of, you know, the spectacle of shameless kids is almost as terrible as the spectacle of shame ridden kids. Right? So there's a line to tread here. But what I'm saying is that one or two minor isolated incidents of disapproval are fine and almost certainly not going to have a negative impact on young people's development. But when you layer those experiences one on top of the other, stack them up, and that's a consistent part of young people's lives, that's when it becomes a problem. Because that communicates to young people that they're never enough, that there's always another goal to reach for, that no matter how well they do, there's always more. Right. And it's that kind of expectation management that I'm talking about here that we just need to be really careful about calibrating. And what your professor said was absolutely the case. You know, pin in love and approval to achievements is going to be problematic. And so it's important to be consistent. You know, win or lose, did well, didn't do well. The main thing is to try. The main thing is to throw ourselves into something, learn and enjoy the experience. And that there's a consistency of our approval across those experiences.
- [25:07]
A
So what about the kids for whom they're reaching for the stars? Their parents are actually like, I don't even expect that you can do that. So like you're watching them in real time, aiming for something that is inevitably going to disappoint them. Is that a different kind of perfectionism where it's internally motivated versus externally motivated perfectionism? There's a drive for that achievement, but it's coming from a different place than, you know, the parent who's being very clear. My love for you does not rest on the splendor of your accomplishments. And yet the child wants approval for the splendor of their accomplishments.
- [25:46]
B
It all depends on to what extent our emotional reactions depend or our emotions, our feelings, or a sense of well being and worth depend on the outcomes of that striving. Because, you know, some young people really shoot for excellence and they can do that quite comfortably. And if they don't meet it, they can just let it go and it not be a catastrophe. You know, they won't be hiding away in their bedrooms and ruminating about it. You know, there are many kids like that. And if that's the case, then absolutely, you know, then again, that isn't perfectionism. You know, we might call that conscientiousness. We might call that a young person that's really fixated on meticulousness or excellence, whatever.
- [26:29]
A
Thank you for listening.