Your Children Are Listening: Nine Messages They Need to Hear from You

want your children to develop that essential sense of competence, you should communicate messages about effort expectations, over which they have control. This will actually encourage them to do what it takes to achieve the outcomes you want. If your children feel that they have the tools to experience competence, they are much more likely to embrace and pursue their goals. Think about what your children need to do to gain competence, and create effort expectations that will lead to that competence: commitment, positive attitude, hard work, discipline, patience, focus, persistence, perseverance. “Our family expects you to give your best effort,” or “Our family expects you to make your studies a priority.” In doing so, you are also communicating to your children the meta-message that hard work matters most.
    Notice that I use “our family” instead of “we, your parents.” This subtle change in language communicates several important messages and meta-messages. It removes the parent as the source of the message, focuses it on the children, and establishes the message as a collaboration between you and them. This cooperative messaging ensures that your children, as members of the family, have ownership of the expectations rather than feeling that you have forced the expectations on them. You want your children to get the key message that connects their efforts and their competence. The meta-message is that the messages you send to them are a part of your family and all members must abide by them.
    If your children meet your effort expectations, they will, in all likelihood, gain competence and experience, the intrinsic rewards garnered from their efforts. If your children don’t meet the effort expectations, they won’t experience that sense of competence and will also be disappointed (they should be). But rather than being crushed by the failure, they will know that they have the power to fulfill the expectations in the future.
PERFECTIONISM
     
    Perfectionism is one of the most destructive messages that children are getting these days. The problem is that perfectionism has a great allure to parents, particularly in our perfection-driven culture at a time when being good doesn’t seem to be good enough. Who wouldn’t want their children to be perfect? And in these uncertain economic times, parents may feel that perfection is the only way to ensure their children’s success in life. Unfortunately, perfection is, at best, a double-edged sword. One edge of the sword drives parents to urge their children to be perfect. These children push themselves to get straight A’s, be top athletes, and save the world on weekends, all of these efforts directed at demonstrating their perfect competence.
    But the reality is that perfection is unattainable, so such an expectation will guarantee failure. The message that children who are expected to be perfect get is that, no matter how competent they are or strive to be, they will never be competent enough.
What Is Perfectionism?
     
    Perfectionism involves parents communicating to their children messages of impossibly high standards that they will never attain. And these parents believe that anything less than perfection is unacceptable. When children internalize these messages from their parents and popular culture and then fail to meet such ridiculously high standards, they berate themselves unmercifully for their self-perceived incompetence (despite the fact that they are viewed by others as highly competent). Perfectionistic children are never satisfied with their efforts no matter how objectively well they perform, and they punish themselves for not being perfect. For example, after I spoke to a group of high school students recently, a girl from the audience described to me how she had gotten a 100 ona recent test that also offered ten extra-credit points. She got seven out of the ten points correct for a total of 107 out of 100, yet missing those three extra-credit points ate at her for days because she felt completely stupid!
    At the heart of perfectionism lies a very threatening message that children receive from their parents (almost always unintentionally): if they aren’t perfect, their parents won’t love them. This threat arises because children connect being perfect with their self-esteem; if they are perfect they see themselves as worthy of love and respect. The message of perfection and competence is clear for perfectionistic children: “If I am