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

not perfect, I am not competent, and if I’m not competent, my parents won’t love me.” The price these children believe they will pay if they are not perfect is immense, and the research shows that the toll can be devastating: depression, anxiety, eating disorders, substance abuse, and suicide.
Perfection and Popular Culture
     
    We live in a culture that reveres perfection. Our culture has elevated competence to absurd heights where being good is no longer sufficient. Children must now aim for the Ivy League or the pros. They must become wealthy and have the perfect house and the perfect car. Our culture also worships at the altar of physical perfection. Children, particularly girls, are bombarded by images of perfect people with perfect bodies, perfect faces, perfect hair, and perfect teeth, as evidenced by the popularity of cosmetic surgery and “reality” TV shows that feature only beautiful and thin women.
Where Does Perfectionism Come From?
     
    After almost every talk I give, a parent says to me, “I swear that my child was born a perfectionist.” Yet there is no scientific evidence that perfectionism is inborn. The research indicates that children learn their perfectionism from the messages that theirparents send them, most often their same-sex parent. Through their parents’ words, emotions, and actions, children get the message that if they want to be loved, they must be perfect.
    Parents communicate messages of perfection to their children in three ways. Some perfectionistic parents create perfectionistic children by actively rewarding success and punishing failure. When children succeed, their parents lavish them with love, attention, and gifts. But when they fail, their parents either withdraw their love and become cold and distant or express strong disappointment and anger toward their children. Thankfully, in my twenty-five years of practice, I have only come across a few parents who were this overtly perfectionistic.
    Other parents send unintentional messages of perfectionism to their children through role modeling; parents are perfectionists, so their children get the message that they must be, too. Children see how their parents hate themselves when they’re not perfect, so they feel they must be perfect so their parents won’t hate them. These parents unwittingly communicate messages to their children that anything less than perfection won’t be tolerated in the family.
    The final type of parents that convey messages of perfectionism are not perfectionists at all; in fact, they are the antithesis of being perfect. But they are going to make sure their children are perfect! These parents project their flaws onto their children and try to fix those flaws by giving love when their children don’t show the flaws and withdrawing love when they do. Unfortunately, instead of creating perfect children and absolving themselves of their own imperfections, they pass those imperfections on to their children and remain flawed themselves.
Excellence: The Antidote to Perfection
     
    You should remove the word “perfection” from your vocabulary. It serves no purpose other than to make your children feel incompetent and miserable. You should replace it with “excellence.” Idefine excellence as
doing good most of the time
(I use poor grammar intentionally because that’s how most children talk—and I’m not perfect either!). Excellence takes all of the good aspects of perfection (e.g., achievement, high standards, disappointment with failure) and leaves out its unhealthy parts (e.g., connecting achievement with self-esteem, unrealistic expectations, fear of failure). Excellence still sets the bar high, but it never connects competence with the love you give your children (or the love they give themselves). Messages of excellence actually encourage your children to explore, take risks, and yes, fail periodically because those messages communicate another essential message: that without some failure, competence isn’t possible.
FEAR OF FAILURE
     
    Fear of failure among children in America today is at epidemic proportions. Fear of failure causes children to feel debilitating doubt and anxiety when they face anything that might challenge their competence or cause them to fail. It leads them to avoid the challenge altogether, not take risks, give little effort, give up when they struggle, and, ultimately, deprive themselves of opportunities to gain competence.
Parents and Fear of