Parenting Perfectionism
Perfectionism begets Perfectionism.
“Our stories of worthiness—of being enough—begin in our first families.”… “When it comes to our sense of love, belonging, and worthiness, we are most radically shaped by our families of origin—what we hear, what we are told, and perhaps most importantly, how we observe our parents engaging with the world.”
-Brene Brown, Daring Greatly, p.216-217
I highly recommend the chapter on parenting in Brene Brown’s book, Daring Greatly. Our children navigate a culture in which they quickly can feel like they don’t measure up, that they themselves are not enough. We want them to have positive self-worth, accept themselves and know that they are enough. Children practice what they see. They are sponges. When we can model our own positive self-worth, self-talk and self-compassion, they’ll learn it too.
This means we have to pay attention to what we believe about our own sense of worthiness and look at how we as individuals engage with the “culture of not enough”.
In her book, Brene helps us see that the important thing about worthiness is that it does not have prerequisites. We have worth because we exist. Yet most of us have prerequisites to our own worthiness. What prerequisites are you walking around with? Do you feel you’d be more worthy if you lost weight, got a promotion, or had more friends?
It’s easy to attach our value to our performance and achievements and our children do the same. When our kids don’t meet their own prerequisites to be worthy of love, they are experiencing shame, unworthiness, a lack of self-worth and anxiety.
So how can we help?
Start by listening for your own prerequisites for yourself and the prerequisites you have for your child. What if you practiced self-kindness instead of harsh self-criticism when you made a mistake? You burn the dinner and instead of saying, “I’m such an idiot; I can’t believe this happened, I’m the worst,” you say, “This is hard. I wish this had turned out differently. I’m disappointed.” They soak up what we model. Doing our own work can have a huge effect on the health of our children.
The second part of this is harder… It takes guts to look at how you could be providing your child with prerequisites in the expectations that you communicate. Are we full of a lot of rules or worried about what others think of our kids? Are we full of shoulds, criticisms and corrections? This doesn’t mean we aren’t correcting/coaching - that’s a part of a parent’s job. It does mean we aren’t creating a culture in which our kids feel they need to do and be certain things to be accepted by their parent. It’s about having a balance in our focus on them. Have you considered if there is an imbalance in your messaging to your child? If the majority of messages are “do this”, “correct this”, “this is the way to do it”, then their relationship with you becomes managerial. They learn that if they “perform well” then they will get less of these reminders and more praise. Let’s also talk about praise. Does the praise come only in the awards, success and when expectations of yours have been met? Or is praise a spoken because they exist? For example, when you only delight when the A+ paper is handed to you, classical conditioning takes place and they feel this is the way to praise - “I succeed and I feel my worth.” Instead, what if moments in the car, when you’re watching movie their worth is spoken over them? “I’m glad your here. I remember the first time I saw you and I just thought, my goodness I love that baby.” If these statements feel challenging, again, doing our own work can help!
Second listen for your child’s prerequisites. Tune into what makes them think that they would be“enough”. Then provide the counter truth - that they have worth because they exist whether they meet expectations or not. Their prerequisites may sound like, “If I just make it to the right college.” or “If I can get in with that group of people.” They also may not say this explicitly, but you can see that their behaviors and emotions reflect this belief. Try out positive statements like “You are welcome to try for all A’s this semester. I’m here cheering you on, and yet I also want you to know I don’t like you anymore because you get A’s.” You can also remind them that they have so many good intrinsic qualities that far outlast the achievements that they feel will make them be worthy: “I’m glad you’re in our family; you bring ____________ (fill in the blank with some of their attributes - kindness, humor, etc.).
Lastly, empathize with them rather than fix their pain. Create a culture of sharing and sitting with feelings of failure.
We can normalize our childrens’ struggles to find worthiness and we can empathize with their feelings of failure. This then allows for failure to be a normal part of life rather than something we have to avoid at all costs to be worth of love or acceptance.
If we want them to have a sense of worthiness and belonging despite failure, we can’t act like we’ve got it figured all out. When we join with them and show them that we struggle too it normalizes the moments when … well we aren’t enough. What I mean is sometimes we aren’t chosen, we don’t make the grade and we fail. It doesn’t mean though that we as people aren’t enough —that’s set from birth. It does mean that we experience disappointment, failure and pain and that can be expressed without it having to also attack our self worth.
When a child feels left out at school, we may feel an urge to “fix it” by saying, “Just don’t feel that way, you now people like you!” …Which won’t fix it by the way…. Or we can engage and model vulnerability by saying, “You know once I was left out too and sometimes I still feel left out of things. It’s hard to feel that way. I get why you feel disappointed.” Notice how quickly the sharing moves back to it being about them. The sharing should not refocus the conversation on our hurts, but rather state our imperfections quickly so that they know everyone struggles with failure and feeling not enough sometimes.
After normalizing pain, we can remind them of their value and worth by letting them know how we enjoy them and see them as worthy of hanging out with. Of course they may brush it off in the teen years, but our whispers of truth are soaked up too — after all they are sponges.