Concern with mistakes is a reflection of what Frost calls the core issue in perfectionism, the unspoken belief or doubt that arises in a child's mind: "I'm incompetent or unworthy." It leads to hypercriticalness and the rigid adherence to strict standards of performance under all conditions. It is the element of perfectionism most linked to psychopathology. And it comes about because a child has been made to feel that approval is contingent on performance.
The conditionality of love doesn't have to be stated. It can be communicated in simply "the way the whole environment is structured," says Frost. "If the parent is enthusiastic only when the child accomplishes something or spends a lot of time working at something, then it's unspoken yet demonstrated by the environment."
Pushing for perfection clashes with children's developmental needs. If a child's sense of self comes to rest on accomplishments, they buy into the idea that they're only as good as they achieve. Driven from within to reach that impossible ideal, perfection, they become compliant and self-focused.
"There's a difference between excellence and perfection," explains Miriam Adderholdt, a psychology instructor at Davidson Community College in Lexington, North Carolina, and author of Perfectionism: What's Bad About Being Too Good? Excellence involves enjoying what you're doing, feeling good about what you've learned, and developing confidence. Perfection involves feeling bad about a 98 and always finding mistakes no matter how well you're doing. A child makes all As and one B. All it takes is a parent raising an eyebrow for the child to get the message.
The truly subversive aspect of perfectionism, however, is that it leads people to conceal their mistakes. Unfortunately, that strategy prevents a person from getting crucial feedback—feedback that both confirms the value of mistakes and affirms self-worth—leaving no way to counter the belief that worth hinges on performing perfectly. The desire to conceal mistakes eventually forces people to avoid situations in which they are mistake-prone—often seen in athletes who reach a certain level of performance and then abandon the sport altogether.
Frost also looked at writing ability in college students. "We found that those with great concern over mistakes did poorly on a writing test. People learn to write by showing their work to others and having it critiqued. Perfectionists avoid having their writing evaluated. They avoid courses that require sharing their writing . They don't develop their writing skills because they don't put themselves in the right environment." The pressures of perfectionism similarly keep people from developing social skills and emotion-regulation skills that would help them cope in life.
Perfectionism is self-defeating in still other ways. The incessant worry about mistakes actually undermines performance. Canadian psychologists Gordon L. Flett and Paul L. Hewitt studied the debilitating effects on athletes of anxiety over perfect performance. They uncovered "the perfection paradox." "Even though certain sports require athletes to achieve perfect performance outcomes, the tendency to be cognitively preoccupied with the attainment of perfection often undermines performance." Overconcern about mistakes orients them to failure.
Preoccupation with perfection also undermines performance in cognitively based academic pursuits such as math—especially among the best students, those who have superior working-memory capacity. Such students are most apt to choke under pressure, which selectively erodes their memory capacity.
Emote Control
In the grand scheme of things, perfectionism is an intrusive form of parenting that attempts to control the psychological world of the child. But where does psychological control come from? At the Catholic University of Leuven in Belgium, developmental psychologist Luc Goossens and colleagues have identified two distinct sources of psychological control.
One is the parents' own perfectionism, an excessive concern with mistakes. Parents approve of their children only when high standards are met. Using covert, indirect techniques—a sigh, a strategic silence, the raised eyebrow—perfectionist parents apply their psychological control on the children, who then become self-critical.
Another source of control is parents' separation anxiety. The adults are overly attached to their kids and anxious about their growing autonomy ; a child's continued development poses the threat of emotional loss and abandonment to the parent. Such parents guilt-trip their kids, approving of their behavior only when the children remain close and dependent on them. Parents tend to resort to keeping their children dependent when their own adult relationships are less than fulfilling.
Whether stirred by fear of loss or a need for status, parents who employ psychological control focus primarily on their own personal needs, not their children's developmental needs.
Suniya Luthar was not at all prepared for the discovery she made about the modern pressures on kids. Children of upper-class, highly educated parents, she explained in a 2005 article, "Children of the Affluent," experience just as many problems as inner-city kids—and in some cases, more. Luthar tracked the source of their problems. First and foremost are achievement pressures. "Children with very high perfectionistic strivings—those who saw achievement failures as personal failures—had relatively high depression, anxiety, and substance use, as did those who indicated their parents overemphasized their accomplishments, valuing them disproportionately more than their personal character."
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