Inside: What is perfection paralysis, and how can you help kids overcome it?
It’s Sunday night, bedtime. Your daughter is upset about the English assignment due tomorrow. She’s had a week to do it, and you’ve seen her sitting at her desk, writing and making notes. She has spent hours at it, so you assumed she’d finished. It turns out she hasn’t started. Well, she has. Several times. But she deleted each start she made. It wasn’t quite right.
You know your child isn’t lazy, and she isn’t a good old-fashioned procrastinator, otherwise, her bedroom would be clean or her furniture reorganised. She may be experiencing perfection paralysis.
WHAT IS PERFECTION PARALYSIS?
Perfection paralysis is when you simply can’t start a project because you are so concerned that you won’t get it exactly right. There seem to be two options in your mind:
- Start and prove you’re not perfect
- Don’t start
Teachers see it in classrooms all the time. Kids will ask many questions and run many ideas past you, but they won’t commit anything to paper. Even when they do commit an idea to paper they will screw it up and throw it away, rather than using it as a jump-off point for a better idea.
These kids love writing in pencil because they can remove any evidence of errors, and anything risky can be erased. Laptop schools make this even easier…it’s simply a matter of hitting ‘delete’.
WHAT DRIVES PERFECTION PARALYSIS?
What drives perfection paralysis is a combination of several elements:
1. FEAR OF SHAME AND JUDGEMENT
“Perfectionism is a self destructive and addictive belief system that fuels this primary thought: If I look perfect, and do everything perfectly, I can avoid or minimise the painful feelings of shame, judgment, and blame. It is the fear that we are not good enough.” Dr Brene Brown
People always talk about fear of failure, but in reality, the underlying fear is of shame. So, it is a logical belief that if we can change the association of mistakes = shame, we can disrupt this mindset. Mistakes must mean something positive. This can’t be a tokenistic pat on the back and “We all learn from our mistakes”. It has to be an authentic change in culture where mistakes are just normal. Completely and utterly normal.
2. COMPARISON
It is human instinct to compare ourselves to others. We are biologically programmed to place ourselves in a hierarchical structure that determines status and possible mates. We compare our belongings with those of others’, we compare our partners to others’, we even compare our meals when we order at a restaurant!
For most people, these comparisons play a minor role in how we go about our daily lives. However, if a child has low self-worth, they will always judge themselves as second best in the comparison ‘game’. These negative comparisons reaffirm their low sense of worth and so they spiral further downward. The easiest way to avoid these comparisons is to present nothing for comparison. So they don’t. They are paralysed by their fear, so they avoid completing tasks altogether.
Another technique people use to avoid comparison is to create disclaimers for themselves. If a child can say, “I did it all at the last minute, so I probably won’t get a good result,” then there is less shame in a poor outcome. In fact, there is also a slight kick in social comparison because not caring about the system gives you a bit of ‘rebel without a cause’ swagger.
3. ANXIETY
If a child struggles with anxiety, they already feel judged, inadequate and fearful. That’s how anxiety works. It’s little wonder they find it hard to start a project if they’re already convinced that the outcome will lead to negative emotions. The problem is that not starting confirms their feelings of inadequacy. Not starting is also a failure.
Anxiety doesn’t give any positive solutions, and it has a contagion effect. Often, perfection paralysis will start with one subject or type of task, and then it will generalise across lots of different circumstances and types of activities. Plenty of kids excel in a couple of subject areas but are paralysed in others. As content gets more challenging in the subjects where they feel comfortable, they will experience mistakes, and anxiety will infect that subject too. This sort of fear and anxiety limits kids. It stops them from trying anything new. That makes for a small world with little joy and wonder.
WHAT CAN WE DO TO HELP KIDS WITH PERFECTION PARALYSIS?
Mrs Tracy Webster is the Dean of Students at St Hilda’s College. She suggests these practical strategies for helping kids with perfection paralysis:
1. Model making mistakes. Admit you aren’t perfect. Be calm in the face of your own mistakes. Make it normal. Fail well.
2. Make things challenging. Make it an expectation that they will fail at first. Some things that are worth learning are hard-won.
3. Provide a safe environment. Kids need to feel that getting things wrong is a valuable part of learning.
4. Praise process over product. The glitter border doesn’t matter if you haven’t put enough time into the actual process of the task.
5. Praise effort over grades… but make sure there has been an effort. Lots of people say, “You tried your hardest” when the child really hasn’t.
6. Teach kids about their brains. Explain how neural pathways are created and reinforced by practising skills and thinking.
7. Teach them to plan. Big tasks can be overwhelming. Teach kids to approach tasks in more manageable sections.
8. Show kids different approaches. There are often lots of different answers to a question, not just one. There are also a number of ways to get an answer.
9. Teach kids to accept their mistakes. Learning is a messy process. You don’t need to start again.
10. Let kids be brave. Give kids lots of opportunities in their lives to be brave: physically, emotionally and intellectually.
FINALLY…
I would add to Tracy’s suggestions…Just get kids to start. It doesn’t matter where. Start in the middle, write the last sentence, or write the first heading. It doesn’t matter. Just start. Churchill said, “Perfection is the enemy of progress.” And he was right.
