Perfectionism is a multifaceted disorder, and there are many factors that combine to cause it. Exactly how the many variables interact isn’t entirely clear. Twin studies do show that heredity plays a role, but so does temperament. In addition, our culture supports winning and losing, competition and achievement. Employers review and critique workers and reward and punish them accordingly. Our education system grades children as young as 5 and 6. Failure or lack of promotion is experienced as shameful.
Within families, parents have a powerful influence. First, parents provide role models that children imitate. A second path to perfectionism develops among compliant children who strive to please their parents as well as others. These approval-seeking children are motivated to perform well to be loved and accepted by parents who have high expectations. They’re also likely corrected or criticized when they don’t meet them. Still a third reason children become perfectionists is in reaction to pain in the family. They might try to excel to be under the radar of an unpredictable, invasive, or abusive parent. Alternatively, in line with Rothstein’s theory, above, their rigid thinking and perfectionistic behavior may be understood as defensive coping mechanisms for managing their pain in a dysfunctional family setting. Self-esteem matters and so do children’s interpretation of their parent’s words and actions.
It’s generally accepted that children are better adjusted and are confident when parents have clear expectations that are communicated in a nurturing environment and where they won’t be criticized for mistakes. On the other hand, parents encourage perfectionism when they over-correct children, pressure them to excel, or only approve of them based upon their performance. This puts perfection ahead of their developmental needs, such as needs for acceptance, nurturance, play, and experimentation. There are many aspects to parenting, including role modeling, communication, nurturing, discipline, bonding, and expectations. These influence children in direct and indirect ways that are also affected by each child’s temperament and genetic predisposition.
Parents with high standards for themselves tend to expect their children to live up to them. Perfectionism is becoming more pervasive, because parents are escalating their demands on children to achieve. Economic realities and competition for jobs and higher education puts added pressure on them and their children to do well. When their egos and sense of status are tied to their children’s performance, the negative impact on their children is greater.
However, high expectations alone don’t foster perfectionism. In a nurturing environment, where there’s little criticism, high expectations actually raise children’s self-esteem. They provide children a sense competence because children infer that their parents believe they can achieve their goals. But at the same time high expectations can make self-esteem unstable and can cause adaptive or maladaptive of perfectionism. When parents don’t try to understand children’s mistakes, when they expect their children to be the best at everything or punish them for missing the mark, then children begin to believe that they’ll never meet their parents’ expectations. They conclude that nothing they do, nor they themselves, are good enough.
When parents are very critical but have low expectations––children do the worse. Their self-esteem is shaky. It may be because they believe their parents don’t care or expect much of them, which is reinforced by heavy criticism. That formula could make them feel highly pressured to perform to seek parental approval, but create an underlying feeling of, “Nothing I do is good enough,” i.e., “I’m not good enough.”
The type of parental expectations and praise is also important. Some parents acknowledge their children’s successes, yet try to motivate them to do more or try harder. Pressuring children to achieve is often driven by a parent’s own fear or feelings of inadequacy. Children may feel that whatever they do is not good enough.
Barbara’s parents repeatedly assured her that she’d have all she needed to succeed, and indeed they helped her with homework and paid for tutors. But when she didn’t get straight A’s, she felt inadequate and a failure. She was ashamed of disappointing her parents since they’d provided everything she needed. She concluded she was the problem.
Even positive, general statements, such as “you’re a good kid” or “wonderful job” can cause a child to make general self-assessments, and then in other situations, infer the opposite, “I’m bad (or terrible).” No praise, too little praise, too much praise, or alternating praise and criticism so that the child doesn’t know where they stand can create a fertile environment for a child to become addicted to praise.
Susie, a talented singer, suffered from shame and low self-esteem because she received neither praise nor criticism growing up. She had no sense of herself or confidence in her ability. She was beset by self-consciousness and anxiety in relating to others.
When parents emphasize learning and self-improvement, they promote adaptive perfectionism, but when parents make comparisons that imply their child must satisfy the parents’ needs, it conveys the belief that their child’s low worth is dependent on what other people think and leads to maladaptive perfectionism. This is important, because striving to be perfect can be adaptive, but when as children we believe that our worth is conditional, as adults, we’re unable to take pride in our accomplishments––everything is for external approval (our parents), and it’s never enough to feel truly accepted.
Research consistently confirms that focusing on children’s errors increases anxiety and reduces their self-esteem, competence, and performance level. It leads to maladaptive perfectionism, not adaptive perfectionism. Over-correction can also be experienced as criticism. It needn’t be harsh to undermine self-confidence. Criticism that isn’t mediated by warmth and love feels especially rejecting. Affectionless bonding conveys parental indifference and rejection while being controlling and overprotective. The negative impact leads to perfectionism especially when this type of parenting comes from the mother. When parents are critical, harsh, and punitive, it increases children’s worry about mistakes and doubt about their ability to achieve. They feel personal shame and equate mistakes with failure.
A similar pattern appears in “blaming” families. When anything goes wrong, rather than focus on a solution, someone must be culpable. One shame-ridden spouse blames the other or a child. Parental shaming promotes self-judgment and low self-esteem that links self-worth to performance and leads to maladaptive perfectionism. Parental criticism undermines a child’s ability to maintain a sense of self-worth. The combination of harsh parenting, maladaptive perfectionism, and shame can lead to depression. Shame is such an important component of perfectionism and codependency that it requires further discussion below.
Parents are also increasingly over-involved with their children, which can be experienced as control. Children need to learn autonomy, feel free to experiment, be creative, and make mistakes. They also require nurturing to feel accepted and respected, and to be treated fairly. Where rules are “my way or the highway,” children feel they have no choice or control over their life. Rigid, arbitrary, or inconsistent rules or environments where peace, praise, and punishment are unpredictable undermine children’s dignity and self-worth.
But control needn’t be harsh. When a child doesn’t perform to a parent’s excessively rigid standards, disapproval can also be exercised with a look. It’s a form of psychological control over a child. They feel powerless and inferior, and can go between extremes of being either rebellious or submissive. They may try to please their parents, believing that if they do the right thing, they’ll be accepted, but it’s an illusion. They’re continually made to feel they’re wrong and not enough, and become self-critical and blame themselves. They may show signs of anxiety, depression, or turn to substance abuse.
Perfectionistic parents role model standards and behavior that their children emulate. Their standards, values the effort they invest, and how they judge themselves provide learning examples for their children. These parents not only provide role models, but they impose their excessively high standards on their children. They tend to be more demanding, intrusive, and controlling. Perfectionistic fathers are usually more overbearing and unforgiving than mothers. They withhold approval for mistakes and failures and attempt to manage their children through invasive control and guilt. Acceptance is conditioned upon compliance and performance. Nor do these parents help their children deal with mistakes and failures, except in a self-shaming manner. When parents don’t comfort them, children don’t learn how to self-soothe or to pick themselves up and try again. Presumably, parents treat themselves the same way, since they’re lacking in self-acceptance. They pass on self-shaming criticalness and perfectionism predominantly to their same-sex child (mother to daughter, and father to son).
Personality theory has identified five dimensions of personality, called the “Big 5.” They include extraversion, agreeableness, openness, conscientiousness, and neuroticism (meaning moody with negative emotions). You can test yourself online here, or take a short version of the quiz in the Appendix. Of the Big 5 personality traits, conscientiousness is predictive of adaptive self-oriented perfectionism. Neuroticism is associated with maladaptive perfectionism and somewhat related to the development of perfectionism.
Parents’ behavior affects each child differently, and each child has a unique relationship with both parents. Siblings have dissimilar temperaments and sensitivities and thus dissimilar reactions to and views of their parents. When my mother complained to the principal about my third grade teacher, I felt embarrassed and sorry for my teacher; but when our mother talked to the principal on my sister’s behalf, my sister felt grateful and protected by her.
As children grow, they adopt their parents’ judgments. Their evolving attitudes are observable in their play. Toddlers as young as eighteen months display self-consciousness and embarrassment. Between two and three years of age, they show outward signs related to pride and failure. By three years old, they’ve sufficiently incorporated their parents’ reactions, experiencing shame when they fail at a task, even when their parents aren’t in the same room.
The manner in which parents respond to their children’s feelings and needs significantly determines their children’s emotional health, including shame. Each interaction contributes to their emerging self-concept and beliefs about their identity. A child may interpret unresponsiveness, an irritable mood, or being ignored as criticism or emotional abandonment. Depending upon the frequency, duration, and intensity, parental reactions that are punitive, indifferent, shaming, painful, or fear inducing make a child vulnerable to shame. On the other hand, when children are consistently comforted, supported, and guided to help themselves, they’re able to weather the disappointments and shame that are part of life.
Shaming, abuse, and real or perceived unfairness breed anger in children. Without a bridge to their parents, who may be indifferent, inconsistent, or interfering, they turn their hostility against themselves and come to believe that they’re unworthy of love and respect. Shame is now intensified and self-perpetuated by a shaming, devaluing voice, usually of a parent, which takes up permanent residence in their mind as an inner critic. It’s as if a record needle were stuck, forever skipping and replaying the same inner dialogue, often using the same words as that parent. It criticizes and corrects in a tone that ranges from malicious self-contempt to one of mild frustration. Either way, in the background dwells a punitive, persecutory detractor.
From childhood onward, our inner judge puts us in unending conflict with ourselves, as the drama of our childhood unfolds internally. We become afraid of making a “mistake” because the critic is without tolerance or mercy, regardless of justification or relative considerations. As a result, we strive to think, feel, and act the way we deem is “correct.” It’s easy to lose self-trust to the point that decisions and spontaneous action are impossible. When our actions don’t match our expectations, or our limitations prevent us from achieving our ideals, we’re filled with shame. In actuality, we’re expecting the impossible—to become someone other than ourselves.
Life with a harsh critic is paralyzing. A robust critic is unyielding, dogmatic, and second-guesses everything. It can find fault with any thought, feeling, choice, action, or decision. Our self becomes divided by the judge and the judged. With no escape, we’re bound to the scrutiny of an unforgiving inner master. In extreme cases, the critic can overtake our personality so that we feel nothing good or worthwhile about ourselves. We’re constantly disappointed in ourselves and see only flaws and failures.
We no longer have access to our strengths or abilities and believe the critic’s every accusation, and no person or authority can convince us otherwise. Although we may be successful in our job or other roles, it tears us down and compares us negatively to others as evidence of our defectiveness. Despite outer appearances, the shame and the anxiety that the critic creates fester and force us to function from a weakened, divided self, without access to the real self for strength.
Most of us weren’t loved as separate, independent individuals, but instead experienced the trauma of shame and emotional abandonment in childhood, where acceptance was conditional on compliance and/or performance. Children’s feelings must be empathically mirrored and their needs respected and met. This matching process affirms a child’s individual self. Thereby, children learn to own and trust their perceptions, thoughts, and feelings. They gradually develop a whole, separate self they feel good about.
Growing up in dysfunctional families, children miss out on parental empathy and understanding. They’re deprived of validation of their individual, psychological existence. They lack confidence and experience what psychoanalyst Karen Horney calls basic anxiety. The resulting insecurity and impaired, contingent self-esteem forces children to be other-focused in order to get their needs met and survive. First the parents, and then the child, abandons or has disdain for his or her authentic self.
To cope, children invoke an ideal self who they imagine will be better than who they really are––a child who feels not enough, who makes mistakes and has undesirable feelings and needs. Their substitute, ideal self lives by unrealistic standards to feel loved and avoid shame. This can lead to codependency. (For a fuller explanation of this process and how codependency originates, see Conquering Shame and Codependency: 8 Steps to Freeing the True You.)
Their ideal self has ideal traits children strive to embody, such as being perfectly good, strong, or self-sufficient. The critic expects the unattainable by insisting that they suppress authentic feelings and traits that conflict with their unrealistic standards and ideal of perfection. Over time, a child conforms to who he or she should be and what he or she should feel, think, do, and need. This is true whether the ideal self is someone strong and powerful or self-sacrificing and cooperative. Genuine feelings, such as fear or hurt in the former instance, and boldness or anger in the latter, are suppressed to measure up to our ideal.
This process also can lead to perfectionism, both of the socially-prescribed type and also self-oriented perfectionism. The former is motivated by approval and is characterized by fear and anxiety. Moreover, if parental acceptance is conditioned on achievement and performance, they become compliant and strive to reach impossible goals. Self-focused perfectionists have internalized their ideals, but it’s a defense to feelings, trauma, and pain, as described above under “Pursuit of Perfection.”
Parents reduce shame when they excuse and forgive their children’s mistakes and apologize for their own, when they’re sympathetic to their children’s failures. Empathic parents comfort their children’s suffering, and accept their shame, guilt, shyness, and discouragement without pressuring them to feel better or change. It’s important not to shame children when they make mistakes or fail by denying their feelings. Children naturally feel disappointed and inadequate when they fail. Criticizing their shame in an effort to cheer them up (e.g., “Don’t feel bad.”) teaches them that their feelings and they themselves are wrong. It’s better to empathize with their discouragement and sense of failure. Rather than blame, they can be supported to learn from mistakes in a constructive blaming manner. This helps them accept themselves and try again.
Research shows that having expectations of children that promote learning can help children when compared to no expectations at all. But it’s essential that these expectations are realistic and achievable; otherwise, children will blame themselves for failing and give up. It’s more effective to teach children to set realistic, achievable goals based on their capacity and level of performance and to acknowledge their progress as each step toward their goal is reached.
Parents inevitably and unintentionally shame their children. What’s essential is to maintain a loving, empathic bond based on an abiding acceptance of who they are. Excessive criticism and love that’s conditioned on performance can not only contribute to maladaptive perfectionism, but also undermine self-esteem and lead to shame, codependency, and depression. For more parenting tips, see the Appendix.
Do some writing about the following questions:
• Were your parents perfectionists? If so, how do you know that?
• List standards they had for themselves. List standards they expected of you.
• Did they have higher expectations of you than you did or than they did for themselves?
• What was the message when you didn’t meet parental standards? How did you feel? What did you decide about yourself?
• Did you feel controlled by either of your parents? How much control did you have over your body, belongings, choices, actions?
• Did a parent or authority figure insist on doing things his or her way?
• Did a parent overcorrect you? What was the effect on you?
• Did a parent correct your homework or do it for you? How did you feel?
• How were you or your behavior praised and rewarded? Write the words and actions you recall. How did you feel? What did you decide about yourself?
• What were the spoken and unspoken rules?
• How were you disciplined? Did it feel fair? Were you shamed?
• Did you ever feel emotionally abandoned?