Parenting: Perfection Is Not the Goal

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Perfection. I know her. Her child goes to school with mine. We sit together at baseball games. Her son’s baseball pants are always the whitest. She gnaws her fingernails to nubs whenever he’s up to bat and curries beverages on demand to the dugout whenever he’s on the bench. She talks to me about her son and his stats when mine is batting. She relives every home run he’s ever hit at almost every game.

Sometimes we meet for coffee, when she’s not busy talking to her son’s teachers or putting away his clean laundry or sharpening his homework pencils or planning his science fair project. She chats me up about the healthy foods she feeds him and how she organizes his school locker each month and about the children’s choirs for which he’s auditioning.
I want to lean in and tell her, “My children are well-adjusted because I ignore them,” but she won’t get the humor. And it won’t help me feel any less inadequate.

The Plague of Perfectionism

Remember those bumper stickers wildly popular in the not-too-distant past that bragged, “My Child is an Honor Student at Whatever School?” At one point it seemed as if every minivan in America boasted of having at least one straight-A passenger inside and a successful, proud, beaming, triumphant, top-of-her-game, invested mother at the wheel.

John Rosemond, family psychologist and parenting expert, railed against these bumper stickers. “It’s emblematic of the problem,” he says. The problem to which he refers is that of parents, mainly moms, aspiring to perfection in and through their children. “The child’s accomplishments have become the new status symbol over the last 30 to 40 years,” he says.

A breach of the emotional boundaries that once existed between parent and child has occurred, causing parents to see the child’s achievements as a reflection of their own success and indicators of their own self-worth.

While not strictly limited to any one gender or socio-economic group, Rosemond asserts than 99 percent of parents falling into the perfect parenting trap are women. Demographically, these parents also tend to have a higher than high school education, be middle to middle-upper class, of Caucasian or Asian background and live in a suburban area, as opposed to rural or urban.

A shift in focus in professional circles, over the last 40 years, from examining what a child does to asking why he does it, proposes Rosemond, has ignited this trend in parenting. The rally-cry in mental health to ensure that children ascertain high self-esteem trickled into the mainstream. “The mother began to define herself as the child’s psychological guardian,” Rosemond says. “Her assignment became to protect her child from any negative experience whatsoever.”

Perfection’s Crippling Effects

Perfection is a mighty high standard to set for oneself. Anxiety and fear breeds this kind of unrealistic goal and, ironically, anxiety and fear spur the continued struggle to try to meet it.

According to Rosemond, these mothers are beset by stress, worrying that if they do not remain vigilant in their parenting duties, something will go terribly wrong, leading to a loss of credibility and status in their peer group.

Parenting, an age-old task of humanity, oddly enough, has become bad for the mental health of the modern mother. “The parent who feels driven to perfection needs to look inward and see how she feels about the goals she’s attained. She needs to look at what she wants to do with her life in addition to parenting,” says Dawn Jett, executive cirector of CSRA Family Counseling Center, Not only are mothers suffering under the burden of daily trying to live up to self-imposed, unrealistic parenting demands, their adult relationships are suffering as well. “It results in complete neutralization of the marriage,” says Rosemond, “and leaves the husband dangling at the edge of the family.” Because the mother devotes an inordinate amount of energy to parenting she has virtually none to apply to the marital relationship and, as Rosemond says, “backs out of the marriage.”

Children, believe it or not, aren’t faring any better under this intensive form of parenting. In spite of the mother’s good intentions, the outcome for these kids is poor. “They don’t learn to take care of themselves when there’s someone taking care of everything for them,” says Rosemond.

Dawn Jett emphasizes that micromanaging a child in this way results in stress for the child. “Children develop anxiety that something really, really horrible will happen if they fail. They’re missing out on developing a sense of competency.” A great deal of learning results from trial and error. In doing for themselves and facing both the highs of succeeding and the lows of failure, children learn to face and fare adversity; something the micromanaging mom is preventing through her efforts at control. The perfect parent hampers her child’s resiliency.