Pressure to Perfection
A race to perfection is having a toxic impact on this generation, our future.
Students need to present themselves as superhuman in order to get into a top college.
However, this presentation is rarely rooted in reality and therefore forces many students to compromise their integrity in order to enhance their resumes. A greater fear is that this push towards perfection will undermine the very ingredients needed for success.
People are uneven. Highly successful people are great at something, and their desire to explore other areas is what makes them interesting. We do kids enduring harm when we suggest that in order to make it in this world they must be good at absolutely everything. When we speak of super people, we increase the hype and dial up the stress. Imagine how teens who aren't perfect at everything respond to this kind of pressure. Some will don the mask of indifference. They'll work hard to pretend they don't care precisely because of how much they do. Some will get off the playing field altogether. Others will push themselves toward perfectionism and so decrease their chances for real success.
They need tenacity and a strong work ethic. They need the social and emotional intelligence that will prepare them to have both leadership and collaborative skills. They need to be able to accept and react to constructive criticism without feeling as though they are being attacked. They need creativity and an innovative spirit to be able to develop the solutions and strategies not yet imagined. Perhaps most critically, they need resilience so they will be able to recover from life's setbacks.
Our society has a real stake in our young people being high achievers. We need to understand the difference between a high achiever and a perfectionist.
High achievers run the world, they excel at something but have no fantasy that they must be good at everything. They revel in their accomplishments. They value constructive criticism because they look for opportunities for growth and self-improvement. They see failures as temporary setbacks to be overcome with greater effort.
In sharp contrast, perfectionists consider themselves unacceptable unless they meet impossibly high self-imposed standards. They worry about being discovered as imposters, and therefore view constructive criticism as an attack. Their creativity and innovative spirit is stifled as they fear the B+ and won't think outside-the-box because their fear of failure is so acute. They aren't as resilient because they see even mild setbacks as catastrophes.
Pressure to be good at everything pushes children towards perfectionism and undercuts the core ingredients needed for success.
When our heroes are only sports stars and performers, most teens learn that they'll never be a hero. If we help them to understand that teachers, firefighters, and social workers are also heroes, they understand how much each of them can make a difference. When we hype this generation as filled with super people, we condemn those striving for perfection to self-doubt and fear of failure.
We need every kid in America to feel that they can make a major contribution to society.
We will submit to condemn most of our youth to a self-perception of mediocrity.
It is a dangerous slippery slope that compromises the stake we have in the success of this entire generation.
Kenneth Ginsburg, M.D., M.S.Ed,
Psychology Today
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