#80. Socially Prescribed Perfectionism is Harming Our Kids

Perfectionism is a psychological mediator converting achievement pressure to poor mental health.

Unkown/Public domain

Dear friends,

In previous letters I’ve presented much evidence that increased pressure for achievement in school and out of school has caused large increases in anxiety and depression among children and adolescents (Letters #43, #51, #69 & #78). Now I turn to a psychological consequence of achievement pressure that appears to be part of the mechanism through which such pressure has its harmful effects. This letter is about perfectionism.

Definition of Perfectionism and Its Varieties.

Perfectionism is a psychological trait characterized by obsessive striving toward unrealistically high levels of performance and excessive self-criticism and, often, concern about others’ judgments for not achieving those levels. Researchers and clinicians consider perfectionism to be a multidimensional trait, because people differ in how they experience it. Clinical assessments distinguish among three varieties of perfectionism, defined as follows (Curran & Hill, 2022):

• Self-oriented perfectionism is perfectionism in which the high standards for performance are perceived as coming from oneself and are integral to one’s sense of self-worth. The person may feel continuously unworthy for failing to achieve by their own impossibly high standards.

• Socially prescribed perfectionism is perfectionism coming from beliefs about what others expect of you. Here the primary concern is that failure to achieve at high levels will cause others to see you as a failure. This has been found to be the most damaging variety of perfectionism, apparently because the striving comes primarily from the drive to satisfy others’ expectations of you rather than your own, and because it is accompanied by a preoccupation with concealing self-perceived defects, which interferes with authentic personal relationships.

• Other-oriented perfectionism is perfectionism turned on others and is evident when individuals evaluate others critically, or scorn them, for their failure to meet high standards of achievement. You don’t want to be the spouse or child of someone strongly inflicted with this variety of perfectionism!

Although the relative strengths of these varieties of perfectionism can vary from person to person, most perfectionists experience all three to some degree. There is a logical, maybe causal relationship among them. The perception that others expect excellence from you (socially prescribed perfectionism) can lead you to internalize those expectations and experience them as your own (self-oriented perfectionism), and the sense that your own worth depends on excellence might be generalized to others (other-oriented perfectionism).

The Psychological Harm of Perfectionism

A certain degree of perfectionism, especially of the self-oriented variety, can for some purposes be a good thing. It can motivate you to strive for higher levels of performance at tasks you and society value. But even when perfectionism leads to better performance, it may fail to promote the performer’s sense of achievement and self-worth, as the internalized standard is too high to reach. Perfectionists suffer from continuous negative evaluations of themselves, concerns about how others are judging them, and endless striving to reach goals that cannot be reached. They are like Sisyphus striving to push the rock to the top of the hill. For Sisyphus the goal cannot be reached because it keeps rolling back; for the perfectionist it cannot be reached because it is a moving target. Each success is not experienced as success, because the bar is immediately raised to a new level.

Dozens of research studies have related perfectionism, assessed by standard clinical questionnaires, to indices of mental suffering, with teens as well as with adults. These have consistently shown significant positive correlations between perfectionism, especially socially prescribed perfectionism, and anxiety, depression, poor social relationships, and suicidal ideation (Limburg et al., 2017; Lunn et al., 2023; Smith et al., 2018). Researchers have estimated that approximately 25-30% of U.S. adolescents in recent times are psychologically harmed by perfectionism (Endleman et al., 2022).

It may be a good thing to try to do well what you undertake in life, but not a good thing to peg your sense of self-worth on that or on others’ assessments of how you are doing.

Increased Rates of Perfectionism Among Youth over Recent Decades and Role of Perceived Parental Pressure

To determine if perfectionism among young people has increased over time, Thomas Curran and Andrew Hill (2019) identified all the research studies of perfectionism among college students in the U.S., Canada, and Britain, conducted between 1989 and 2016, which used the same clinical questionnaire (the Multidimensional Perfectionism Scale) to assess perfectionism. They found 146 such studies, comprising a total of 41,641 students, that met their criteria for inclusion. They assessed the findings using a statistical procedure called cross-temporal meta-analysis, which combines the results of multiple studies conducted at different time points to determine trends over time. The main finding was a consistent linear increase in all three varieties of perfectionism over the 27-year period. The biggest increase—an increase of 32%--was for socially prescribed perfectionism. The increases for self-imposed perfectionism and other-oriented perfectionism were, respectively, 10% and 16%.

What might have caused the large increase in socially prescribe perfectionism? Curran and Hill hypothesized that a major cause might be young people’s perceptions of pressure deriving from parents. Much research shows that over recent decades parents have become ever more directly involved in supervising and monitoring their children’s and teens’ activities, especially those having to do with school performance and competitive out-of-school activities (see Letters #56, #58, and #79). To test this hypothesis, Curran and Hill (2022) conducted two more meta-analyses.

The first of these involved studies aimed at correlating young people’s degree of perfectionism with their perceptions of the degree to which their parents had been persistently critical of them or held high expectations of them. Twenty-one studies met their criteria for inclusion. The main findings were that both parental expectations and parental criticism correlated strongly with socially prescribed perfectionism and moderately with self-imposed and other-oriented perfectionism. This result is consistent with the researchers’ hypothesis that an increase over time in parents’ expectations of their children and critical evaluations of their performance is a cause of the increase over time in young people’s perfectionism, especially socially prescribed perfectionism.

The second additional meta-analysis was aimed at determining if college students’ perceptions of parental criticisms and achievement expectations had increased over recent decades. For this, they identified 82 studies conducted between 1991 and 2021, with college students in the US, Canada, and Britain, that assessed the degree to which the students reported experiencing high expectations or criticism from their parents. The main result was that, over this period, both of these increased roughly linearly, by approximately 34% overall. So, consistent with their hypothesis, the degree of increases in perceived parental expectations and criticisms over this period was about the same as that for socially prescribed perfectionism.

Concluding Thoughts

The research I’ve described here focuses on the pressure parents put on kids, but ultimately the pressure derives from larger social forces, some of which I have discussed in previous letters (e.g. Letter #58). Parents are pressured to pressure their kids! Much of that pressure has to do with trying to get kids into a selective college. In a national survey of parents conducted in 2020, 73% agreed with the statement, “Parents in my community generally agree that getting into a selective college is one of the most important ingredients to later-life happiness” and 83% agreed with “Others think that my children’s academic success is a reflection of my parenting.” So, you can see why parents might feel pressured to pressure their kids. At the same time, 87% agreed with “I wish today’s childhood was less stressful for my kids.” (Wallace, 2023)

In the Q&A portions of talks I have been invited to give to groups of parents, parents often describe a feeling of being trapped—trapped between what they feel to be a demand to push their kids to higher levels of achievement and, at the same time, concern about their kids’ being overstretched and stressed without enough time to find and pursue their own interests. It may help to realize that getting into a selective college has been shown to have no effect on later-life happiness and very little effect on later-life income (see Letter #60). The arguments underlying the idea that “the good enough parent is the best parent” (Letter #57) may also be helpful. Also relevant here is Suniya Luthar’s research showing that those students at “high-achievement schools” who were not suffering psychologically were primarily those whose parents clearly accepted them for who they are rather than how they were performing (Letter #43).

And now, what are your questions and thoughts about all this? Have you had experiences with perfectionism, in yourself or loved ones or colleagues, that you feel comfortable sharing? This substack is, among other things, a forum for discussion. Your stories, ideas, and questions enrich these letters for me and other readers.

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With respect and best wishes,

Peter

References

Curran, T., & Hill, A.P. (2019). Perfection is increasing over time: A meta-analysis of birth cohort differences from 1989 to 2016. Psychological Bulletin, 145, 410-429.

Curran, T., & Hill, A.P. (2022). Young people’s perceptions of their parents’ expectations and criticism are increasing over time: implications for perfectionism. Psychological Bulletin https://doi.org/10.1037/bul0000347

Endleman, S., Brittain, H., & Vaillancourt,T. (2022). The longitudinal associations between perfectionism and academic achievement across adolescence. International Journal of Behavioral Development, 46, 91-100.

Limburg, K., Watson, H. J., Hagger, M. S., & Egan, S. J. (2017). The relationship between perfectionism and psychopathology: A meta-analysis. Journal of Clinical Psychology, 73(10), 1301–1326. https://doi.org/10.1002/jclp.22435 (In Curran & Hill, 2022.)

Jessica Lunn, J. et al. (2023). Associations between perfectionism and symptoms of anxiety, obsessive-compulsive disorder and depression in young people: a meta-analysis. Cognitive Behaviour Therapy, 52, 460–487 https://doi.org/10.1080/16506073.2023.2211736

Smith, M. M., Sherry, S. B., Chen, S., Saklofske, D. H., Mushquash, C., Flett, G. L., & Hewitt, P. L. (2018). The perniciousness of perfectionism: A meta-analytic review of the perfectionism–suicide relationship. Journal of Personality, 86(3), 522–542. https://doi.org/10.1111/jopy.12333 (In Curran & Hill, 2022.)

Wallace (2023) Never enough. Portfolio/Penguin.