Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums Parenting and Advocacy How to challenge the perfectionist?

My DD8 is a perfectionist. She likes to do her best at everything she does. She is not challenged with her school curriculum and that does not bother her because she wants to be the smartest kid and the best at what she does.

FWIW, I don't encourage this mentality and I downplay being the best and being perfect, I remind her that nobody is perfect.

At home I try to challenge her since I know the curriculum at school is not giving her what she needs academically to learn and grow. When I introduce concepts that are new to her she gets short tempered, frustrated and tells me she can't do them because they are too hard. They might be difficult for her, but I am certain she could sit and listen to instruction and eventually understand.

Today she was playing a game with me that she got for Christmas, it is called Rubik's Race and requires you to go head to head to complete a pattern before your competitor does. She was more then half way through completing the pattern when I finished mine (I am pretty good at patterns) and I worked with her to complete it. When I asked her to play again she said she never wanted to play that game again because it is too hard. Is it too hard for her? No, it challenged her and she didn't get to be the "best" at it, so she doesn't want to work on it anymore.

I won't accept this for her so I had a short talk with her about how I want her to be exposed to things that are difficult to do because those are the things that challenge her to learn. She understands what I am saying but resists.

I don't want her to grow up into a lazy complacent person, who will only attempt to do things if they can guarantee a successful result (heck, that resembles me way too much and I want a lot more for her!)

Is there anything I can do to nip this in the bud before it gets worse?

Thanks!!

None of my children are perfectionist - probably the opposite. However, I have found team competitions like Destination Imagination to be very helpful in injecting some reality. They clearly cannot be perfect because they cannot control their team mates. It was also helpful for DS to realize that he cannot lead by pushing everybody to do things exactly the way that he wanted. Instead, he has to account for other people's strengths and weaknesses and sometimes compromise to get the best results for the team.

That is a great recommendation. Unfortunately, it is too late for me to sign her up for DI (I got a flyer about it in Sept, but cannot remember if it was cost prohibitive or a time issue for us that made me opt out of it at that time), but I will definitely make it a bigger consideration for next year. Your suggestion also makes me wonder if I can do some sort of mini DI type team project for my Girl Scout troop to work on over the next few months. We have Thinking Day coming up in Feb and we are going to work on researching Japan and making a display about all things Japanese (our assigned country), as well as picking out a Japanese food dish to cook for the Thinking Day event. Maybe if I format it in DI style, it will help her learn to challenge herself and work with others in a more positive spirit.

We have one of these. For us, the best thing has been to enroll him in piano. He's very good in piano- but it doesn't come to him as easily as other things in his life. When the songs first started getting hard, he'd slam his fingers down on the keyboard and scream "never!" then storm out of the room. I just stayed calm (barely) and escorted him back to the piano and reminded him that I only respect perfectionism in one area- effort. We had lots of talks on the piano bench over the past year or so about what we can control- effort, persistence, etc... and what we can't control as much- outcomes. And we had many opportunities to discuss that he's not going to be perfect at every song right away, but he can be "perfect" in his attitude and practice the "perfect" amount of time. He's made great strides and I've noticed it affecting other areas of his life in positive ways.

Your upcoming project may be a great place to start this discussion in a regular way. Any activity that makes these kids face their lack of perfection daily in a safe setting with support and encouragement seems to be a gift to them. I'm fairly certain tackling this at a young age is MUCH better than waiting until they are older.

This was me to a "T," and it set me up for disaster when I was finally confronted with real challenge in law school. My advice is skip a grade, change schools, homeschool--do whatever it takes to make her school curriculum challenging. Don't let being the "smartest kid" become your daughter's (paper thin) identity or source of self-confidence--because sooner or later, there will always be someone smarter, and your daughter needs to learn to see that as a challenge and opportunity for growth rather than a threat.

Our oldest ( DS8 now ... DS5 back then) was tested and the psychologist had told us of a surfacing of perfectionisty tendencies and that these tendencies were holding him back from taking chances with his intellectual gift.


We introduced him to music and had him take up the piano. During the first year, we re-enforced on him that he was going to make mistakes and that the practicing his does minimizes them.


We also told him how practising on the piano to get better is the same thing as when he does his school homework to get better in school.

Lastly, after each piece he mastered we praised him and reminded him of how far he has gotten becuase he practiced and learned from his mistakes to become a much better player.

He was tested again by the same psychologist 2 1/2 years later and she stated that those tendencies were gone and that he was a more confident and flexible child when it came to trying new things.

Thanks everyone for sharing your valuable experiences with me.

Master of none, normally I don't try to beat her (to teach her), for some reason I got lost in doing the pattern and accidentally finished ahead of her. But if she does lose, IMHO, she should lose graciously and it shouldn't prevent her from wanting to compete again. Thanks for the tips on how to encourage her while we are competing, though, because I lack in that area and am glad you pointed it out to me, maybe that would make it less painful for her to work at it again.

I never considered a musical instrument before but that is a great suggestion. She seems to love the piano she got as a 4 year old (small and inappropriate for her now) so maybe I will check into getting her a full size keyboard for her birthday and see if she can spark some interest.

Otherwise, the only sports she is interested in are individual sports (she does dance and Isshinyru Karate). She completely melts down over team sports (which is the same reaction towards team sports that I always had myself so I relate to that feeling) and it never dawned on me that this was fostering her inability to try harder.

MsFriz, I am working on your suggestions. She will be formally tested in February and with that information I can figure out what options I need to exercise. Thank you for validating my concerns.

Same here. DS 5 have all those tendencies as well. I think introducing them to challenging activities is key. I thought to myself, DS is in Kindergarten and all the kids have to start working hard from day 1 trying to learn what is being taught. This is not the case for our DS. To me, if that continues, will be a disaster. Like MsFritz said, what happens when finally, years and years down the line, it gets hard? He will have no way to cope and no work discipline.

That is one of the reasons he does KUMON math. He gets so frustrated and angry when he can't master something right away. I actually love seeing it. Sounds mean but I think it is awesome that he has to actually fight to learn something. And he sticks with it and feels very proud once he works through it. We also keep him enrolled in some kind of sport. He was in soccer after school this fall and complained he was the worst of them all. The day of the last class he had anxiety and didn't want to go. The teacher actually called me and said he was begging not to go. I didn't give in, and sent him anyway. He went and when I picked him up we had a great chat about the whole situation. It was one of those "valuable lesson learned" type moments.

Same here - with DD10, and myself. She's doing much better after being put in the bottom of a split class last year. It's language immersion, which adds challenge, and she's a November birthday, so there were kids in her class close to 2 years older (she was a full head shorter than everyone else... they were all so... old! lol).

Prior to being in that class her perfectionism was absolutely crippling. Now it's still there, but not as dominant. She's much calmer. She's much... less reactive and temperamental, and much more willing to try again when something is challenging. She used to have a hair trigger to meltdowns if she couldn't achieve instant mastery, but now she's more resilient and somewhat able to face challenge.

So now we're on to our next dilemma. She's currently in a straight grade 5 class, French immersion, and in a pull out gifted math program. On her latest report card her teacher indicated that her attitude has improved a bit, but she's still coasting, exerting minimal effort. The good news is that this has gotten her Bs, which means that there's room for her to actually try. My dilemma is how do I motivate her? If she's coasting and napping and getting Bs, in her mind that's good enough. If I place value on only As in order to get her to exert some effort, I run the risk of aggravating the perfectionist beast (ie Bs aren't good enough) and losing all the progress we've made.

She needs to be back in a higher grade split, or she needs to be skipped. Socially this is not the best choice, because her friends are in her current class (it's a nice group of kids). Her teacher, who I absolutely love, is unfortunately one of those who won't challenge a kid unless they're exerting full effort already.

(sigh)

Anyway, Kelly0523 the only thing I can say is that my perfectionist has really benefited from being challenged. My DD was 8 when she was put in her mostly grade 5 class last year (there were double the 5s so they did mostly gr 5 curriculum), so the time is right! It was difficult at first - perfectionists FIGHT against their demons, that's for sure. There were LOTS of temper tantrums and meltdowns. We persevered and I have no regrets - we've definitely seen progress.

Good luck

Thank you for all of your advice and suggestions and personal experiences. I have no idea what exactly I am going to do, but I do know that I am going to start pushing her to her discomfort level and making her work through it. I think I will also consider a spring team sport for her (my husband will be thrilled, ha ha ha!) We had a lengthy discussion today and she understands that I am "on to her" (so to speak). Not that it will change her reaction, but at least she knows that her reaction has no control over me anymore. She did agree to try to accept more challenges and worked on her accelerated math tonight (voluntarily) and even had some fun working with the Scientific calculator. I told her if she feels anxious over "not knowing" that it is OK, she can talk to me about it and we can work through it together. She seems receptive, so we will just have to see how this works out.