Chronic perfectionism through the eyes of school reports
A short post for a short thought. I was sifting through old school reports, and there’s only one comment which is repeated in pretty much every report from 3 years old all the way through to 16.
3 years old: “Has a hard time dealing with disappointments. Tends to cry and is hard to console. Always wants to be first and if he is not sometimes he is very disappointed.”
5 years old: “Stuart sometimes gets frustrated with his finished results, but he tries his best.”
10 years old: “Stuart is mostly a thoughtful and friendly boy, however sometimes his rather volatile temper can get the better of him when he gets frustrated.”
12 years old: “[Stuart] is a fragile pupil who is reluctant to make mistakes which may prevent him from putting pen to paper.”
14 years old: “Stuart should [...] have the confidence to ask teachers for support when he is not sure. It is vital that Stuart can convey his ideas in writing if he wishes to show the extent of his potential.”
It’s sort of telling, really. My parents weren’t tigers who would berate my every failure—to the contrary, they learned this was counterproductive because I was usually harder on myself.
There’s a lot of talk about unlearning perfectionism in the world. It’s not such an easy thing to get away from when it’s an inherent part of your personality rather than a learned behaviour. I think perhaps the message is to treat it as nature rather than nurture, and lean in, rather than away.
I wonder how many traits there are that, for most people, are acquired responses to their environment, but for a minority are essential qualities of their nature.
Considering the poor track-record of the nurture assumption when it comes to psychological traits, I would surmise that the answer might be: almost none[1]. Even perfectionism has at least moderate genetic influences[2].
Excluding traits that have close to no influence on one’s life.
And I would argue that the study underestimates the heritability due to measurement error, which can be a non-trivial issue when measuring personality.
Yeah, generally when people say “someone has a trait X because that’s how his parents brought him up” it makes sense to ask “okay, but why did his parents bring him up to do X” and a likely hypothesis is that the parents themselves were X. In which case, we should consider the possibility that X was simply inherited.
The thing the parents can teach are the coping strategies they use.
Wow that was a fascinating read, thank you for linking that. Most interesting to me was the separation of self-perfectionism from social perfectionism as a clinical concern. I’ve never felt social perfectionism, and ironically almost all of the trouble I got myself into as a child was from actively rebelling against social expectations. I’m glad to hear that this is also considered different in the literature.