How the Pressures of Perfection Affect Our Children

Recently, The New York Times published an article entitled Campus Suicide and the Pressure of Perfection about the pressures college students more frequently feel and I thought I’d share it with you. In the story, Kathryn DeWitt, a University of Pennsylvania student, admits she battled depression. Her parents’ expectations for her were always very high and she’d met or exceeded those expectations. Once in college, however, she was surrounded by students who were so impressive (one was a world-class figure skater, another an Intel science competition winner) that she began to feel she just wasn’t up to par. The anxiety began.

Anxiety and depression, in that order, are now the most common mental health diagnoses among college students, according to the Center for Collegiate Mental Health at Penn State. William Alexander, director of Penn’s counseling and psychological services, has watched a shift in how some young adults cope with challenges. “A small setback used to mean disappointment, or having that feeling of needing to try harder next time,” he said. Now? “For some students, a mistake has incredible meaning.”

Meeta Kumar, who has been counseling at Penn for 16 years, has noticed the same change. Getting a B can cause some students to fall apart, she said. “What you and I would call disappointments in life, to them feel like big failures.”

In my new book set to be released this August, I talk about pressures just like these that can cause our children grave emotional despair.  If a child receives a grade on a test, and the parent thinks the child should have done better, the disappointment on the parent’s face says it all. Maybe the child should have done better, but this look of disappointment has deeper repercussions for the child than the test score. I have spoken to adults who said they would have preferred that their parents say something negative rather than give them a look of disappointment.

For most parents, of course, our intentions are to let our children know that they can do anything; they do have it in themselves the ability to achieve what they want from life. But how we communicate that can make all the difference in the world. Read the rest of this insightful article at The New York Times Campus Suicide and the Pressure of Perfection.