Do you have a teen creative artist who loves their art to the point that it’s hard to get them to enjoy successes as they push to learn more? Or maybe they say they love their art, but you find yourself questioning if this is true as you see them avoiding or procrastinating tasks related to their art. Talking to your creative teen about perfectionism can help them understand why they have moments that may undermine their progress.
In my book, “Parenting Talent: The Grown-Up’s Guide to Understanding and Supporting Creatively Driven Teens and Tweens,” I talk about what perfectionism is and how it can become a roadblock to skill building.
What is Perfectionism?
Perfectionism, in a broader sense, is a combination of high personal standards, often to the point of an expectation of flawless performance, combined with a tendency toward overly critical self-evaluation.
A little perfectionism can be a helpful, adaptive internal motivator. Too much can quickly become a paralyzing, maladaptive shackle of unrealistic expectations. Not all Creatives struggle with perfectionism, but it is a trait that can become an obstacle for some.
The first part, high personal standards, isn’t necessarily a bad thing. It can actually be a great thing when it pushes your teen to work to their personal best. When talking about perfectionism, it’s broken into two types: Adaptive perfectionism and maladaptive perfectionism.
The adaptive form is when your teen is able to set a goal, execute it in an effective manner, and learn from the inevitable hiccups that will occur along the way. Though they have high standards, they aren’t so focused on a perfect outcome that they get lost in the weeds. The maladaptive form may lead to your teen overcorrecting, practicing or avoiding incessantly, or being unable to make good decisions on how to best make progress.
When I am speaking to teens about perfectionism, we focus on the second part: the overly critical self-evaluation. This is where we can break down the difference between adaptive and maladaptive perfectionism. Once teens understand what plays into this distinction, they can become more aware of when they are sliding in the wrong direction and can course correct.
Adaptive Perfectionism
Your teen’s inner voice can have a big impact on how they perceive themselves. If their inner voice is a cheerleader, that can keep them on the side of adaptive perfectionism. The cheerleader’s voice will say, “Wow, you wanted to achieve this goal, and even though you aren’t all the way there yet, you have made great progress tonight. You deserve a break, and you can get back at it tomorrow. Yay you!” The cheerleader’s inner voice is able to look at the goal and understand the need to celebrate small gains and doesn’t see failure to make a gain as a sign it’s an impossible goal.
Maladaptive Perfectionism
If your teen’s inner voice is a harsh critic, this is when maladaptive perfectionism can creep in. The critic will take the exact same situation and say, “Wow. You wanted to achieve this goal, and you aren’t even close to finishing. How can you even consider taking a break until tomorrow? You should stay up no matter how tired you are until you achieve it. You suck.” The harsh inner critic’s voice looks at the goal as the end-all-be-all finish line and does not care if progress is made. This voice defaults to negative thoughts and finds little positive about progress. It only cares about perfect completion.
How Perfectionism Leads to Over-Working
Some creative teens with a harsh inner critic enter an obsessive quest to avoid negative outcomes by practicing, revising, editing, and even completely abandoning and restarting tasks if they begin struggling.
These teens may demonstrate poor time management by pursuing perfectionism in a specific area to the neglect or exclusion of other responsibilities. They will overwork, often past the point of exhaustion, and will find themselves unable to relax or enjoy other activities until they feel they have mastered the task they are focusing on.
When this occurs, they may present as anxious, controlling, stressed, or overwhelmed. The process of practice and preparation does not alleviate these feelings—and sometimes, paradoxically, the more they master the task at hand, the more critical they may become or the more they may doubt that their output will be “good enough” for others.
This approach may also lead a perfectionistic creative teen to overthink or overcorrect small mistakes. They may hyperfocus on small details that are of little or no consequence, or they may agonize over decisions, becoming paralyzed in self-critical loops. This misuse of time and energy can leave Creatives feeling as if no progress has been made in spite of hours of effort.
How Perfectionism Leads to Under-Working
For other creative teens, maladaptive perfectionism will present as procrastination. They avoid the possibility of failure or of not being good enough by not engaging in or completing certain tasks. They may fantasize that if they leave those tasks to the last minute, they can use the time leading up to the deadline to mentally prepare and produce a perfect outcome.
Or, from an opposite approach, they avoid thinking about what they have to do because of the psychic discomfort of the idea that they may not be capable of a perfect outcome. The higher the stakes, the more they may procrastinate. They may embrace the feeling that it is much safer to be able to tell themselves they didn’t do well because they didn’t try, as opposed to feeling that their efforts were not enough.
Although it may appear that your teen doesn’t care or is not invested in the outcome, the opposite is very much the truth. All of these only serve to create a self-fulfilling prophecy where they don’t prepare for their task and, in turn, do not improve at or master the task. They then experience a less-than-ideal outcome. The very thing that would have increased their chances of a better performance, product, or outcome—preparation—has been sacrificed.
How to Help a Perfectionist Teen
I have found one of the best ways to encourage teens to practice finding and listening to their inner cheerleader versus their inner critic is to get them to engage in new activities where they aren’t concerned about the outcome. Since they aren’t worried about how things turn out, they can tune down the voice of the critic and actively look at where they are making progress, no matter how small.
Even if they completely fail at the new activity, they are able to call the cheerleader in to praise themselves for trying something new. Teens are able to look objectively at the process and outcome in a way that they can’t for things they are deeply invested in mastering. Breaking down this experience, being able to look at small shifts, gains, or attempts can be practiced, and they can begin to apply this in areas where maladaptive perfectionism is a concern. They learn to practice self-compassion.
Self-Compassion and Maladaptive Perfectionism
Self-compassion creates room to see positive progress, even when perfection has not been met. Just saying “progress is better than perfect” does not resonate with a teen who does not know how to tap into self-compassion. But by learning to have empathy for themselves teens are better to find the positive in a situation.
A recent study found that self-compassion is a protective mechanism to ward off depression and that it “consistently reduces the strength of the relationship between maladaptive perfectionism and depression for both adolescents and adults.”
Conclusion
Talking to your creative teen about perfectionism, how it may be holding them back, and ways they can work to move past is a valuable gift you can offer them to help them move forward when they feel stuck. And to learn to have compassion for themselves instead of allowing their inner critic to be the loudest voice in their head.
Adapted from my book, “Parenting Talent: The Grown-Up’s Guide to Understanding and Supporting Creatively Driven Teens and Tweens.”
