Perfectionists need attention

Donya Betancourt, Pediatrician, drdonya@hotmail.com

Perfectionist students are not satisfied with merely doing well or even with doing better than their peers. They are only satisfied if they have done a job perfectly. This can become a problem when the student begins to focus not so much on meeting personal goals but on winning competitions against classmates.

Fear of failure or of blame, rejection, or other anticipated social consequences of failure can be destructive to the motivation to achieve and many students become alienated underachievers.

Pacht (1984) listed the following as symptoms of student perfectionism:

* performance standards that are impossibly high and unnecessarily rigid;

* motivation more from fear of failure than from pursuit of success;

* measurement of one's own worth entirely in terms of productivity and accomplishment;

* all-or-nothing evaluations that label anything other than perfection as failure;

* difficulty in taking credit or pleasure, even when success is achieved, because that achievement was merely what was expected;

* procrastination in getting started on work that will be judged; and

* long delays in completing assignments, or repeatedly starting over on assignments, because the work has to be perfect from the beginning and continue to be perfect as one goes along.

Perfectionist students need to relearn performance norms and work expectations. They need to learn that:

* schools are places to learn knowledge and skills, not merely to demonstrate them;

* errors are normal, expected and often necessary aspects of the learning process;

* everyone makes mistakes, including the teacher;

* there is no reason to devalue oneself or fear rejection or punishment just because one has made a mistake; and

* it is usually more helpful to measure progress by comparing where one is now with where one was, rather than by comparing oneself with peers or with ideals of perfection.

The goal is to help perfectionist students achieve a 20-degree or 30-degree change rather than a 180-degree turnaround in behavior.

Teachers want students to retain their desire to aim high and put forth their best efforts, but to learn to do so in ways that are realistic and productive rather than rigid and compulsive. The goal is to gradually guide the student toward an independent work position.

Effective teachers make an attempt to appeal to, persuade or change the attitudes of perfectionist students, and to support their efforts to change, by doing the following:

* building a friendly, supportive learning environment;

* establishing the expectation that mistakes are a normal part of the learning process;

* presenting themselves as helpful instructors concerned primarily with promoting student learning, rather than as authority figures concerned with evaluating student performance;

* articulating expectations that stress learning and improvement over a perfect performance on assignments;

* explaining how perfectionism is counterproductive;

* reassuring perfectionist students that they will get the help they need to achieve success.

The most ineffective strategies for dealing with perfectionist students is criticizing or nagging, threatening punishment for failing to change, controlling or suppressing perfectionist tendencies and ignoring or denying the problem rather than dealing with it.

Perfectionists often show unsatisfactory achievement progress because they are more concerned about avoiding mistakes than learning. They are inhibited about classroom participation and counterproductively compulsive in their work habits.

Effective teachers take perfectionist students seriously, communicating understanding and approval of their desire to do well and sympathizing with the students' feelings of embarrassment and frustration.

Teachers can learn to support and reinforce the motivation to achieve while working to reduce unrealistic goal setting. Parents and teachers alike are often times the two greatest influences in a child's life.

What a child learns at home can be reinforced at school and what a child learns at school can be reinforced at home. Giving our children the message that they are accepted and respected for who they are rather than what they do is a positive step toward a healthy lifelong sense of positive self-worth.