The Trouble with Perfect: How Parents Can Avoid the Overachievment Trap and Still Raise Successful Children
By Elisabeth Guthrie, MD and Kathy Matthews
Broadway Books
256 pp $22.95

For some these stories are familiar: the fierce competition among parents to get toddlers into the "best" nursery schools; teenagers so busy with extracurricular activities meant to impress college admissions boards that they rarely see their siblings; parents so overloaded and overworked that their children are raised mainly by tutors and nannies.

Welcome to the brave new world of American parenting.

The Trouble with Perfect provides a chilling glimpse into our overachievement-oriented culture and its impact on many middle- to upper class families. Elisabeth Guthrie, MD, is the founding director of the Learning Diagnostic Center at Blythedale Children's Hospital in New York. Drawing on more than 15 years of clinical experience with children and their families, Guthrie explores the dangers of setting the bar too high, and forcing kids into situations so competitive that they lose their appetite for learning.

However well-intentioned, these parents mistakenly believe that their children will never succeed unless they take extreme measures. Some hire consultants who charge up to $6,000 to help them fill out nursery school applications. Others push their children into music or athletic training in preschool. A veritable industry has even taken shape to aid in increasing a baby's IQ in utero, and for encouraging "tummy time" (putting an infant on his tummy to exercise) whether the baby wants it or not. There are gadgets to stimulate the fetus, devices that will play music to it, and even ways to encourage its aptitude for foreign languages.

Who are these driven parents too passionately engaged in their children's lives? Many are affluent professionals and business executives. They're used to success and to beating out the competition, according to Guthrie, and they bring this notion of success to parenting. "They've learned to respect effort, hard work," writes Guthrie. "Their buzzword is "professionalism ... They bring all their job skills and training -- decisiveness, ability to prioritize, focus on the bottom line -- to their childrearing. They are very good at their work and they want to be very good at parenting."

Unfortunately, expecting full return on investment in the corporate world doesn't translate well in the world of parenting. Children burdened by such unreasonable expectations of perfection may perform well initially to please their parents, but often show symptoms of stress later on in life. In particular, this kind of performance pressure tends to backfire in adolescence. Guthrie describes the case of 15-year-old Todd, whose parents sent him in for an evaluation when he stopped doing his homework, ignored curfews, and began experimenting with drugs.

Diagnosed with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) in the fourth grade, Todd managed to excel in most of his elementary school classes with the help of multiple tutors. Although his passion was sports, his parents insisted he take trombone classes -- while participating in several extracurricular sports -- throughout elementary school. Then, in the sixth grade -- and against the recommendation of his teachers, Todd's parents pushed him into several honors classes. Since that time, his academic performance steadily declined.

By the time Todd was 15, Guthrie recounts, he felt like a complete failure and became dead set against trying out for sports. He became angry at the world -- and anything related to his parents-- because he'd been pushed too hard, without ever being given a chance of finding out what he liked to do. In this way, Guthrie says, he is typical of the "pushed" child.

What's more, recent technology allows driven parents to be accessible to their bosses around the clock. In some homes, there's no moment of the day or night that is completely off limits to work demands. Instead of parenting their own children, parents engage a corps of coaches, tutors, and consultants to fill in.

Guthrie sees two types of adolescent patients in her clinical practice. At the Blythedale Children's Hospital, she treats children who are chronically sick or who have suffered disabling injuries. In her private practice, Guthrie sees children with emotional illnesses that she attributes in part to an accelerated version of childhood foisted upon them by well-meaning "super" parents. These children often become depressed and anxious, she says, and some suffer from anorexia and bulimia. Others become suicidal, or turn their rage outward in violence against others. At this point, says Guthrie, parents must come to terms with their less-than-perfect offspring. Sadly, some of them are hard-pressed to do so.

The fate of Todd and his parents is a case study. Todd fell farther and farther behind his classmates, despite his parents' best efforts to keep him afloat with coaches and tutors. Meanwhile, Guthrie says, his parents did the worst thing parents can do to a child: They showed him how disappointed they were that he had failed. This, of course, only made matters worse. With Todd and his parents deeply alienated, Guthrie had to step in and try to salvage the adolescent's trampled self-esteem -- and re-educate his parents on how to communicate with their son.

Guthrie remains hopeful for change. "What I have learned from countless parents is that just about no one wants to push, but most feel they must," she writes. Unfortunately, Guthrie doesn't offer many clearcut ideas on how to do it constructively, and suggestions to parents tend to be rather prescriptive. Meanwhile, her repetition of the phrase, "As we all know ..." is likely to irritate those who may not agree with or understand her assumptions.

Too bad The Trouble with Perfect fails to fulfill the promise of its title. We could certainly use advice on how to avoid this parent trap, but good counsel is in short supply -- even in this provocative book. Telling parents in this culture to simply "slow down" is as reasonable as telling a person who wants to get off a speeding train to just close her eyes and jump.

-- Barbara Jamison is a San Francisco-based writer, editor, and translator. She has won two PEN awards for fiction.

First published February 17, 2003
Last updated July 23, 2007
Copyright © 2003 Consumer Health Interactive