Solving Perfectionism, New Problems?

[beaners]

On all of the perfectionism threads I see parents who have moved their children into areas like dance or gymnastics. Does it concern any of you to open your children up into that world when they already have perfectionist tendencies?

 

I was a collegiate runner. I knew a lot of girls (and a couple boys) in running with eating disorders, but I knew more who were in gymnastics or dance. Almost all of them had those same perfectionist tendencies. Almost all of them were very intelligent and very driven. Now, I know the "tumbling tots" class is not prone to the same dynamic that you find in a group of teenage girls. I'm just curious what other parents think of that risk and what they do to try to minimize that.

 

I'm certainly not assuming that any of the children here will have eating disorders; I'm looking back at the people I have known. But do any of you worry that music or dance or gymnastics will open up an additional arena for perfectionism instead of providing an outlet to decrease its intensity? Do we think addressing perfectionism when it first crops up will reduce its likelihood of affecting children when they are older?

 

I know this could be kind of a sensitive subject, but I'm not asking with any kind of accusation in mind. I'm trying to figure out if there is a way to guard against this as a parent, in my ever-irrational desire to protect my children.

[Iucounu]

There's a link in my sig with some extra information on perfectionism, including an aggregated list of techniques for dealing with it. There's good perfectionism and bad perfectionism, and I guess that it'd depend on the situation. Honestly, perfectionistic tendencies may help a great deal for achieving at high levels in playing music, etc.; it's about channeling the noticing and caring about imperfection in a positive way.

[Dmmetler]

I've been very, very careful about the coaches and programs I've put my DD in-ones where the focus is on skills, not on appearance, where there's a range of body types performing/competing (even if it means not at as high of a level as a whole), and where the coaches/instructors tend to be focused on teaching good habits, not on excellence at the cost of everything. DD's gymnastics coaches are wonderful, as have been her dance instructors so far (although I think the gymnastics gym does a better job of teaching overall health-among other things, my daughter comes home with healthy recipes to try each week). I think if my daughter had the wrong teacher, she could very, very easily end up with an eating disorder or other very destructive habits. I've gone through several bouts of being semi-bulimic since my teens (I don't think I've ever met the DSM criteria for it-but I've certainly been close), and was fortunate in that in college I had several friends who went to my faculty adviser/applied instructor and had him confront me on it-which led to getting into therapy. And that, while in college, I was able to get therapy which included working with an athletic trainer to set up exercise and nutritional habits that gave me the need for control without having to go to self-injurious extremes.

[Donna]

I think you could be creating new problems if parents and coaches focus on "perfection" within the child's activity rather than developing the child as a person. If you are constantly focused on how the child performs and, as a parent, attach love to performance, then I imagine the results could be issues that are damaging to the child like eating disorders, etc...

 

I think allowing the child to lead their involvement in the activity and being the support person as a parent is key. I think it is very important to praise effort and willingness to work hard because those are things a child has control over rather than their natural ability or a performance itself (win/lose in sports or in the case of music the actual outcome of the performance).

 

My dd's violin teacher once told her that if she cares too much about winning then she shouldn't compete. I think that could apply to anything kids do...if winning is the ultimate goal rather than participation in the activity itself then it could be damaging to them to compete whether it is a sport or music because sometimes you don't have any control over whether or not you win a music competition or a sporting event. There are lots of other factors that come into play. The only thing you can control is your effort and how well you prepared.

[Beth in SW WA]

We found a wonderful piano and voice teacher who 'speaks Abi' and understands how she ticks. Music is perfect for my perfectionist. :)

[Greenmama2]

I've known dancers with eating disorders but not musicians. I was a little confused by the mention of music in your post. I understand what you are saying about the perfectionist personality trait but I think there are other factors involved as well. Those other factors are irrelevant to studying music but not to dance or gymnastics.

In response to your final question I feel the best a parent can do to guard against it is to a) foster your child's sense of self and b) foster a healthy habit of questioning insidious attitudes about body and gender image norms.

[Dmmetler]

I've known dancers with eating disorders but not musicians. I was a little confused by the mention of music in your post. I understand what you are saying about the perfectionist personality trait but I think there are other factors involved as well. Those other factors are irrelevant to studying music but not to dance or gymnastics.

In response to your final question I feel the best a parent can do to guard against it is to a) foster your child's sense of self and b) foster a healthy habit of questioning insidious attitudes about body and gender image norms.

I was a music major and performing musician when I was struggling with bulimia, and I wasn't the only one. I do think you'll find more bulimics than anorexics in music, because part of the culture tends to be the parties and receptions, where you go, eat too much, then end up hating your body and starving yourself for a week, or vomiting in the bathroom before going back to the reception. And practice schedules really do make it easy to skip meals and starve yourself. I'd often go several days without eating before a performance. I think, for me, part of it was that I was also finally developing physically. I had held the "child prodigy" crown a long time comparatively, and the fact that I no longer stood out because I was/looked so young compared to everyone else hurt. To be blunt, while they might pick the solo performer based on skill, the newspaper reviewer is going to pick the soloist of the night to do his article on based on who looks best or has the "hook"-and I was one of these people who was a cute kid with a big horn (classical saxophonist/clarinetist) who turned into a very average looking adult.

[8filltheheart]

I think your question is very valid and I will share our experience.

 

I don't post a lot about my dd who is in many ways more advanced than our ds. She has a completely different personality than her brother, is more of an introvert, and is a very private young lady.

 

I don't see a lot of frustration due to perfectionism attitudes at home; it is not that our kids don't have those tendencies, but they are not a consuming issue.

 

That said, dd was a competitive figure skater. The perfectionist drive was overwhelming. The cut-throat attitude amg the other girls did push our dd's buttons in ways that just don't exist in our home. She pushed herself to the point that she was skating hrs upon hrs every week even while exhausted. She was diagnosed with Hoshimoto's (and her tsh levels would have had me flat in bed) and still pushing herself to skate to the pt where she ended up w/a serious case of mono.

 

She is also incredibly mature and while sick w/mono she recognized in herself what was going on and she made the decision to stop skating competitively. So yes, beaners, I think your question is a valid one.

[Donna]

My best friend in high school was pushed a lot by her father to get good grades. She and I were basically almost tied to be valedictorian of our class. (The honors points from one advanced math class that I took and she didn't was all that separated us in the end.) Her father was constantly on her to study and was very strict in a number of ways. She felt like she had no choice but to do what he wanted.

 

About midway through high school, I figured out she was bulimic. She told me she would eat then vomit because she wanted to lose weight. It wasn't until I knew what bulimia was that I had a name for what she was doing. Purging and excessive exercise at times were the only areas in her life where she felt like she had control. Her habits/illness had nothing to do with a sport she played a body image because of that. She had to be "perfect" at school and wanted her body to be "perfect" plus she felt as though she had a level of control over herself when she purged...where she didn't have control over what/when she studied or grades.

 

So, I can see why the OP included musicians in her original question. Anorexia and bulimia are not always only about body image...there is the control aspect to it as well.

[Greenmama2]

... I had held the "child prodigy" crown a long time comparatively, and the fact that I no longer stood out because I was/looked so young compared to everyone else hurt. To be blunt, while they might pick the solo performer based on skill, the newspaper reviewer is going to pick the soloist of the night to do his article on based on who looks best or has the "hook"-and I was one of these people who was a cute kid with a big horn (classical saxophonist/clarinetist) who turned into a very average looking adult.

 

Hmm, actually I remember now I did know one young woman struggling with bulimia early on in my studies. She was a vocalist aiming for a contemporary rather than classical or jazz career though so I always felt her issues stemmed from something a little different.

I do think Donna is right about control. That is what I meant by fostering a child's sense of self. I guess autonomy would have been a better term. A child/teen/young adult with a lot of autonomy would hopefully not need to excercise control in such drastic fashions.

Dmmetler, I'm sorry you suffered. Yes, practice schedules can enable the behaviour but enabling is not quite what the OP was asking about (I think).

[Nan in Mass]

This is a very, very good question. I think you have to be very careful.

 

I have boys. Fairly adventurous boys. Ones who do things like go off ski jumps and go diving mid-winter in wet suits. Nothing extreme (they are naturally rather cautious and we are not an extreme-sport family) but definately adventurous. It is hard for me to think about gymnastics objectively because the physical coordination they gained has saved their lives, according to them, many times. In my estimation, it all paid for itself when one of them fell off a second story roof, flipped around in the air to avoid the minivan windshield and several other objects and landed unhurt, so unhurt that he brushed that part off as an aside - what had traumatized him was the possibility of going through the windshield or landing in the birdbath or crushing the lady trying to decide whether to catch him. It didn't even occur to him that he might be hurt just by falling that far. (As you can see, years later I am still upset about it lol.) So... gymnastics is something I would do again just so my children would avoid some rather major accidents. But probably not if the gym or the coach were bad, because that, too, can be deadly.

 

My boys tend towards the I-am-not-going-to-even-try-unless-I-know-I-can-do-it-well rather than the I-am-going-to-kill-myself-to-be-perfect. We really, really push doing something for personal enjoyment rather than doing something for exterior validation or doing something for other people's enjoyment (performance). We are very careful about our family atmosphere, both for our own sake and for our children's. We chose the gym and coach very, very carefully. We told ours that the cost (non-monetary) of aiming for the olympics or whatever was high enough that as a family, we really, really did not want to go there. We never actually said we would not if the child really wanted it, but we did convey very strongly that this was not something we wanted them to do. Fortunately, none of mine did. There are disadvantages to actively encouraging non-competativeness (like when it comes time to compete for a place in college), but encouraging it when you have high strung children has even more disadvantages in my opinion. In the end, there is a balance point between trying hard and succeeding and being an unhealthily driven person, and the child has to find and maintain that point themselves. You can't do it for them. While they are trying to find that point, they may live in your basement for awhile or they may make themselves sick trying to achieve perfection. There may be relatively little you can do to help. In our culture, at least, there is a largish gap between when parental authority and management of a child stops and when a child's own adult management of himself starts. During that gap, all sorts of things happen. Children grow up at different rates, also, and at different rates in different areas. All that is just to say that it is pretty hard to manage a teenager and your best efforts may not be enough. (I guess that is a lesson for us all in being perfectionist about our parenting.) Anyway, I know that for my family, all the potential perfection-feeding-ness disadvantages of gymnastics was well outweighed by the advantages of self-discipline, learning the learning process, and gaining physical coordination and self-confidence. One way you can help a perfectionist to overcome the perfectionist tendencies is to give them self-confidence. We also insisted that ours become competent in areas other than gymnastics. We didn't let it become the one thing they were good at. That helps keep them from having their success in that one thing be their whole self-identity and investing too much in being perfect at that.

 

If you asked my boys (youngest 17) their thoughts about this, they would say that the only reason they made it through their teens is their coach. The coaches somehow were able to parent them through this very high strung period in a way that we, as the parents, couldn't. This only worked because of the amount of time they spent with them (plenty of time for things to be said without many words), because the coaches remembered clearly what it was like to be their age, and because my children are the sort for whom doing something physical actually works as an outlet for perfectionism and stress relief. I don't think it would have worked for some of the other teens I know, but that might perhaps be because they weren't raised to use it that way from an early age. Those teens found their own outlets or escapes with other things, some good, some not so good.

 

Anyway, it is an excellent question. It seems to me that whether music or dance or gymnastics works as a good outlet or as a bad outlet depends of whether the person is doing the activity for personal enjoyment or to gain the praise and attention of others. I have limited experience in this, but does this sound right: if one is trying to get a piece of music (or whatever) just right for personal enjoyment, it may be frustrating and one may choose to do it when one ought to be doing other things (like eating) but it isn't as dangerous as trying to get the piece just right so that other people will praise it, pick it, or be pleased by it?

 

Nan

Edited February 15, 2012 by Nan in Mass

[La Condessa]

I do worry about gymnastics eventually becoming an area of stress, perfectionism, and just an overly competitive focus for my daughter when she is older. I don't really think her personality would tend towards eating disorders, but a consuming competitiveness, yes. I especially worry about this because I have gradually gotten the impression since she started gymnastics half a year ago that the coach has plans for her and a certain group of talented little girls one to two years older than her. I sometimes worry where this road might lead.

 

But each time, I conclude that I will have to cross that bridge further down the road. For now, this coach is wonderful for her. He does a great job of balancing instilling discipline and good character values with understanding that they are still little kids, as well as helping them advance their physical skills. The social atmosphere with the other kids is great for her, and the growth in her self-discipline since starting has been wonderful--plus, having that physical outlet for her has been amazing. (Over Christmas break, she went back to being so hyper that she would run around and around our tiny house, literally running into and bouncing off of walls and furniture at full speed because she just had to do something with all of that energy.)

 

So yes, I do worry, but I don't really know what I can do about it except wait and see. Gymnastics is so beneficial to her at this point; I suppose that if the coach wants her to start doing some serious training for competition a few years down the line and we do not feel that it is in her best interests, or that her character development at that point is such that allowing competition would not be wise, we will just have to keep her out of it.

[serendipitous journey]

On all of the perfectionism threads I see parents who have moved their children into areas like dance or gymnastics. Does it concern any of you to open your children up into that world when they already have perfectionist tendencies?

 

I was a collegiate runner. I knew a lot of girls (and a couple boys) in running with eating disorders, but I knew more who were in gymnastics or dance. Almost all of them had those same perfectionist tendencies. Almost all of them were very intelligent and very driven. Now, I know the "tumbling tots" class is not prone to the same dynamic that you find in a group of teenage girls. I'm just curious what other parents think of that risk and what they do to try to minimize that.

 

I'm certainly not assuming that any of the children here will have eating disorders; I'm looking back at the people I have known. But do any of you worry that music or dance or gymnastics will open up an additional arena for perfectionism instead of providing an outlet to decrease its intensity? Do we think addressing perfectionism when it first crops up will reduce its likelihood of affecting children when they are older?

 

I know this could be kind of a sensitive subject, but I'm not asking with any kind of accusation in mind. I'm trying to figure out if there is a way to guard against this as a parent, in my ever-irrational desire to protect my children.

 

A little off-topic, but we were completely unable to address Button's perfectionism with music or dance/gymnastics b/c he wouldn't do anything he didn't know he could accomplish. I finally got him doing hip-hop but haven't seen any impact on his perfectionism. May I venture that hip-hop doesn't have the clear distinction between correct and incorrect performance that, say, the violin or a gymnastics class has? I ended up tackling his perfectionism head-on, requiring him to work past mistakes, rewarding his recovery after errors, focusing on rewarding effort, dispensing heaps of chocolate at sensible intervals, etc. So many people have had success with the endeavors you mentioned, so clearly there is merit; but there are ways of addressing perfectionism that don't involve the precision mentality.

 

Of course, I have no idea how Button will turn out as a teenager or adult; and also I do know that our methods would not work for everybody, the children all being so different to each other.

Edited February 16, 2012 by serendipitous journey

[Nan in Mass]

I think gymnastics worked for my children because they had a whole gym full of people doing really cool things that they wanted to be able to do and it was impossible to escape the o-so-obvious fact that the way these people were learning to do those so cool things was to try them and FAIL a million times first. In other words, it worked because EVERYBODY was telling them that trying and failing was the ONLY way to succeed, and "success" was something that was terribly desirable to my small boys, like being able to spin around a bar and jump over something large. If failure-is-the-path-to-success hadn't been so obvious that even my 7yo couldn't miss it, and if success hadn't been so desirable, I don't think it would have worked. Also, I don't have the most stubbourn children in the world (my sister does). Mine will bow to necessity, eventually.

 

Nan

[Dmmetler]

:iagree:

Nan's experience has matched mine-the reason why cheer and gymnastics has worked for DD is because she gets to see the older kids do it and see that they try, and fail, and try again, and fail, and try some more, and fail, but she also sees the triumph and successes. I think cheer has been the most motivating because there's an attitude of "Team" that goes from the highest elite group down to the 4 yr olds who can't even do a forward roll and fall over when they try a Liberty on the floor. And I think, for DD, competitions are more motivating than performances-and the fact that they can go out, do extremely well, and still LOSE is helpful. She has seen her team place 3rd at one competition with the same routine that they placed 1st at with another, and not place at all at a 3rd-and she's seen that happen to every single level in her gym, and has, now, been to enough competitions with other local teams to realize that it happens to everyone.

 

She loves dance, but I don't think dance is as useful because she's in class with kids at her current level. She sees the older students only when they have polished a piece and have it ready for performance, and while she knows that they're in there practicing for hours and working with their teachers, she doesn't SEE it in the same way. And there's not the same pay-off, and chance of failure, because you get out there in your pretty costume, do your routine, and people applaud.

[beaners]

I'd like to thank everyone so much for these responses. I've been mulling over everything in my head.

 

Although I've never had an eating disorder, members of my family have. My husband brings in perfectionism. I'm not seeing complete refusal on unknown things yet, but I'm not happy with our reaction to "hard" right now. It's completely age-appropriate, but not desirable now or in the future.

[Nan in Mass]

That is a good point: in our gym, anyway, many levels are working together in one big room. The little ones get to watch the older ones while they wait for their turn. This is considered important. Another difference between dance and gymnastics is that in gymnastics, the coaches teach the children to fall. They did things like grabbing them unexpectedly and heaving them into the pit or lining them all up then walking down the line pushing them over. In other words, it was so expected that they would fail more times than succeed that they were taught how to do it safely. They were also taught that if they were going to bleed or throw up, to do it into the chalk bucket. Their hands ripped and they were taped up and sent to keep working. The coaches were sympathetic but there was a sort of all-pervailing attitude that if one failed, one would pick oneself up and immediately try what-ever-it-was again. The gym seemed to be full of perfectionist children who were very hard on themselves. Tears abounded and were tactfully dealt with even with older boys. I think the coaches had all been through the same thing themselves. They were kind but firm. The emphasis was on safety. The coaches prefer to get the children very young so they can nip some of these problems in the bud early and work on some of the basic coordination.

Nan

[Truscifi]

Ds also tends toward the not-even-try camp for things he doesn't immediately do well. We have talked about it and specifically told him that one of the reasons we won't allow him to quit piano is that it is good for him to have to practice and work through that, that the skill of working to learn something will help him be successful later in life. Ditto for karate. Of course he knows there are other reasons these activities are good as well, but he always needs to understand the why behind our decisions. It is part of his personality I think. ;)

[acurtis75]

Ds also tends toward the not-even-try camp for things he doesn't immediately do well. We have talked about it and specifically told him that one of the reasons we won't allow him to quit piano is that it is good for him to have to practice and work through that, that the skill of working to learn something will help him be successful later in life. Ditto for karate. Of course he knows there are other reasons these activities are good as well, but he always needs to understand the why behind our decisions. It is part of his personality I think. ;)

 

 

It is encouraging to read that I'm not the only one with a child who doesn't want to try unless she knows she'll do something well. I am about to start dd in piano lessons which I think will be good for her and we're trying the spelling bee out this week.

 

I read in Condeleeza Rice's book that she wanted to quit piano ten her parents told her she wasn't old enough or good enough to make that decision yet. I thought that was a good perspective.

[serendipitous journey]

Ds also tends toward the not-even-try camp for things he doesn't immediately do well. We have talked about it and specifically told him that one of the reasons we won't allow him to quit piano is that it is good for him to have to practice and work through that, that the skill of working to learn something will help him be successful later in life. Ditto for karate. Of course he knows there are other reasons these activities are good as well, but he always needs to understand the why behind our decisions. It is part of his personality I think. ;)

 

It is encouraging to read that I'm not the only one with a child who doesn't want to try unless she knows she'll do something well. I am about to start dd in piano lessons which I think will be good for her and we're trying the spelling bee out this week.

 

I read in Condeleeza Rice's book that she wanted to quit piano ten her parents told her she wasn't old enough or good enough to make that decision yet. I thought that was a good perspective.

 

... These are good perspectives. We may try again later for Button; in his case, pursuing gymnastics seemed pointless: not only would he not try, he HATED it and he was only 5 years old! Guitar lessons he wanted, but wouldn't follow instructions, so we dropped them. Fortunately his homeschool, and home life generally, involves enough things that he both doesn't want to do and isn't super good at that he gets those sorts of lessons regularly ;). -- he seems to perceive behavioral failures as personal failures and tends to beat himself up about them, so that's where at least half of our anti-perfectionism practice comes from.

 

It is interesting to me that so many of us find it useful to go outside the home for practice in learning to do something very hard. I think Button must be unusual somehow, maybe it is b/c he didn't like reading when he was little and so that is a learning area for us. It just seems to me that he cannot perform to my goals on most of the tasks I set, and our school topics are multi-year achievements so he gets a lot of practice at sticking with something. DH and I even had to make him learn to bicycle! which he now loves. The best course of action must depend so much on the particular child, and the home, and the parents (we're very sensitive ourselves). Button would have cracked up in gym or at piano: the whole experience would have been miserable, he would have dreaded it before it happened and taken at least a day to recover afterward; I cannot see the point in that. I think Bot-bot would love these things, but so far he's not perfectionistic at all.

 

Clearly, however, the gym/piano/etc. sorts of performance activities are beneficial to many children. Hallelujah for individualized educations! :)

 

ETA: I plan to make him stick with hip-hop at least through 3rd grade, when he can start a boys' break-dancing class. DH and I agree that if this child can dance his life will be MUCH easier :D!

Edited February 17, 2012 by serendipitous journey

[Greenmama2]

It is interesting to me that so many of us find it useful to go outside the home for practice in learning to do something very hard. I think Button must be unusual somehow, maybe it is b/c he didn't like reading when he was little and so that is a learning area for us. It just seems to me that he cannot perform to my goals on most of the tasks I set, and our school topics are multi-year achievements so he gets a lot of practice at sticking with something. DH and I even had to make him learn to bicycle! which he now loves. The best course of action must depend so much on the particular child, and the home, and the parents (we're very sensitive ourselves). Button would have cracked up in gym or at piano: the whole experience would have been miserable, he would have dreaded it before it happened and taken at least a day to recover afterward; I cannot see the point in that. I think Bot-bot would love these things, but so far he's not perfectionistic at all.

Actually I haven't really felt that we've had to go "out of the home". Violin has been what has been what has helped my DD see that effort=progress and the vast majority of those realizations happen in her daily practice at home. I'm there guiding her and requiring that effort everyday. Yes, I'm a musician but even if I weren't I would still be in the role of "home teacher" or "practice partner". Her teacher's input goes a lot more towards learning the technique of the instrument and it's my input that gets her addressing those perfectionist issues. I guess with gymnastics the coach would probably shoulder both or the bulk of both of those loads though...

[Donna]

Actually I haven't really felt that we've had to go "out of the home". Violin has been what has been what has helped my DD see that effort=progress and the vast majority of those realizations happen in her daily practice at home. I'm there guiding her and requiring that effort everyday.

 

:iagree: My dd also learns and puts in the most effort at home during her daily practice sessions. Her teacher is our guide. I am not a musician at all but I am good at breaking down tasks into smaller components that she can accomplish more easily and in the beginning, when she was very young and I needed to, I was very good at approaching everything in a fun way.

 

Sure, there were those lessons where my 3yo would attempt to distract her violin teacher by asking questions and discussing everything on the walls of the studio or lay herself on the soft fluffy carpet rather than do what the teacher asked if she didn't think she could do it on the first try. But we were able to take what her teacher wanted her to learn and figure it out on our own at home during the week. My mantra was something I had read in a Suzuki book..."We practice to make things easier" so every time she balked at doing something, I'd repeat that to her and surprisingly the distraction of the teacher and laying on the floor only happened for a few months in the beginning.

[Nan in Mass]

Journey -

 

About surviving outside activities:

 

I didn't start mine in gymnastics until they were older. Younger would not have worked. Ballet started at 7 (at least at my school) because of coordination, so I started my middle one at 7. His brother joined him the next year (when he was 11) and the youngest, who spent evenings in the waiting room, started when the coach decided he was big enough to work with the older children, which was basically when he thought he could do it without too many tears. (I declined to go mid-day to the younger children's classes.) Even so, I can't believe they survived competing. They were willing to put up with the competing to learn how to do the skills, I think. When they were older, there were periods when they wanted to compete. And periods when they didn't. I would have hated it. They were boys, though, and craved different things than I did growing up. We all like disciplined movement, though.

 

About whether it is better to teach these lessons at home or away:

 

There were times when I was not at all sure I wanted my boys to suffer through some of the tougher bits like being told not to whine. Not that I didn't say the same thing myself, but the delivery was different. The coach they had was determined to make them stand up for themselves and I was determined to make them polite to adults no matter what and sometimes the two conflicted. It seems to me that there are two sorts of home atmousphere: one which mimics the rigours of the world so that the child will be taught to deal with them by people who love him, and one in which the home is considered a haven from the rigours of the world. Obviously, homes are all a mix of both and the mix needs to change to accommodate different stages of growth. We tend towards the home-as-a-haven, though, which meant that I needed to find ways, as the children grew older, for them to learn to deal with the less gentle real world. We live in the woods and we sail, so they learned about the natural world, and our clan has pretty high standards of behavior, so they learned to behave themselves when they were little, but we mostly have the energy to be patient and understanding, and we are quick to bend the rules to fit the circumstances, unlike much of the real world. There comes a point, as the children grow older, when it is important that they learn to deal with that fact and not be overwhelmed by it. Well, not be overwhelmed by it some of the time, at least. (Why do you think our home has to be a haven from rather than a model of the real world?) When that time arrived, gymnastics did a nicer job of doing that than public school. Public school might have done a better job, but gymnastics did a sufficient job and did it in much more controled circmstances.

 

Nan

Edited February 17, 2012 by Nan in Mass

[gracyomalley]

I do worry that my daughters perfectionistic tendency may lead her into trouble with gym and dance...but I don't think those activities could in any way "cause" an eating disorder (which I did have trouble with as a teen/young adult, despite my parents moving me out of activities when they got too competitive). I have been thrilled to see all the things her coaches and dance instructor do differently than what I experienced as a young dancer. I chose her gym carefully, and when she was doing handstand presses at 4, watching to see that the level 10 gymnasts there came in "all body types" (although all very fit). Their coaches have nutritionists come and talk to the girls, do food diaries, and other healthy approaches to making sure the girls are being good to themselves. They also have rules about "there is no such thing as perfect, only improving" and not making decisions about moving up levels and things like that based upon a score, or other objective measure that would make the girls hyperfocused. She is incredibly nutured by these people, its a home away from home, and her "failures" and "successes" are all part of "growing into a young lady" there - whatever her performance may be.

 

My boys get a whole different, more boyish, aspect from gym. Its my oldests "tiny bit of middle school", with male role models, in a controlled setting, where behavior is monitored, but boys have to work together...and he's pushed to do things that are hard for him. Youngest simply has to move....and jump and spin...

 

Music on the other hand is a required element of schooling here - and when you don't like your "schoolwork" you don't get to quit! I have seen 2 kids now (ds 11 never disliked practicing...getting him to stop is the challenge) go from "I hate violin" and naming class "poopy pants", to gaining pride and some degree of musicianship even as young as 7. Smart kids need to be made to persist - but its important to have a teacher who is good with this age group - and patient. It killed me to watch them not do "their best", but now I realize that they are learning to keep on with difficult things even if they don't like them. DD, the one who named violin poopy pants and didn't practice for an entire year, is now entering her first concerto contest...by her choice!

 

In some ways, the teacher/coach/parent attitude may be much more important than the kids' when they are young. Perfectionism without learning that failure is the beginning of growth can be bad...but persistance, the ability to work hard, acceptance of ones "failures" as roads to some kind of success, and even (eventually for each of us) learning when to "move on" can all come from these (and other) activities...I often think they are learning more there than here at home conjugating verbs and dividing fractions....but that may be a cop-out as we are in the middle of gym meet season and live in rural Oregon, so we are spending more time driving than schooling!

Erin