The Trouble With Perfect - How Parents Can Avoid the Overachievement Trap and Still Raise Successful Children

by Elisabeth Guthrie M.D. and Kathy Matthews

I read this book after learning about it in The Chinaberry Catalog. As the editors of Chinaberry acknowledge in their mission statement “conscious parenting is the most important and challenging responsibility that many of us will have.” So true.

Elisabeth Guthrie, a psychiatrist, wrote this book because she was alarmed by the high numbers of unmotivated, burned-out youngsters seeking her treatment.  She came to believe that a big culprit is the current cycle of “push-parenting” that results in kids being over-extended and over-pressured. Rather than blaming parents, she explores our “confounding culture of overachievement and takes a sympathetic look at the pervasive guilt that accompanies raising children today.”

What does push-parenting look like? According to the author, here are a few tell-tale behaviors:

1)         Orchestrating virtually every minute of a child’s life with lessons, play dates and enriching activities;

2)         Demanding high achievement in school and at sports at almost any cost (emotional, psychological, physiological, financial);

3)         Pressuring a child to choose courses, activities, or interests more to “build a resume” than to discover or explore natural curiosities or personal interests;

4)         Meddling in a child’s friendships and relationships with teachers and coaches

I loved this book because it helped me understand the subtle, pervasive and often unexamined pressures that riddle our current culture of parenting. And while it is easy to conjure up examples of parents who push, we all know that for every hysterical, over zealous parent out there bent on pushing their child to Herculean levels of achievement, there are multitudes of well-intentioned parents who actually feel caught in a system they don’t like, but feel they have no choice if they want the best for their children. Yet what is truly the best? How do you encourage your child to succeed in a healthy way? How do you judge how much nudging is good and how much is counterproductive? These are the fundamental questions at the heart of this book.

For the full summary Download the_trouble_with_perfect.doc

Comments

[dr dre beats headphones]

so good!