Talking To Teens: Expert Tips for Parenting Teenagers

Introduction to Talking to Teens
---

Andy Earle: You're listening to Talking to Teens, where we speak with leading experts from a variety of disciplines about the art and science of parenting teenagers. I'm your host, Andy Earle.

We want our kids to be excellent and successful in everything they do.

But how do we push them towards excellence without overloading them with too much pressure so that they feel bad about themselves when they aren't able to perform well?

How do we raise kids who will set the world on fire and do amazing things in their life, but also know that they matter regardless of what they do or what they don't do?

As we help to guide our kids and point out ways that they can improve, how do we also make sure that we don't come across as being too critical?

In other words, how do we raise teens who know that they're enough?

Meet Dr. Ellen Hendriksen
---

Andy Earle: Today's guest, Dr. Ellen Hendriksen, is a clinical psychologist and author of How to Be Yourself, and the new book, How to Be Enough.

She's talking with us today about the psychology of being hypercritical on ourselves and how we can avoid passing that on to our teenagers.

Ellen, thank you so much for coming on the show today.

Ellen Hendriksen: I am delighted to be back. I had a great conversation with you last time. So I'm thrilled to be here again

Andy Earle: Well, you have a new book coming out. It's packed with brand new research, anecdotes, and insights. And it's called How To be Enough: Self Acceptance for Self Critics and Perfectionists. Congratulations on that.

Can you talk a little about what inspired this? What made you think, this is the topic for the next book?

Understanding Perfectionism
---

Ellen Hendriksen: There are two reasons and one of them is personal. There's a saying for self help book authors, which is "write the book you need." If my first book on social anxiety, How to be Yourself, was the book I needed 20 years ago as a college student, this is the book I need now. I wrote this for me, but also, for many other people. Because there seems to be a silent epidemic of perfectionism happening these days. No one ever comes into the anxiety specialty center where I work and says, Ellen, I'm a perfectionist.

I need everything to be perfect. Instead, they come in and say, I feel like I'm failing. I feel like I'm falling behind. I have so much on my plate and I'm not doing anything well. And I think that's because perfectionism is a little bit of a misnomer. It's not about striving to be perfect. It's about never feeling good enough.

And that is something I think a lot of us can relate to. So I wrote the book for me, but also for all the folks who feel like they're never doing well enough that they themselves are never enough. And that is really what gets to the heart of perfectionism.

Andy Earle: Wow, I think a lot of people resonate with that.

I know I do. I was talking to a friend recently. We both work with a lot of high achieving people and it's this pattern where it feels like so many high achieving people. The reason that we do so much and strive to to be more in our career is like we're filling some kind of a hole where we don't feel like we can just be as we are or something like that? And reading your book really got me thinking about that more, in terms of where that comes from or what that looks like.

Ellen Hendriksen: Sure. And I think it's important to say that perfection.

Healthy vs. Unhealthy Perfectionism
---

Ellen Hendriksen: Well, there are some researchers who would disagree with me, but there are definitely others who would agree with me that perfectionism can be good. I think of it as one of those optical illusions where you look at it and you either see the bunny or the duck, or the young lady or the old lady.

Perfectionism can be good. That's when we strive for excellence for the sake of excellence. We work hard. We set high standards. We care deeply. Please keep doing that. There's actually a really healthy heart of perfectionism, which is a personality trait called conscientiousness.

And that is a tendency to be responsible, to be diligent, to be persistent, to follow through. In the book, I call it the world's least sexy superpower, but if there's a personality trait to choose, that's the one, for both objective and subjective success in life. So again, please keep doing all that you're doing.

That's fantastic. Where it can tip over into unhealthy perfectionism or clinical perfectionism is when we get into something called over evaluation. This is the work of Drs. Roz Schaffrin, Zafra Cooper, and Christopher Fairbourn when they were colleagues at Oxford University. Over evaluation is when we start to conflate our self worth with our performance.

It's when "I did good" equals "I am good." We base our self image, our self esteem on striving to meet personally demanding standards. And that's where we can start to get into trouble. We can talk a lot more about that.

Andy Earle: You have some great lines right at the beginning of the book that I thought were pretty encapsulating of what you're talking about. Privately, we may feel like we're falling behind, inadequate, left out, or not like everyone else. We get called some dubious labels, type A, intense, task oriented, driven, workaholic, neat freak.

Ellen Hendriksen: I think we often look quite successful, we look like we're hitting it out of the park.

Maybe we get good grades. We're involved in a lot of activities. We're first chair violin. Captain of the soccer team, but we feel like we're striking out. There might be all these signifiers of success, but there's a sense of not doing well enough, not being enough.

Impact of Perfectionism on Teens
---

Andy Earle: It's interesting thinking about the teenage years and adolescence and I just think of it as such a time of exploring different aspects of your identity and different things that you that might let you on fire.

And there's this interesting component with perfectionism, where we don't want to try things we might be bad at. Or as soon as we are trying something that feels like, oh, this isn't my thing. Or maybe I'm not good at it. We set that aside and say, okay, that's not my thing.

I'm going to focus on this over here. You talk about this violinist in the book who is like a child prodigy and she could just notice the look on adults faces that says, Hey, I'm really good at this. And I think we do that on so many levels as kids and teenagers.

Especially if we have this sensitivity to how other people are perceiving us. That shapes our decisions or shapes our life towards those things where we're receiving that validation and maybe away from those things that might be really interesting to us or might really be a passion for us, and we set those aside and focus on the other ones.

Ellen Hendriksen: Absolutely. I'm really glad you brought that up. So, yeah, over evaluation. Conflating our worth with our performance. It's kind of a package deal. It comes along with a bunch of other things. One of those is evaluating our performance as all or nothing. We set the bar for adequate at flawless.

If we make a mistake or we screw up or we struggle, cause we're learning something new. And of course we're going to struggle when we're learning something new. It shunts us from all to nothing. Failing one quiz makes us a bad student or screwing up during our hockey game shunts us from all to nothing.

And then in addition to that, we also focus on flaws and details. So we do the equivalent of zeroing in on the one frowning face in the crowd of smiles. We might notice the one, you know, for me, I certainly noticed the crumbs on the counter that no one else sees.

The third thing that we do to make our lives harder is we criticize ourselves. One of the pillars of perfectionism is over evaluation, but the other Is self criticism. We all criticize ourselves and criticism is the heart of human self regulation, but in perfectionistic self criticism, we make it particularly harsh.

All or nothing and personalistic, so it might be all I am such an idiot or all of that was so stupid. Or it could be rhetorical questions like, why can't I do this? Or it could be a general sense of dissatisfaction or disillusionment with ourselves and how well we're doing. So I'm glad you brought up, her name is Tricia Park, the violinist. And yes, she was a child prodigy violinist.

She still plays violin. Still performs all over the world. She figured out the crux of over evaluation and perfectionism, which is contingent self worth. She learned through experience that she was only as good as her last performance. She actually had teachers say to her, Tricia, nobody cares how you feel.

They only want you to be as perfect as possible. She has done a lot of work to undo the damage of contingent self worth, of only being as good as her violin performance. And now is certainly much more multifaceted, is thriving, but she'll be the first to say that when the pressure gets turned up, sometimes old habits come back.

So yeah, it can be a real challenge to be put in a perfectionistic climate whether that's a family, a school, the highest levels of violin performance, whether that's the, you know, the highest levels of, say, like, women's gymnastic. Because then not only can perfectionism manifest as a personality trait, but it can also manifest as a reaction to a climate that tells us we have to be better, that mistakes are not allowable, and that we'll be harshly criticized if we screw up.

Family Influence on Perfectionism
---

Andy Earle: You talk in the book about this analysis of childhood development of perfectionism, and identifying different family environments. Especially relevant is this anxious rearing model. What does that look like? And how does that manifest, especially as we get into adolescence?

Ellen Hendriksen: So I jokingly say it manifests sort of as Marlon from Finding Nemo, as being a little bit overprotective, a little bit helicoptery. We can come out of any kind of family being perfectionistic. It's not a one to one ratio if we come out of one of these four types of families and, blam, we're perfectionistic.

And also, all of this comes from good intentions. Maybe if we identify as perfectionistic or maybe we ourselves as parents are just trying to help. This all comes from good intentions. So I don't want to shame anyone or saying people are damaging their children or anything like that.

That's not the point. Okay. We can come out of families that are overly cautious. Rule bound. Protective. Or another type is to come out of a perfectionistic family when we model sort of hard driving, high achieving behavior for our kids with little room for mistakes, or equating ourselves with our performance.

A third is contingent love, confusing pride and love. Love is a freely given emotion. It doesn't have to be earned. Whereas pride is contingent upon performance. We're proud of our kids when they do well. We love them no matter what. Sometimes kids need to be told that explicitly.

And then the fourth type of family is a chaotic, unstable family where kids feel they have to double down on some kind of control. If I can't control mom's drinking, at least I can control my grades.

If I can't control dad's temper, at least I can be bubbly and outgoing to the most popular kid in school. We've got those four types of families, but again, we can come out of any kind of family perfectionistic.

Andy Earle: So then how does that relate to detail focused processing and this way that we zoom in on little things and notice when they're not right or they're not the way that they should be? You talk a lot about the word should in the book. This almost x ray vision of noticing anything that's not what your internal standards are for how it's supposed to be, and then being really hard on ourself when it's not like that.

Ellen Hendriksen: Yeah, absolutely. So that processing comes from focusing on flaws and focusing on details. We're the first to notice that typo in the slide deck, or when the painting on the wall is crooked. These incorrect details cause this disproportionate emotional reaction. It's just how we're wired. I really want to be careful not to say that anybody's personality or tendencies are wired incorrectly, but then I think where we can get into trouble is when we turn that focus on flaws and details into behavior and bring up that our kid got an A minus instead of an A at dinner, or criticize or point out flaws or things that could be done better. It comes across as you're doing it wrong, or I don't trust you to do this correctly, or you're not good enough.

I'll tell you a story.

Coaching and Perfectionism
---

Ellen Hendriksen: There is a study that I found really fascinating out of Macquarie University in Australia. They recruited two groups of kids. Anxious kids who were in treatment for anxiety, and kids from the community. Typical, non anxious kids.

And then they had them go through one of two kinds of coaching. So they either got perfectionistic coaching or non perfectionistic coaching from their moms. And then they did a three minute study. In minute one, the kids copied shapes from a booklet, by themselves. For minute two, their moms went in and either gave them perfectionistic coaching with comments like, Well, you know, if you don't do it right, you won't get your best score. And this line could be longer or straighter or darker. Or here, let me show you how to do it. The moms were instructed to take over.

In the non perfectionistic condition, the moms were coached to say things like, it's okay if you don't do it perfectly. I don't mind if you don't get your best score. I'm sure you can do it fine by yourself. They were coached to have this unbothered attitude and project confidence in their kids ability.

The two findings I thought were fascinating were that it didn't matter whether the kids were anxious or non anxious. Perfectionistic coaching made everybody react the same way. The kids who got the perfectionistic coaching freaked out and worked really slowly. They crumpled their paper and started over.

They erased more than they drew. After the whole study was over, they were still sort of insecure and asked their mother, did I do it right? Was it okay? Whereas the non perfectionistic coaching kids, whether they were anxious or non anxious, just kind of drew their shapes and moved on. So that was one thing that I found the coaching was more important than the temperament.

The other finding was that in the perfectionistic coaching, quality didn't actually go up at all. The performance flatlined. So all the fretting and critiquing actually didn't have an effect on quality of outcome. And I thought that together, those two findings were really, really fascinating.

But when we apply that to 18 years, we can get a certain message over and over again, whether that message is, hey, you got to do this better, or the message is, I'm sure you've got this.

Andy Earle: It's so interesting because I wonder how much is dispositional versus situational in these kinds of things. Are some people just wound a little more tight from birth and that might contribute to feeling like, wow, we have to get everything right.

Or we beat ourselves up when it's wrong. But also this style of how we coach our kids and interact with our kids. Gotta be a big part of it. Because we also think about differences between boys and girls and you see lots of stuff about anxiety in girls, so much anxiety, and I can't help but wonder how much, or do we do more of this kind of perfectionistic type of coaching to girls or expecting them to be more polished or present in a certain way and give boys more of a pass to be rough around the edges.

Gender and Cultural Perspectives
---

Ellen Hendriksen: I'm glad you brought up gender. So I can talk for adults at least. Dr. Thomas Lynch, who specializes in a coping strategy called over control, finds that any gender can project these tendencies, but women tend to want to be seen as competent and nice.

And men tend to want to be seen as competent. Everybody wants to be competent and strong. So that can manifest in terms of some perfectionism, some emotional perfectionism. So women might have to project more smiles or not be allowed to be angry. Men might be restricted to bravado and rage.

And that's it. I don't actually know the data for younger kids, but I know there's definitely some gender differences in what we're allowed to feel and project, and that can certainly get in the way of our social connections. I like to say that perfectionism is certainly a personal problem, but it's also an interpersonal problem.

And then the other thing I'll say, sorry, I'm doing your question backwards. But in terms of, does this come from within or our families? The answer is all of the above. There is some research showing that perfectionism itself, even though it's not a disorder per se, but it's more of a personality trait, is genetic. And we definitely know that the disorders that perfectionism lies at the heart of like social anxiety, OCD, eating disorders. Depression. Those are definitely genetic. This is beyond the cutting edge of science right now, but that's what's beginning to emerge.

So it can come from within in terms of our DNA. It can come from how we were raised and our family microculture. And it can also come from the culture all around us.

All humans react to the situations they're put in, and so when we're put in capitalist, consumerist, high achieving culture, and then we pour social media on top of that. Of course, we're going to react and feel like we need to perform and consume and achieve to ever higher levels to be sufficient as a person.

Andy Earle: It's so interesting what you're saying about the different perspectives on nice versus strong in girls versus boys. I think that's pretty interesting.

Ellen Hendriksen: I think there's a whole nother layer for minority and marginalized communities because we all react to the situations we're put in. If we're put in a culture or a school or a workplace that subtly or not so subtly sends the message of you don't belong here or you don't deserve to be here, then a reaction of trying to prove ourselves or trying to overcompensate is no longer a personality trait, but an understandable reaction to an environment like that.

And there's some really interesting work I talk about in the book by Dr. Gary Mitchell out of Duke, who studies teenagers in college prep programs that are designed to launch promising black and brown students into impressive career trajectories, and he has found that there can be a sort of institutionalized perfectionism, where the academic and behavior standards for the college prep kids are notably higher than the academic and behavior standards for, say, legacy kids or donor kids.

And so it can actually be institutionalized, this notion of you have to be twice as good to get half as far.

Andy Earle: Then translates to a feeling in ourselves that we're somehow only half as worthy as someone who's white or someone from a more privileged background.

Ellen Hendriksen: Yeah. It's a natural, understandable reaction to being put in a racist or sexist or homophobic society.

So it absolutely becomes a coping mechanism, which makes sense.

Andy Earle: Wow.

Conclusion and Final Thoughts
---

Andy Earle: On that note, we are coming to the end of our time here, Ellen. This has been fabulous. We covered so much and there's so much more in this book. We didn't even get to scratch the surface of emotions, perfectionism, and some really interesting things you have in here, like switching from the head to the heart and comparing apples to apples versus apples to tennis balls.

There is a lot that we didn't even get to. So I will highly encourage people to check out a copy of How to be Enough.

Ellen Hendriksen: Thank you. You asked great questions.

Andy Earle: Thank you so much for coming on the show today and speaking with us about your work.

Congratulations on your new book. What can we tell people about where to find out more about you, to follow updates from you and your work?

Ellen Hendriksen: Sure, I have an eponymous website, ellenhendriksen. com. You can buy, How to Be Enough: Self Acceptance for Self Critics and Perfectionists.

Anywhere you get books. I also have another book about social anxiety called How to Be Yourself, Quiet Your Inner Critic and Rise Above Social Anxiety. The place where I post most often is Substack. You can look for my newsletter called How to be Good to Yourself When You're Hard on Yourself.

Andy Earle: Excellent.

We're here today with Dr. Ellen Hendriksen, talking about how to raise teenagers who know that they are enough. And we're not done yet. Here's a look at what's coming up in the second half of the show.

Ellen Hendriksen: So when a label starts to determine what we have to do, what we can't do, who we have to be, that's when it's morphed into a rigid rule. If anxiety is driven by uncertainty, and rules reduce uncertainty, then, therefore, rules reduce anxiety. When the rules become rigid and we make everybody else play by our rules we start to erode our relationships. Am I putting I am right first, or am I putting the relationship first? We can think of ourselves as a good student who sometimes fails a quiz, or an outgoing person who sometimes has a quiet moment. I challenge people to dare to be unproductive and tap into the things that they might like to do, might find interesting, might find fun. Notice and praise the things that have nothing to do with performance that are simply who they are, how they are in the world.

Andy Earle: Want to hear the full interview? Sign up for a subscription today. It's completely affordable and your membership supports the work we do here at Talking to Teens. You can now sign up directly through Apple Podcasts. Thanks for listening and we'll see you next time.