Your Kid Isn't a Perfectionist. They're Afraid... #102

0:00Jon @WholeParent Have you ever had one of those moments where your kid melts down over something that feels like incredibly, almost impossibly small? You say maybe instead of yes, or they spelled a word wrong, or something didn't go exactly the way that they expected. Suddenly you're looking at this like full-blown meltdown and you're thinking, how did we get here?

0:20Jon @WholeParent For some kids, those moments don't feel small. Cert uncertainty can feel overwhelming, and being wrong for a lot of kids can feel very threatening. A tiny disappointment creates this like massive emotional response. When that happens over and over again, it's easy for parents to think things like, hey, my kid needs to toughen up, or they need to learn that the world is not always gonna go their way.

0:44Jon @WholeParent They need to build some resilience. And yes, kids like that do need to develop frustration tolerance. We're gonna talk about that in this episode. But frustration tolerance is not built by telling dysregulated kids that they are overreacting to things. In fact, that just sends them deeper into dysregulation.

1:01Jon @WholeParent It's built by understanding what makes these experiences so difficult for them and giving them manageable opportunities to experience that discomfort while helping them discover that they can actually survive being disappointed and uncertain and even sometimes just flatly wrong. In this episode, you're gonna hear two conversations.

1:20Jon @WholeParent They both come from parent lab group coaching backed by popular demand. The first is about a child who is really struggling with uncertainty, especially around this word maybe. And the second is about a child who has fears of making mistakes, and it looks a lot like perfectionism, but I'm gonna talk about why it's not actually perfectionism.

1:38Jon @WholeParent So if that sounds good to you, welcome back to the whole parent podcast and let's get into it.

1:52 Okay, so my oldest child who's like um a uh I forget what you call them, but the deeply feeling kids, the highly sensitive ones. He um just seems to have a hard time with I don't know, lots of things. I don't know if these are related, but like frustration tolerance, or like sometimes, like, for example, we'll be like driving around and he's like, I want to eat at Chick-fil-A.

2:15 And I'm like, Well, we're not eating at Chick-fil-A today, but we can do that another time. And then like a week later when we're driving, he's like, You said we would do it sometime, so we have to do it now. And then he like freaks out and tells us whole come apart. And I'm like, Well, I didn't say we were gonna do it now, or like, but that but that happens with like lots of different things.

2:32 We're all saying, Yeah, we'll try to get to that today, or something. And if I say maybe, then later that day he's like, No, you said we could do it, and that means like we have to do it, and he will have these like huge come apart about things because like you said maybe, and so to him that means like absolutely 100, or maybe he actually knows that and he's just like saying that because he wants it to happen.

2:52 So I don't know what it is, but like it happens with stuff so often, and like he's almost nine years old. I don't know if that's normal for a child this age. He just gets so upset about things like that, and and then he'll get upset because we're not doing it, and then he'll pick on his brother, and it's like this like chain effect, this like domino effect because he's so upset that this thing that maybe will happen doesn't happen, and then it's like affecting everyone else because he picks on everyone.

3:17Jon @WholeParent Right, right. The first thing that I always like to talk about with with stuff like this, so so yeah, there are a lot of like what we can call them the the fancy term here is intersectional, but but interlocking pieces, right? Where you have well when when he's dysregulated, he picks on his siblings because he's bored or he's feeling big feelings and like he's like trying to direct that energy somewhere.

3:39Jon @WholeParent So then that becomes a sibling conflict. But he's only upset in the first place because he struggles with uh uh conceptions around time and maybe and ambiguity, and he really wants things to be more concrete. And he's in a phase where he's probably shifting out of concrete thinking into more abstract thinking, but still, you know, again, development is on the sliding scale where uh development can be drastically different.

4:02Jon @WholeParent In fact, this is kind of an interesting side note, not related to your question specifically, but um, I was looking into for the purposes of an assignment that I had to do for my PhD yesterday, uh it was a paper on on whether or not we're over-diagnosing ADHD in kids. And um it kind of there's an easy way to do every assignment and then the John way.

4:23Jon @WholeParent And the John way is to be like, well, not only are we, but why are we, right? Uh or or are or why not, you know? And so I looked at school specifically as as a place where a lot of people are diagnosed with ADHD. And what what what we found or what I found in some papers, which was kind of interesting, and I think it made my post more interesting than just like a generic one, was that specifically ADHD rates increased drastically when we accounted for the age of the child relative to the age of the grade or the the the grade that they were in.

4:59Jon @WholeParent So obviously we have to have school cutoffs, and we we put kids into like a calendar year, usually September to September. And so kids born on September 1st are are the oldest in their class, and a kid born on August 31st is the youngest in their class. Um and what we what they found in the research was that kids who were on the younger side were diagnosed with ADHD 40% more than kids who were on the older side, as if to say that it was not only ADHD, it was how that the development, natural development, the biological development, because it could be kids that are 11 months apart in in age, but they're in the same grade, how the biological development impacted that.

5:41Jon @WholeParent So why I mention this is because when we think about development as a whole, we have to understand that not everything happens at the same time for everybody, and also things can be delayed that we don't really expect to be delayed for different reasons, and they can catch up really quickly or they can lag behind for a long time.

5:59Jon @WholeParent And one of the things with highly sensitive kids that tends to um be a mismatch is that they tend to be really intelligent, they tend to be really emotionally attuned to others often, where they can sense your emotions about a given thing more than maybe other kids who lack the same types of theory of mind, but they still struggle mightily with frustration tolerance, with with dysregulation around their emotions, and with uh any sort of ambiguity whatsoever.

6:29Jon @WholeParent Highly sensitive people, generally speaking, struggle with the concept of ambiguity, right? Well, what if this happens? Well, it could or it could not. Well, I don't like that. Just tell me, is it going to happen or is it not? Um, and so let me just tell you from my perspective, one way of of kind of navigating around this.

6:45Jon @WholeParent The first thing is to just understand that when he's asking a question, the ambiguity, like ambiguity is not a way in which he's it's not a language that he's gonna speak. So instead of saying, we'll do that later, maybe, just make the determination then. We're either doing that later or we're not doing that later.

7:03Jon @WholeParent And if you're good, if the answer is maybe, explain the conditions under underneath the maybe. Explain the the the thinking. And that can be a really, really helpful tool for for kids who are highly sensitive because when you explain the thinking, then you say, Okay, the answer is yes if the answer is no if.

7:20Jon @WholeParent So a great example of this is one, but you know, I have a highly sensitive 10-year-old. He said, We're out of town last week, and he said, Can I have, you know, can we have ice cream? And I said, maybe. And he said, why maybe? And I said, because or he said, Can I have ice cream now? And I said, no. He said, Can I have ice cream later?

7:37Jon @WholeParent And I said, maybe. And he said, Well, why maybe later? And I said, Because I don't know what we're gonna do for the next six hours. And if you wind up having, you know, we we wind up going to apple picking and you have a slice of apple pie, and then, you know, we wind up going to, you know, the the bait shop for something, and you want a candy bar, and and you've had three or four different treats throughout the day, and then at the end of the night you say, Well, I want ice cream still, I'm gonna say no.

8:03Jon @WholeParent But if you don't have any sweets from now until six o'clock, seven o'clock, yeah, you can have ice cream, that's fine. So you get to make that choice. But those are the conditions under the maybe. Now it's gone from being this abstract thing to this concrete thing. The other thing to remember is that just because he's dysregulated by these things does not make them bad teaching tools.

8:21Jon @WholeParent So I would say at nine years old, you can start to implement maybe and then just know that the meltdown is coming and then go, why did we feel that way? Which I know is is not always what parents want to do. A lot of time we want to stream, especially I know you have multiple kids, like we want to streamline parenting a little bit.

8:38Jon @WholeParent We want to talk about, you know, the efficiency of parenting. The problem is when we are ultimately perfectly efficient at parenting, we remove all of the things that are triggers for our kids. And then our kids never triggered, and then they never learn how to work through their discomfort. So if frustration tolerance is something that he's struggling with, that doesn't mean that you should do all in your power at all me for by by all means to avoid frustration.

9:02Jon @WholeParent In fact, it means, okay, how do I create opportunities? I'm not, you're not gonna make him frustrated on purpose, but what how do you allow for opportunities that allow for some frustration while also allowing the tools to work through that frustration? And if you're wondering whether this is much easier or just harder than avoiding the frustration, it's much harder than avoiding the frustration.

9:23Jon @WholeParent Of course it is. But the goal is not for him at 15 to still be struggling with frustration tolerance. The goal is for him to slowly, slowly have opportunities to build some tolerance and like with anything, right? How do you get tolerant to caffeine? How do you get tolerant to alcohol? How do you get tolerant to medications?

9:41Jon @WholeParent Like by taking them. The only way to become tolerant to frustration is to actually engage in a little bit of frustration. So I would look for opportunities to create conditions under which, like n you can say, All right, I want Chick-fil-A today. Okay, we're not having Chick-fil-A today. We can have Chick-fil-A next week, we'll decide on the time later.

10:02Jon @WholeParent Well, I don't like that. I want to know not right now. Okay, you can be frustrated about that. That's totally fine. I understand why you would be. But we're not making that decision now. It's not the right time to make that decision. But I'll let you know when the right time to make that decision is.

10:15Jon @WholeParent Well, now you've built in a little bit of frustration tolerance without kind of throwing them in the deep end of just like ultimate ambiguity. And I think that the challenge for parents is that we don't see that interaction as ultimate ambiguity. We see that interaction as like a specific measured, well, what do you think?

10:32Jon @WholeParent It's Chick-fil-A, like this is a specific thing. But for him, it's no, uh everything in life feels ambiguous because he's a kid and a kid's nine-year-olds, everything feels ambiguous. Um so everything feels ambiguous, and now you're adding ambiguity to the the the already almost powerlessness that they feel because they they have agency that they want to express, but they don't always have an opportunity for that.

10:56Jon @WholeParent And then, you know, the final piece of advice, which is the piece of advice that I seem to give for everything, but it's because I think it is the thing that is lacking most for most parents, is that the world in which we live in today is a world where kids have increasingly less autonomy than they've ever had in developmental evolutionary history.

11:15Jon @WholeParent Um nine-year-olds grasp for power in places where it may be inappropriate, like demanding that they go to Chick-fil-A, oftentimes as a response to not having their developmental need for autonomy met in other places. So if that makes sense, the the the key here is also not only it's it's to simultaneously build in some frustration, to avoid all you know, the the overwhelming frustrations, to build in some smaller frustrations, but also provide opportunities over here where there's some freedom and autonomy.

11:47Jon @WholeParent And I can tell you per anecdotally from my personal experience, but the more freedom my now 10-year-old was nine last year, was nine until a month ago, um the more freedom he had from an academic perspective, sending him to a school where he's generally speaking more free to engage than than um typical schools.

12:07Jon @WholeParent He only is there for half as much time as most kids are in in regular school. Uh so he has a lot more free time there. But like all of these things lead together to he accepts he accepts control when the control is necessary. Far easier. But do I still have moments where I'm like, hey, leave this room because your little brother doesn't want you to be here right now and he's having a hard time and like it's just easier if you walk out.

12:32Jon @WholeParent And he'll just be like, demand avoidant? Yeah, totally still. Like, like that's just a feature. That's a feature. He's just gonna be demand avoidant about some things. And I have to smile and say, hey, let's talk about why you're being so demand avoidant right now. What are you feeling that's making you feel that way?

12:48Jon @WholeParent And then he's like, Ugh, don't pathologize me.

13:01 One of the things that's on the top of mind is like this perfectionist, um, my daughter's six going on seven, this perfectionist attitude where she, if she makes a little mistake, she gets really upset about it. If she spells a word wrong that she's never even spelled before, and and like she thought she tried to spell watermelon and then the teacher wrote it the right way, and then she was really, really upset about it.

13:21 So how do I navigate those feelings? How do I navigate that response? Um, because she's this like she just has that perfectionist, like, you know, way of doing things.

17:00Jon @WholeParent Let me let me ask you a couple questions. Um, is she the type that uh that gets really overwhelmed when she's trying something new in general? So like like if she goes to a park and she doesn't have any friends there, and you're there's kids playing a game, she doesn't want to join the game until she's watching it for a while.

17:20 She tried, I I I try to ask her to introduce her to the friends or ask her to introduce herself herself and she can't.

17:26Jon @WholeParent She's she's like, no way. And it's not that she's shy, it's that she's just unsure, right?

17:30 And I think if she's I think she's shy too, like she like she just doesn't know, or maybe she's unsure, but she keeps saying I'm too shy, you know, she says that too.

17:37Jon @WholeParent Right, and kids and kids will empow kids will embody whatever like message they've been sent, and not just by us, but by the world, right? If if people keep saying you're shy, you'll start to believe that. Um is she also the type that gets has really big emotional reactions to things that are seemingly very small?

17:53 Yeah.

17:55Jon @WholeParent So so one of the things that one of the things that I would want you to do here in Parent Lab is go and watch the whole highly sensitive kids course. Um it's or a workshop. It's it's not super long. There's multiples in there, but you just watch one of them, they'll they kind of talk about the same thing.

18:10Jon @WholeParent Um and see if that fits for you. And if it does, and if it's like, oh man, this this does seem like it's right. And and if you're listening to the podcast, I also have a quiz that I can add where you can kind of go through and take this quiz, and it's a little I I find the quiz to be less helpful than actually watching the course if you have a ex if it's accessible to you, which obviously for you it is.

18:31Jon @WholeParent So I would start there and see if that fits. And if that fits, then one of the things that we know about highly sensitive kids is that they take i I I mean, I can't get into all of it right now, but basically 20% of the population has increased sensitivity to things. And this is true not only in humans, but in other species of mammal.

18:52Jon @WholeParent And in this uh the the 20% that has a higher uh sensitivity threshold, they they can smell like literally, we have tests that show that they can smell better, they can hear better, like literally they are more sensitive. The utility function for this in a herd or tribal uh evolved species like humans is that some of the members of the species should be more cautious to jump into things because that member of the species can can kind of be the canary in the coal mine for the rest.

19:24Jon @WholeParent And so what happens with kids who are highly sensitive, this is especially true with oldest children, what happens is they take any failure as if it is critical violation to every part of themselves. They just see failure as like the I I just got a bunch of people killed. Like that's how they think of it, right?

19:46Jon @WholeParent Like if I misspell watermelon, I have fundamentally violated my own like view of the world. I don't make mistakes.

19:54 And she never learned it either, right? And she misspelled it. She never learned it, you know.

19:57Jon @WholeParent Right, right, right, right. It's not, it's again, it's not that that it's not a problem with them. It's that they're like, look, I'm supposed to be the one that doesn't make mistakes. And it's literally because you know, that deer in the forest that's like sniffing the berries and the berries are poisonous, and that one deer, the highly sensitive one, sniffs them and goes, Hey guys, we shouldn't eat these.

20:18Jon @WholeParent These are poisonous. If they made a mistake and they ate the poisonous berries, not only do they die, every the whole the whole herd dies because everybody else eats them too. And so that's kind of how these kids think. And when they're really early on, it becomes this crippling sense. It's not actually perfectionism, it's a terror of being wrong.

20:36Jon @WholeParent There's a difference, right? Perfectionists are like if I'm stacking the blocks and they're a little bit uneven, but they all stay up, that is a failure and I might as well restart. Failure, feel failure aversion, feeling like anytime you get something wrong or anytime you mess up or anytime you have to retry is like a critical threat to you.

20:56Jon @WholeParent That's that's different than perfectionism. So I wouldn't think about it as perfectionism. I would think about it as this child has a deep, deep fear, anxiety around failure. They feel like their failures are crippling. Does that make sense?

21:11 It makes sense because it reminds me of me, right? I don't know if this is genetic, but like I have a fear. I used to have a fear of a fear of failure, like I wasn't enough. And like I've gotten over that. And and maybe she's maybe it's genetic. I don't know. It is, but um it is I just I just don't know how to navigate that.

21:28Jon @WholeParent 80%, 80 or 90 percent of highly sensitive people have a highly sensitive parent. So so you're it is genetic. But um, yeah, the real way to do this is through tolerance. And how do we build tolerance in anything? We build tolerance. If you want to build a tolerance to alcohol, I don't know why you would, but if you wanted to build a tolerance to alcohol, you drink a lot of alcohol.

21:46Jon @WholeParent If you want to build a tolerance to anything, and you want to get build a tolerance to the flu, you get the flu shot, right? It exposes you to a little bit of the flu so that you can build a tolerance to it. If you want to build a tolerance to failure, failure tolerance, or what we call emotional distress tolerance, you have to experience, not in an overwhelming way, but in a minor way, emotional distress.

22:08Jon @WholeParent And so the next time she writes the word watermelon and freaks out about it, you say, It is okay and good to fail. In fact, I would make it a mantra in your head over and over. I would say, sometimes we win and sometimes we learn. I would say it a thousand times a day for the first week. I would say, you know.

22:26 I love that.

22:26Jon @WholeParent Sometimes we win and sometimes we learn. Those are the only two options.

22:30 We have a mantra.

22:32Jon @WholeParent Yeah, take it away. What's your mantra?

22:33 My my last thing is Daza. Our mantra is what do the Daza say it's gonna be okay, right? And I hugger most of the times after I say that. So that's our mantra.

22:42Jon @WholeParent Yeah, what do the Daza say it's gonna be okay? And these kids, they can also like get really anxious about the future. What if you die? What if this happens? What if this happens? Like this is another thing.

22:53 She said, What happens when you get unalive? I didn't know how to answer that. Yeah, I don't know how I don't know what do you think, you know?

22:59Jon @WholeParent Yeah, yeah. These kids think about things in ways that adults we go, how you're how old? Why are you asking me this question? But that's the those are the times we say, hey, if you actually say, Well, that won't ever happen, they don't like that. It's better to say, so yeah, what do you think would happen?

23:16Jon @WholeParent And then they could tell you all these horrible things. You go, Yeah, well, you know, here's here's and my son, who's 10 this way, he was like, So what happens when you if you and mom did die in a car accident? I was like, Well, we would find there's somebody that we've set apart to take care of you guys.

23:31Jon @WholeParent Well, what if it happened tomorrow? Well, me and mom don't drive in the car a lot together. We we are not hanging out all the time during the day. But if it did happen for some crazy reason, like your grandma and grandpa would take care of you until you're 18, and then you would do this and do this. And I and I literally walked him through the steps, and my my mother-in-law is sitting there, and she's like, What are you saying?

23:54Jon @WholeParent Why would you even entertain this thought? And I'm like, Because if I say stop thinking about that, it's not gonna happen. That that idea just went underground, and he is gonna obsess about this for the next 10 10 weeks. Or I just address it and I go, Yeah, this is what would happen, this is what happened, this is what happened, and you'd be okay, no matter what, right?

24:14Jon @WholeParent As yours, like your mantra, whatever happens, it's gonna be okay. That's a great mantra. So now your new mantra to add to that one. And by the way, I have 15 mantras myself for my kids, so so you can't have too many. You just have to add them one at a time, just like the tasks. Your new mantra for your kids is going to be sometimes we win, sometimes we learn.

24:32Jon @WholeParent And for her, she's gonna be like, she may push back on this. She may just say, Well, I don't ever the water watermelon should be spelled. The kids will do this, they should be spelled this way, it should be the spelled the way that I wanted it to be. And this is where I go. It is okay to acknowledge the feeling and also the reality and say, I know you feel that way.

24:51Jon @WholeParent I have felt that way many times. That is not how it is. We don't get to choose how things are spelled. It's just how it is. But sometimes we win and sometimes we learn. And and understand that really what she's looking for is for you to validate the feeling underneath. She's not really looking for you to fix the problem.

25:08Jon @WholeParent And I fail with this with my 10-year-old all the time. I try and fix the he had a huge meltdown the other day about something, literally on yesterday, about something. It was a huge thing. And I spent the first 10 minutes trying to fix his problem before I realized, oh, all he wants to hear is that it's okay that he feels this way.

25:23Jon @WholeParent And then I told him it's okay that you feel this way, and then he said, Well, now I want you to tell me how to fix the problem, and then we did. But but he needed me to say that first, and that can be really challenging.

25:33 Appreciate it, man. Thank you, Joe.

25:42Jon @WholeParent Thanks again for listening to this episode of the Whole Parent podcast. I hope it was worth the time that you gave it today. I hope you learned something, or were challenged, or maybe it just made you smile. If it did, there's a couple of things that you can do that would really, really help me out. The first one is to go right now and subscribe to my channel at Whole Parent on YouTube.

26:04Jon @WholeParent YouTube is getting full, unabridged versions of every podcast episode ad-free right now. I am really trying to get people over there because I have so much awesome YouTube content planned and I have such a small following over there. So if you want to get the best of Whole Parent, hop over to YouTube.

26:21Jon @WholeParent There's awesome stuff there. It's going to absolutely change your life. The second thing that you can do is actually go to the link in the description. You can find YouTube there as well, but find the link for the Parent Lab. It's my exclusive community where I do group coaching. I have a whole course library there full of amazing educational resources for parents.

26:43Jon @WholeParent It is a subscription model where you gain access for a low monthly fee. Go ahead, check out the Parent Lab. There's so many amazing things in the Parent Lab. And if you want to grow in your parenting, it's the best way to do that. The third thing that you can do, and it probably costs you the most because it costs you vulnerability, is to share this episode or this podcast in general with people in your life.

27:05Jon @WholeParent There are parents in your life who are struggling. There are parents in your life who could use this in their life. And we know that the number one way that we can get more people to listen and watch and follow along with the podcast is by personal referral. People want to know what you're listening to.

27:22Jon @WholeParent They want to know what's helping you to parent more effectively. And so if you can do that, find somebody in your life who needs this podcast and send it to them. I would be so, so, so appreciative. Thank you again so much for your time. You can find links to everything that we talked about in the episode, including my books, Punishment Free Parenting, and Set My Feelings Free down below.

27:42Jon @WholeParent And I'll see you next time.