14 Powerful Strategies To Prevent Dementia

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Dementia risk starts climbing very steeply after the age of 65, but it’s not entirely predetermined. Dr. Brad Stanfield, a primary care physician, has insights:

The strategies

We’ll not keep them a mystery; they are:

  • Cognitive stimulation: which means genuinely challenging mental activities using a variety of mental faculties. This will usually mean that anything that is just “same old, same old” all the time will stop giving benefits after a short while once it becomes rote, and you’ll need something harder and/or different.
  • Hearing health: being unable to participate in conversations increases dementia risk; hearing aids can help.
  • Eyesight health: similar to the above; regular eye tests are good, and the use of glasses where appropriate.
  • Depression management: midlife depression is linked to later life dementia, likely in large part due to social isolation and a lack of stimulation, but either way, treating depression earlier reduces later dementia risk.
  • Exercising regularly: what’s good for the heart is good for the brain; the brain is a hungry organ and the blood is what feeds it (and removes things that shouldn’t be there)
  • Head injury avoidance: even mild head injuries can cause problems down the road. Protecting one’s head in sports, and even while casually cycling, is important.
  • Smoking cessation: just don’t smoke; if you smoke, make it a top priority to quit unless you are given direct strong medical advice to the contrary (there are cases, few and far between, whereby quitting smoking genuinely needs to be deferred until after something else is dealt with first, but they are a lot rarer than a lot of people who are simply afraid of quitting would like to believe)
  • Cholesterol management: again, healthy blood means a healthy brain, and that goes for triglycerides too.
  • Weight management: obesity, especially waist to hip ratio (indicating visceral abdominal fat specifically) is associated with many woes, including dementia.
  • Diabetes management: once again, healthy blood means a healthy brain, and that goes for blood sugar management too.
  • Blood pressure management: guess what, healthy blood still means a healthy brain, and that goes for blood pressure too.
  • Alcohol reduction/cessation: alcohol is bad for pretty much everything, and for most people who drink, quitting is probably the top thing to do after quitting smoking.
  • Social engagement: while we all may have our different preferences on a scale of introversion to extroversion, we are fundamentally a social species and thrive best with social contact, even if it’s just a few people.
  • Air pollution reduction: avoiding pollutants, and filtering the air we breathe where pollutants are otherwise unavoidable, makes a measurable difference to brain health outcomes.

For more information on all of these (except the last two, which really he only mentions in passing), enjoy:

Click Here If The Embedded Video Doesn’t Load Automatically!

Want to learn more?

You might also like to read:

How To Reduce Your Alzheimer’s Risk ← our own main feature on the topic

Take care!

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  • Take Care Of Your Lymphatic System To Beat Cognitive Decline

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    First of all, for any unfamiliar with the lymphatic system, it’s mostly the body’s clean-up system (as well as a big part of the body’s anticancer system).

    See: The Lymphatic System Against Cancer & More

    It may not be the most glamorous job, but it’s certainly an essential one.

    There’s no lymph in the brain, but…

    Because of the blood-brain barrier (BBB) that keeps the astonishingly sensitive brain as safe as it can from unwanted things, there are many aspects of our physiology that only happen inside the brain, or only happen outside of it, as the compounds in question may be too large to get through the BBB.

    The lymphatic system is, in and of itself, an entirely outside-of-the-brain affair. So, how does stuff get cleaned out from the brain (such as beta-amyloid and alpha-synuclein clearance, to avoid Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s, respectively)?

    The glymphatic system (a portmanteau of glial cells doing the job of the lymphatic system) is the brain’s own cleanup crew, and we wrote about it here:

    How To Clean Your Brain (Glymphatic Health Primer)

    Why lymph still matters for the brain

    Although the glymphatic system is doing a (hopefully) fine job of scrubbing up the brain, if the lymphatic system isn’t working at least as well, then this becomes the equivalent of what would happen if you at home were very attentive to taking the trash out, but the garbage disposal crews stopped doing their job, or did it much less well than they need to. Soon, you’d end up with a mountain of trash at home, even though you were doing your part correctly.

    In short: the glymphatic system needs to pass the waste on somewhere, and the lymphatic system is its go-to.

    You may be wondering about the role of blood in all of this, and the answer is that no part of any of the above systems can do its job without adequate oxygenation, and our blood also assists in the transport of things removed—which is one of the reasons why there are blood-based Alzheimer’s tests that can be done; they measure certain markers of neurodegeneration that become present in the blood having left the brain:

    Early Dementia Screening From Your Blood & More ← the “and more” is actually quite interesting, but it’s the blood we’re interested in for this section

    What can be done about it

    Our first two links up above, about the lymphatic and glymphatic systems, respectively, also tell how to look after each of them, but we’ll mention a few salient pointers here.

    For the lymphatic system:

    • do lymphatic massage
    • exercise, with a focus on maximizing movement
    • eat an anti-inflammatory diet

    For the glymphatic system:

    • do vagal massage (Vagal! Not vaginal, which will not help! Or rather: it won’t help the glymphatic system, anyway)
    • exercise, and/but also rest well (good quality sleep)
    • eat omega-3 fatty acids

    For more details and suggestions on each though, do check out:

    Lymphatic health primer | Glymphatic health primer

    How this was discovered

    Until as recently as 2014, it was not known that there was any part of the lymphatic system around the brain, waiting to take things from the glymphatic system. Since then, research has slowly been done about the relationship between the two, how things work, and what affects what and how.

    Most recently (the study was published two days ago, at time of writing this) it was discovered that, in mice at least, improving lymphatic function just outside of the brain (the meningeal lymphatic vessels, responsible for draining waste from the brain) improves memory.

    Aged mice who underwent a process that rejuvenated the meningeal lymphatic vessels, performed better in memory tests afterwards.

    How this worked, step-by-step:

    • The mice were given a special protein that rejuvenated the meningeal lymphatic vessels¹
    • The lymphatic vessels were then able to do their job better
    • This meant that the glial cells of the glymphatic system were no longer drowning in excess stuff
    • This reduced levels of a protein that says “help, too much stuff!” and starts inhibiting everything it can to try to cope²
    • This meant that neural activity was no longer being suppressed, and memory improved

    Technical bits for those who want it:

    ¹ We’re not being secretive about what this special protein was; it’s just that the special protein is called adeno-associated virus 1 cytomegalovirus murine vascular endothelial growth factor C, or “AAV1-CMV-mVEGF-C” for short, so for readability, “a special protein” does the job. Suffice it to say, a) you can’t exactly buy AAV1-CMV-mVEGF-C on Amazon, and b) you wouldn’t want it anyway, you’d want its close cousin AAV1-CMV-hVEGF-C (“m” for murine, i.e. mousey, vs “h” for human)

    ² This one’s just called interleukin-6 (IL-6); perhaps you’ve heard of interleukin; we’ve mentioned it sometimes before.

    You can read the paper in its entirety here; if you don’t mind reading very technical stuff, it is very interesting:

    Meningeal lymphatics-microglia axis regulates synaptic physiology

    Enjoy!

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  • Over 50? Do These 3 Stretches Every Morning To Avoid Pain

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    Will Harlow, over-50s specialist physiotherapist, recommends these three stretches be done daily for cumulative benefits over time, especially if you have arthritis, stiff joints, or similar morning pain:

    The good-morning routine

    These stretches are designed for people with arthritis and stiff joints, but if you experience any extra pain, or are aware of having some musculoskeletal irregularity, do seek professional advice (such as from a local physiotherapist). Otherwise, the three stretches he recommends are:

    Quad hip flexor stretch

    This one is performed while lying on your side in bed:

    • Bring the top leg up toward your body, grab the shin, and pull the leg backward to stretch.
    • Feel the stretch in the front of the leg (quadriceps and hip flexor).
    • Hold for 30 seconds and repeat on both sides.
    • Use a towel or band if you can’t reach your shin.

    Book-opener

    This one helps improve mobility in the lower and mid-back:

    • Lie on your side with arms at a 90-degree angle in front of your body.
    • Roll backward, opening the top arm while keeping legs in place.
    • Hold for 20–30 seconds or repeat the movement several times.
    • Optionally, allow your head to rotate for a neck stretch.

    Calf stretch with chest-opener

    This one combines a calf and chest stretch:

    • Stand in a lunged position, keeping the back leg straight and heel down for the calf stretch.
    • Place hands behind your head, open elbows, and lift your head slightly for a chest stretch.
    • Hold for 20–30 seconds, then switch legs.

    For more on all the above plus visual demonstrations, enjoy:

    Click Here If The Embedded Video Doesn’t Load Automatically!

    Want to learn more?

    You might also like:

    Top 5 Anti-Aging Exercises

    Take care!

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  • What Harm Can One Sleepless Night Do?

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    We’ll not bury the lede: a study found that just one night of 24-hour sleep deprivation can alter immune cell profiles in young, lean, healthy people to resemble those of people with obesity and chronic inflammation.

    Chronic inflammation, in turn, causes very many other chronic diseases, and worsens most of the ones it doesn’t outright cause.

    The reason this happens is because in principle, inflammation is supposed to be good for us—it’s our body’s defenses coming to the rescue. However, if we imagine our immune cells as firefighters, then compare:

    • A team of firefighters who are in great shape and ready to deploy at a moment’s notice, are mostly allowed to rest, sometimes get training, and get called out to a fire from time time, just enough to keep them on their toes. Today, something in your house caught fire, and they showed up in 5 minutes and put it out safely.
    • A team of firefighters who have been pulling 24-hour shifts every day for the past 20 years, getting called out constantly for lost cats, burned toast, wrong numbers, the neighbor’s music, a broken fridge, and even the occasional fire. Today, your printer got jammed so they broke down your door and also your windows just for good measure, and blasted your general desk area with a fire hose, which did not resolve the problem but now your computer itself is broken.

    Which team would you rather have?

    The former team is a healthy immune system; the latter is the immune system of someone with chronic inflammation.

    But if it’s one night, it’s not chronic, right?

    Contingently true. However, the problem is that because the immune profile was made to be like the bad team we described (imagine that chaos in your house, now remember that for this metaphor, it’s your body that that’s happening to), the immediate strong negative health impact will already have knock-on effects, which in turn make it more likely that you’ll struggle to get your sleep back on track quickly.

    For example, the next night you may oversleep “to compensate”, but then the following day your sleep schedule is now slid back considerably; one thing leads to another, and a month later you’re thinking “I really must sort my sleep out”.

    See also: How Regularity Of Sleep Can Be Even More Important Than Duration ← A recent, large (n=72,269) 8-year prospective* observational study of adults aged 40-79 found a strong association between irregular sleep and major cardiovascular events, to such an extent that it was worse than undersleeping.

    *this means they started the study at a given point, and measured what happened for the next eight years—as opposed to a retrospective study, which would look at what had happened during the previous 8 years.

    What about sleep fragmentation?

    In other words: getting sleep, but heavily disrupted sleep.

    The answer is: basically the same deal as with missed sleep.

    Specifically, elevated proinflammatory cytokines (in this context, that’s bad) and an increase in nonclassical monocytes—as are typically seen in people with obesity and chronic inflammation.

    Remember: these were young, lean, healthy participants going into the study, who signed up for a controlled sleep deprivation experiment.

    This is important, because the unhealthy inflammatory profile means that people with such are a lot more likely to develop diabetes, heart disease, Alzheimer’s, and many more things besides. And, famously, most people in the industrialized world are not sleeping that well.

    Even amongst 10almonds readers, a health-conscious demographic by nature, 62% of 10almonds readers do not regularly get the prescribed 7–9 hours sleep (i.e. they get under 7 hours).

    You can see the data on this one, here: Why You Probably Need More Sleep ← yes, including if you are in the older age range; we bust that myth in the article too!*

    *Unless you have a (rare!) mutated ADRB1 gene, which reduces that. But we also cover that in the article, and how to know whether you have it.

    With regard to “most people in the industrialized world are not sleeping that well”, this means that most people in the industrialized world are subject to an unseen epidemic of sleep-deprivation-induced inflammation that is creating vulnerability to many other diseases. In short, the lifestyle of the industrialized world (especially: having to work certain hours) is making most of the working population sick.

    Dr. Fatema Al-Rashed, lead researcher, concluded:

    ❝In the long term, we aim for this research to drive policies and strategies that recognize the critical role of sleep in public health.

    We envision workplace reforms and educational campaigns promoting better sleep practices, particularly for populations at risk of sleep disruption due to technological and occupational demands.

    Ultimately, this could help mitigate the burden of inflammatory diseases like obesity, diabetes, and cardiovascular diseases.❞

    You can read the paper in full here: Impact of sleep deprivation on monocyte subclasses and function

    What can we do about it?

    With regard to sleep, we’ve written so much about this, but here are three key articles that contain a lot of valuable information:

    …and with regard to inflammation, a good concise overview of how to dial it down is:

    How To Prevent Or Reduce Inflammation

    Take care!

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  • Rushing Woman’s Syndrome – by Dr. Libby Weaver

    10almonds is reader-supported. We may, at no cost to you, receive a portion of sales if you purchase a product through a link in this article.

    It’s well-known that very many women suffer from “the triple burden” of professional work, housework, and childcare. And it’s not even necessarily that we resent any of those things or feel like they’re a burden; we (hopefully) love our professions, homes, children. But, here’s the thing: no amount of love will add extra hours to the day!

    On the psychological level, a lot is about making more conscious decisions and fewer automatic reactions. For example, everyone wants everything from us right now, if not by yesterday, but when do they need it? And, is it even our responsibility? Not everything is, and many of us take on more than we should in our effort to be “enough”.

    On the physical level, she covers hormones, including the menstrual/menopausal and the metabolic, as well as liver health, digestive issues, and sleep.

    The style is direct and friendly, making frequent references to science but not getting deep into it.

    It’s worth noting that while she acknowledges other demographics exist, she’s writing mainly for an audience of otherwise healthy straight white women with children and at least moderate financial resources, so if you fall outside of those things, there may be things that society will penalize you for and expect more from you in return for less, so that is a limitation of the book.

    Bottom line: if the above describes you, you will probably get value out of this book.

    Click here to check out Rushing Woman’s Syndrome, and take care of yourself too!

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  • Pain Doesn’t Belong on a Scale of Zero to 10

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    Over the past two years, a simple but baffling request has preceded most of my encounters with medical professionals: “Rate your pain on a scale of zero to 10.”

    I trained as a physician and have asked patients the very same question thousands of times, so I think hard about how to quantify the sum of the sore hips, the prickly thighs, and the numbing, itchy pain near my left shoulder blade. I pause and then, mostly arbitrarily, choose a number. “Three or four?” I venture, knowing the real answer is long, complicated, and not measurable in this one-dimensional way.

    Pain is a squirrely thing. It’s sometimes burning, sometimes drilling, sometimes a deep-in-the-muscles clenching ache. Mine can depend on my mood or how much attention I afford it and can recede nearly entirely if I’m engrossed in a film or a task. Pain can also be disabling enough to cancel vacations, or so overwhelming that it leads people to opioid addiction. Even 10+ pain can be bearable when it’s endured for good reason, like giving birth to a child. But what’s the purpose of the pains I have now, the lingering effects of a head injury?

    The concept of reducing these shades of pain to a single number dates to the 1970s. But the zero-to-10 scale is ubiquitous today because of what was called a “pain revolution” in the ’90s, when intense new attention to addressing pain — primarily with opioids — was framed as progress. Doctors today have a fuller understanding of treating pain, as well as the terrible consequences of prescribing opioids so readily. What they are learning only now is how to better measure pain and treat its many forms.

    About 30 years ago, physicians who championed the use of opioids gave robust new life to what had been a niche specialty: pain management. They started pushing the idea that pain should be measured at every appointment as a “fifth vital sign.” The American Pain Society went as far as copyrighting the phrase. But unlike the other vital signs — blood pressure, temperature, heart rate, and breathing rate — pain had no objective scale. How to measure the unmeasurable? The society encouraged doctors and nurses to use the zero-to-10 rating system. Around that time, the FDA approved OxyContin, a slow-release opioid painkiller made by Purdue Pharma. The drugmaker itself encouraged doctors to routinely record and treat pain, and aggressively marketed opioids as an obvious solution.

    To be fair, in an era when pain was too often ignored or undertreated, the zero-to-10 rating system could be regarded as an advance. Morphine pumps were not available for those cancer patients I saw in the ’80s, even those in agonizing pain from cancer in their bones; doctors regarded pain as an inevitable part of disease. In the emergency room where I practiced in the early ’90s, prescribing even a few opioid pills was a hassle: It required asking the head nurse to unlock a special prescription pad and making a copy for the state agency that tracked prescribing patterns. Regulators (rightly) worried that handing out narcotics would lead to addiction. As a result, some patients in need of relief likely went without.

    After pain doctors and opioid manufacturers campaigned for broader use of opioids — claiming that newer forms were not addictive, or much less so than previous incarnations — prescribing the drugs became far easier and were promoted for all kinds of pain, whether from knee arthritis or back problems. As a young doctor joining the “pain revolution,” I probably asked patients thousands of times to rate their pain on a scale of zero to 10 and wrote many scripts each week for pain medication, as monitoring “the fifth vital sign” quickly became routine in the medical system. In time, a zero-to-10 pain measurement became a necessary box to fill in electronic medical records. The Joint Commission on the Accreditation of Healthcare Organizations made regularly assessing pain a prerequisite for medical centers receiving federal health care dollars. Medical groups added treatment of pain to their list of patient rights, and satisfaction with pain treatment became a component of post-visit patient surveys. (A poor showing could mean lower reimbursement from some insurers.)

    But this approach to pain management had clear drawbacks. Studies accumulated showing that measuring patients’ pain didn’t result in better pain control. Doctors showed little interest in or didn’t know how to respond to the recorded answer. And patients’ satisfaction with their doctors’ discussion of pain didn’t necessarily mean they got adequate treatment. At the same time, the drugs were fueling the growing opioid epidemic. Research showed that an estimated 3% to 19% of people who received a prescription for pain medication from a doctor developed an addiction.

    Doctors who wanted to treat pain had few other options, though. “We had a good sense that these drugs weren’t the only way to manage pain,” Linda Porter, director of the National Institutes of Health’s Office of Pain Policy and Planning, told me. “But we didn’t have a good understanding of the complexity or alternatives.” The enthusiasm for narcotics left many varietals of pain underexplored and undertreated for years. Only in 2018, a year when nearly 50,000 Americans died of an overdose, did Congress start funding a program — the Early Phase Pain Investigation Clinical Network, or EPPIC-Net — designed to explore types of pain and find better solutions. The network connects specialists at 12 academic specialized clinical centers and is meant to jump-start new research in the field and find bespoke solutions for different kinds of pain.

    A zero-to-10 scale may make sense in certain situations, such as when a nurse uses it to adjust a medication dose for a patient hospitalized after surgery or an accident. And researchers and pain specialists have tried to create better rating tools — dozens, in fact, none of which was adequate to capture pain’s complexity, a European panel of experts concluded. The Veterans Health Administration, for instance, created one that had supplemental questions and visual prompts: A rating of 5 correlated with a frown and a pain level that “interrupts some activities.” The survey took much longer to administer and produced results that were no better than the zero-to-10 system. By the 2010s, many medical organizations, including the American Medical Association and the American Academy of Family Physicians, were rejecting not just the zero-to-10 scale but the entire notion that pain could be meaningfully self-reported numerically by a patient.

    In the years that opioids had dominated pain remedies, a few drugs — such as gabapentin and pregabalin for neuropathy, and lidocaine patches and creams for musculoskeletal aches — had become available. “There was a growing awareness of the incredible complexity of pain — that you would have to find the right drugs for the right patients,” Rebecca Hommer, EPPIC-Net’s interim director, told me. Researchers are now looking for biomarkers associated with different kinds of pain so that drug studies can use more objective measures to assess the medications’ effect. A better understanding of the neural pathways and neurotransmitters that create different types of pain could also help researchers design drugs to interrupt and tame them.

    Any treatments that come out of this research are unlikely to be blockbusters like opioids; by design, they will be useful to fewer people. That also makes them less appealing prospects to drug companies. So EPPIC-Net is helping small drug companies, academics, and even individual doctors design and conduct early-stage trials to test the safety and efficacy of promising pain-taming molecules. That information will be handed over to drug manufacturers for late-stage trials, all with the aim of getting new drugs approved by the FDA more quickly.

    The first EPPIC-Net trials are just getting underway. Finding better treatments will be no easy task, because the nervous system is a largely unexplored universe of molecules, cells, and electronic connections that interact in countless ways. The 2021 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine went to scientists who discovered the mechanisms that allow us to feel the most basic sensations: cold and hot. In comparison, pain is a hydra. A simple number might feel definitive. But it’s not helping anyone make the pain go away.

    KFF Health News is a national newsroom that produces in-depth journalism about health issues and is one of the core operating programs at KFF—an independent source of health policy research, polling, and journalism. Learn more about KFF.

    Subscribe to KFF Health News’ free Morning Briefing.

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  • Parenting a perfectionist? Here’s how you can respond

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    Some children show signs of perfectionism from early on. Young children might become frustrated and rip up their drawing if it’s not quite right. Older children might avoid or refuse to do homework because they’re afraid to make a mistake.

    Perfectionism can lead to children feeling overwhelmed, angry and frustrated, or sad and withdrawn.

    And yet perfectionism isn’t considered all bad in our society. Being called a “perfectionist” can be a compliment – code for being a great worker or student, someone who strives to do their best and makes sure all jobs are done well.

    These seemingly polarised views reflect the complex nature of perfectionism.

    Annie Spratt/Unsplash

    What is perfectionism?

    Researchers often separate perfectionism into two parts:

    1. perfectionistic strivings: being determined to meet goals and achieve highly
    2. perfectionistic concerns: worry about being able to meet high standards, and self-criticism about performance.

    While perfectionistic strivings can be positive and lead to high achievement, perfectionistic concerns can lead to a higher chance of children developing eating disorders or anxiety and depression, and having lower academic achievement.

    Children doing maths homework
    Perfectionistic concerns can result in lower academic achievement. Jessica Lewis/Unsplash

    Children and adolescents may experience perfectionism in relation to school work, sport, performance in art or music, or in relation to their own body.

    Signs of perfectionistic concerns in children and adolescents may include:

    A range of genetic, biological and environmental factors influence perfectionism in children. And as a parent, our role is important. While research evidence suggests we can’t successfully increase positive perfectionistic strivings in our children, harsh or controlling parenting can increase negative perfectionistic concerns in children.

    Parents who are perfectionistic themselves can also model this to their children.

    So, how can we walk the line between supporting our child’s interests and helping them to achieve their potential, without pressuring them and increasing the risk of negative outcomes?

    Give them space to grow

    A great metaphor is the gardener versus the carpenter described by psychology professor Alison Gopnik.

    Instead of trying to build and shape our children by controlling them and their environment (like a carpenter), parents can embrace the spirit of the gardener – providing lots of space for children to grow in their own direction, and nourishing them with love, respect and trust.

    Girl runs up a hill in winter
    Parents don’t need to control their child and their environment. Noah Silliman/Unsplash

    We can’t control who they become, so it’s better to sit back, enjoy the ride, and look forward to watching the person they grow into.

    However, there is still plenty we can do as parents if our child is showing signs of perfectionism. We can role model to our children how to set realistic goals and be flexible when things change or go wrong, help our children manage stress and negative emotions, and create healthy balance in our family daily routine.

    Set realistic goals

    People with perfectionistic tendencies will often set unattainable goals. We can support the development of flexibility and realistic goal setting by asking curious questions, for example, “what would you need to do to get one small step closer to this goal?” Identifying upper and lower limits for goals is also helpful.

    If your child is fixed on a high score at school, for example, set that as the “upper limit” and then support them to identify a “lower limit” they would find acceptable, even if they are less happy with the outcome.

    This strategy may take time and practice to widen the gap between the two, but is useful to create flexibility over time.

    If a goal is performance-based and the outcome cannot be guaranteed (for example, a sporting competition), encourage your child to set a personal goal they have more control over.

    Child rides bike up ramp
    Parents can help children set goals they can achieve. liz99/Unsplash

    We can also have conversations about perfectionism from early on, and explain that everyone makes mistakes. In fact, it’s great to model this to our children – talking about our own mistakes and feelings, to show them that we ourselves are not perfect.

    Talk aloud practices can help children to see that we “walk the walk”. For example, if you burn dinner you could reflect:

    I’m disappointed because I put time and effort into that and it didn’t turn out as I expected. But we all make mistakes. I don’t get things right every time.

    Manage stress and negative emotions

    Some children and adolescents have a natural tendency towards perfectionism. Rather than trying to control their behaviour, we can provide gentle, loving support.

    When our child or adolescent becomes frustrated, angry, sad or overwhelmed, we support them best by helping them to name, express and validate all of their emotions.

    Parents may fear that acknowledging their child’s negative emotions will make the emotions worse, but the opposite is true.

    Creating healthy balance

    The building blocks of healthy child development are strong loving family relationships, good nutrition, creative play and plenty of physical activity, sleep and rest.

    Perfectionism is associated with rigidity, and thinking that there is only one correct way to succeed. We can instead encourage flexibility and creativity in children.

    Children’s brains grow through play. There is strong research evidence showing that creative, child-led play is associated with higher emotion regulation skills, and a range of cognitive skills, including problem-solving, memory, planning, flexibility and decision-making.

    Girl runs while playing a game
    Play helps children’s brains grow. Mi Pham/Unsplash

    Play isn’t just for young children either – there’s evidence that explorative, creative play of any kind also benefits adolescents and adults.

    There is also evidence that getting active outdoors in nature can promote children’s coping skills, emotion regulation and cognitive development.

    Elizabeth Westrupp, Associate Professor in Psychology, Deakin University; Gabriella King, Associate Research Fellow, Deakin University, and Jade Sheen, Associate Professor, School of Psychology, Deakin University

    This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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