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Perfectionism can lead to children feeling overwhelmed, angry and frustrated, or sad and withdrawn.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.
What is perfectionism?
Researchers often separate perfectionism into two parts:
- perfectionistic strivings: being determined to meet goals and achieve highly
- 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 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:
- children being highly critical of themselves
- their reactions to mistakes seeming to be an overreaction
- intense preoccupation and worry over their standards and goals and/or procrastination
- significant change in performance, for example, lower academic results
- irritability and negative emotions, stress and feelings of worthlessness
- social problems with peers and friends, such as bullying and alienating themselves from peers.
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.
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.
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.
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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Lower Your Cortisol! (Here’s Why & How)
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Cortisol, or “the stress hormone” to its friends, is produced by your adrenal glands, and is generally considered “not fun”.
It does serve a purpose, of course, just like almost everything else our body does. It serves as part of the “fight or flight” response, for example, and helps you to wake up in the morning.
While you do need some cortisol (and a small percentage of people have too little), most of us have too much.
Why? Simply put, modern life is not what 200,000* years of human evolution prepared us for:
- Agriculture (which allowed us to settle down and cease being nomadic) happened during the last 6% of those 200,000 years.
- The Industrial Revolution and the onset of modern capitalism happened during only during the last 0.1% of those 200,000 years.
*the 200,000 years figure is conservative and doesn’t take into account the 200,000,000 years of pre-hominid mammalian evolution. Doing so, on the basis of the mammalian brain & physiology being what’s important here, means our modern stressors have been around for <0.0001% of the time we have.
So guess what, our bodies haven’t caught up. As far as our bodies are concerned, we are supposed to be enjoying the sunshine of grassy plains and the shade of woodland while eating fruit.
- When the alarm clock goes off, our body panics and prepares us to either flee or help fight the predator, because why else would we have been woken so?
- When we have a pressing deadline for work, our brain processes this as “if we don’t do this, we will literally starve and die”.
- When people are upset or angry with us, there’s a part of our brain that fears exile from the tribe and resultant death.
…and so on.
Health Risks of High Cortisol
The long-term stressors are the biggest issue for health. Unless you have a heart condition or other relevant health problem, almost anyone can weather a brief unpleasant surprise. But if something persists? That prompts the body to try to protect you, bless it. The body’s attempts backfire, because…
- One way it does this by making sure to save as much food as possible in the form of body fat
- It’ll also increase your appetite, to make sure you eat anything you can while you still can
- It additionally tries to protect you by keeping you on the brink of fight-or-flight readiness, e.g:
- High blood pressure
- High blood sugar levels
- Rapid mood changes—gotta be able to do those heel-turns as necessary and react quickly to any possible threat!
Suffice it to say, these things are not good for your long-term health.
That’s the “Why”—now here’s the “How”:
Lowering your cortisol levels mostly means lowering your stress and/or lowering your stress response. We previously gave some powerful tools for lowering anxiety, which for these purposes amounts to the same thing.
However, we can also make nutritional and lifestyle changes that will reduce our cortisol levels, for example:
- Reduce (ideally: eliminate from your lifestyle) caffeine
- Reduce (ideally: eliminate from your lifestyle) alcohol
- Yes, really. While many understandably turn to alcohol specifically to help manage stress, it only makes it worse long-term.
- Additionally, alcohol directly stimulates cortisol production, counterintuitive as that may be.
Read: Alcohol, Aging, and the Stress Response ← full article (with 37 sources of its own) from the NYMC covering how alcohol stimulates cortisol production and what that means for us
As well as reductions/eliminations, are some things you can add into your lifestyle that will help!
We’ve written previously about some:
Read: Ashwagandha / Read: L-Theanine / Read: CBD Oil
Other things include, no surprises here:
- The Mediterranean diet (nutritious and delicious): https://10almonds.com/mediterranean-diet
- Get 7–9 hours (good quality!) sleep per night: https://10almonds.com/time-pillow-talk
- Get regular exercise (the regularity matters most!): https://10almonds.com/keep-on-keeping-on
Progressive Relaxation
We’ll give this one its own section because we’ve not talked about it before. Maybe you’re familiar. If not, then in a nutshell: progressive relaxation means progressively tensing and then relaxing each part of your body in turn.
Why does this work? Part of it is just a physical trick involving biofeedback and the natural function of muscles to contract and relax in turn, but the other part is even cleverer:
It basically tricks the most primitive part of your brain, the limbic system, into thinking you had a fight and won, telling it “thank you very much for the cortisol but we don’t need it anymore”.
Take a Hike! Or a Stroll… You Do You!
Last but not least: go connect with your roots. Spend time in the park, or at least the garden. Have a picnic, if the weather suits. Go somewhere you can spend time around leafy green things under a blue sky (we realize the blue sky may be subject to availability in some locations, but do what you can!).
Remember also: just as your body’s responses will be tricked by the alarm clock or the housework, they will also be easily tricked by blue and green stuff around you. If a sunny garden isn’t available in your location, a picture of one as your desktop background is the next best thing.
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Cherries’ Very Healthy Wealth Of Benefits!
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Cherries’ Health Benefits Simply Pop
First, be aware, there are different kinds:
Sweet & Sour
Cherries can be divided into sweet vs sour. These are mostly nutritionally similar, though sour ones do have some extra benefits.
Sweet and sour cherries are closely related but botanically different plants; it’s not simply a matter of ripeness (or preparation).
These can mostly be sorted into varieties of Prunus avium and Prunus cerasus, respectively:
Cherry Antioxidants: From Farm to Table
Sour cherry varieties include morello and montmorency, so look out for those names in particular when doing your grocery-shopping.
You may remember that it’s a good rule of thumb that foods that are more “bitter, astringent, or pungent” will tend to have a higher polyphenol content (that’s good):
Enjoy Bitter Foods For Your Heart & Brain
Juiced up
Almost certainly for reasons of budget and convenience, as much as for standardization, most studies into the benefits of cherries have been conducted using concentrated cherry juice as a supplement.
At home, we need not worry so much about standardization, and our budget and convenience are ours to manage. To this end, as a general rule of thumb, whole fruits are pretty much always better than juice:
Which Sugars Are Healthier, And Which Are Just The Same?
Antioxidant & anti-inflammatory!
Cherries are a very good source of antioxidants, and as such they also reduce inflammation, which in turn means ameliorating autoimmune diseases, from common things like arthritis…
…to less common things like gout:
Cherry Consumption and the Risk of Recurrent Gout Attacks
This can also be measured by monitoring uric acid metabolites:
Consumption of cherries lowers plasma urate in healthy women
Anti-diabetic effect
Most of the studies on this have been rat studies, and the human studies have been less “the effect of cherry consumption on diabetes” and more a matter of separate studies adding up to this conclusion in, the manner of “cherries have this substance, this substance has this effect, therefore cherries will have this effect”. You can see an example of this discussed over the course of 15 studies, here:
A Review of the Health Benefits of Cherries ← skip to section 2.2.1: “Cherry Intake And Diabetes”
In short, the jury is out on cherry juice, but eating cherries themselves (much like getting plenty of fruit in general) is considered good against diabetes.
Good for healthy sleep
For this one, the juice suffices (actual cherries are still recommended, but the juice gave clear significant positive results):
Pilot Study of the Tart Cherry Juice for the Treatment of Insomnia and Investigation of Mechanisms ← this was specifically in people over the age of 50
Importantly, it’s not that cherries have a sedative effect, but rather they support the body’s ability to produce melatonin adequately when the time comes:
Effect of tart cherry juice (Prunus cerasus) on melatonin levels and enhanced sleep quality
Post-exercise recovery
Cherries are well-known for boosting post-exercise recovery, though they may actually improve performance during exercise too, if eaten beforehand/
For example, these marathon-runners who averaged 13% compared to placebo control:
As for its recovery benefits, we wrote about this before:
How To Speed Up Recovery After A Workout (According To Actual Science)
Want to get some?
We recommend your local supermarket (or farmer’s market!), but if for any reason you prefer to take a supplement, here’s an example product on Amazon
Enjoy!
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Triphala Against Cognitive Decline, Obesity, & More
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Triphala is not just one thing, it is a combination of three plants being used together as one medicine:
- Alma (Emblica officinalis)
- Bibhitaki (Terminalia bellirica)
- Haritaki (Terminalia chebula)
…generally prepared in a 1:1:1 ratio.
This is a traditional preparation from ayurveda, and has enjoyed thousands of years of use in India. In and of itself, ayurveda is classified as a pseudoscience (literally: it doesn’t adhere to scientific method; instead, it merely makes suppositions that seem reasonable and acts on them), but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t still have a lot to offer—because, simply put, a lot of ayurvedic medicines work (and a lot don’t).
So, ayurveda’s unintended job has often been finding things for modern science to test.
For more on ayurveda: Ayurveda’s Contributions To Science (Without Being Itself Rooted in Scientific Method)
So, under the scrutiny of modern science, how does triphala stand up?
Against cognitive decline
It has most recently come to attention because one of its ingredients, the T. chebula, has been highlighted as effective against mild cognitive impairment (MCI) by several mechanisms of action, via its…
❝171 chemical constituents and 11 active constituents targeting MCI, such as flavonoids, which can alleviate MCI, primarily through its antioxidative, anti-inflammatory, and neuroprotective properties. T. Chebula shows potential as a natural medicine for the treatment and prevention of MCI.❞
Read in full: The potential of Terminalia chebula in alleviating mild cognitive impairment: a review
The review was quite groundbreaking, to the extent that it got a pop-science article written about it:
We’d like to talk about those 11 active constituents in particular, but we don’t have room for all of them, so we’ll mention that one of them is quercetin, which we’ve written about before:
Fight Inflammation & Protect Your Brain, With Quercetin
For gut health
It’s also been found to improve gut health by increasing transit time, that is to say, how slowly things move through your gut. Counterintuitively, this reduces constipation (without being a laxative), by giving your gut more time to absorb everything it needs to, and more time for your gut bacteria to break down the things we can’t otherwise digest:
For weight management
Triphala can also aid with weight reduction, particularly in the belly area, by modulating our insulin responses to improve insulin sensitivity:
Want to try some?
We don’t sell it, but here for your convenience is an example product on Amazon 😎
Enjoy!
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Best Salt for Neti Pots?
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❓ Q&A With 10almonds Subscribers!
Q: What kind of salt is best for neti pots?
A: Non-iodised salt is usually recommended, but really, any human-safe salt is fine. By this we mean for example:
- Sodium chloride (like most kitchen salts),
- Potassium chloride (as found in “reduced sodium” kitchen salts), or
- Magnesium sulfate (also known as epsom salts).
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Dr. Greger’s Anti-Aging Eight
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Dr. Greger’s Anti-Aging Eight
This is Dr. Michael Greger. We’ve featured him before: Brain Food? The Eyes Have It!
This time, we’re working from his latest book, the excellent “How Not To Age”, which we reviewed all so recently. It is very information-dense, but we’re going to be focussing on one part, his “anti-aging eight”, that is to say, eight interventions he rates the most highly to slow aging in general (other parts of the book pertained to slowing eleven specific pathways of aging, or preserving specific bodily functions against aging, for example).
Without further ado, his “anti-aging eight” are…
- Nuts
- Greens
- Berries
- Xenohormesis & microRNA manipulation
- Prebiotics & postbiotics
- Caloric restriction / IF
- Protein restriction
- NAD+
As you may have noticed, some of these are things might appear already on your grocery shopping list; others don’t seem so “household”. Let’s break them down:
Nuts, greens, berries
These are amongst the most nutrient-dense and phytochemical-useful parts of the diet that Dr. Greger advocates for in his already-famous “Dr. Greger’s Daily Dozen”.
For brevity, we’ll not go into the science of these here, but will advise you: eat a daily portion of nuts, a daily portion of berries, and a couple of daily portions of greens.
Xenohormesis & microRNA manipulation
You might, actually, have these on your grocery shopping list too!
Hormesis, you may recall from previous editions of 10almonds, is about engaging in a small amount of eustress to trigger the body’s self-strengthening response, for example:
Xenohormesis is about getting similar benefits, second-hand.
For example, plants that have been grown to “organic” standards (i.e. without artificial pesticides, herbicides, fertilizers) have had to adapt to their relatively harsher environment by upping their levels of protective polyphenols and other phytochemicals that, as it turns out, are as beneficial to us as they are to the plants:
Hormetic Effects of Phytochemicals on Health and Longevity
Additionally, the flip side of xenohormesis is that some plant compounds can themselves act as a source of hormetic stress that end up bolstering us. For example:
In essence, it’s not just that it has anti-oxidant effect; it also provides a tiny oxidative-stress immunization against serious sources of oxidative stress—and thus, aging.
MicroRNA manipulation is, alas, too complex to truly summarize an entire chapter in a line or two, but it has to do with genetic information from the food that we eat having a beneficial or deleterious effect to our own health:
Diet-derived microRNAs: unicorn or silver bullet?
A couple of quick takeaways (out of very many) from Dr. Greger’s chapter on this is to spring for the better quality olive oil, and skip the cow’s milk:
- Impact of Phenol-Enriched Virgin Olive Oils on the Postprandial Levels of Circulating microRNAs Related to Cardiovascular Disease
- MicroRNA exosomes of pasteurized milk: potential pathogens of Western diseases
Prebiotics & Postbiotics
We’re short on space, so we’ll link you to a previous article, and tell you that it’s important against aging too:
Making Friends With Your Gut (You Can Thank Us Later)
An example of how one of Dr. Greger’s most-recommended postbiotics helps against aging, by the way:
- The mitophagy activator urolithin A is safe and induces a molecular signature of improved mitochondrial and cellular health in humans
- Urolithin A improves muscle strength, exercise performance, and biomarkers of mitochondrial health in a randomized trial in middle-aged adults
(Urolithin can be found in many plants, and especially those containing tannins)
See also: How to Make Urolithin Postbiotics from Tannins
Caloric restriction / Intermittent fasting
This is about lowering metabolic load and promoting cellular apoptosis (programmed cell death; sounds bad; is good) and autophagy (self-consumption; again, sounds bad; is good).
For example, he cites the intermittent fasters’ 46% lower risk of dying in the subsequent years of follow-up in this longitudinal study:
For brevity we’ll link to our previous IF article, but we’ll revisit caloric restriction in a main feature on of these days:
Fasting Without Crashing? We sort the science from the hype!
Dr. Greger favours caloric restriction over intermittent fasting, arguing that it is easier to adhere to and harder to get wrong if one has some confounding factor (e.g. diabetes, or a medication that requires food at certain times, etc). If adhered to healthily, the benefits appear to be comparable for each, though.
Protein restriction
In contrast to our recent main feature Protein vs Sarcopenia, in which that week’s featured expert argued for high protein consumption levels, protein restriction can, on the other hand, have anti-aging effects. A reminder that our body is a complex organism, and sometimes what’s good for one thing is bad for another!
Dr. Greger offers protein restriction as a way to get many of the benefits of caloric restriction, without caloric restriction. He further notes that caloric restriction without protein restriction doesn’t decrease IGF-1 levels (a marker of aging).
However, for FGF21 levels (these are good and we want them higher to stay younger), what matters more than lowering proteins in general is lowering levels of the amino acid methionine—found mostly in animal products, not plants—so the source of the protein matters:
For example, legumes deliver only 5–10% of the methionine that meat does, for the same amount of protein, so that’s a factor to bear in mind.
NAD+
This is about nicotinamide adenine dinucleotide, or NAD+ to its friends.
NAD+ levels decline with age, and that decline is a causal factor in aging, and boosting the levels can slow aging:
Therapeutic Potential of NAD-Boosting Molecules: The In Vivo Evidence
Can we get NAD+ from food? We can, but not in useful quantities or with sufficient bioavailability.
Supplements, then? Dr. Greger finds the evidence for their usefulness lacking, in interventional trials.
How to boost NAD+, then? Dr. Greger prescribes…
Exercise! It boosts levels by 127% (i.e., it more than doubles the levels), based on a modest three-week exercise bike regimen:
Skeletal muscle NAMPT is induced by exercise in humans
Another study on resistance training found the same 127% boost:
Take care!
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Dr. Patrick Walsh’s Guide to Surviving Prostate Cancer – by Dr. Patrick Walsh & Janet Farrar Worthington
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Prostate cancer is not glamorous or fun, and neither is this book.
Nevertheless, it’s a disease that affects 12% of men in general, and 60% of men aged 60+, with that percentage climbing every year after that.
So, if you have a prostate or love someone who has one, this book is worthwhile reading—yes, even as a preventative.
Like many cancers, prostate cancer is easy to treat if caught very early, becomes harder to treat as it goes, and almost impossible to cure if it gets as far as metastasis (i.e., it spread). Like all cancers, it’s better off avoided entirely if possible.
This book covers all the stages:
- How to avoid it
- How to check for it
- How to “nip it in the bud”
- Why some might want to delay treatment (!)
- What options are available afterwards
This latter is quite extensive, and covers not just surgery, but radiation, thermo- or cryoablation, and hormone therapy.
And as for surgery, not just “remove the tumor”, but other options like radical prostatectomy, and even orchiectomy. Not many men will choose to have their testicles removed to stop them from feeding the prostate, but the point is that this book is comprehensive.
It’s asking whenever possible “is there another option?” and exploring all options, with information and without judgment, at each stage.
The writing style (likely co-author Worthington’s influence; she is an award-winning science-writer) is very “for the layman”, and that’s really helpful in demystifying a lot of what can be quite opaque in the field of oncology.
Bottom line: absolutely not an enjoyable read, but a potentially lifesaving one, especially given the odds we mentioned up top.
Click here to check out Dr. Patrick Walsh’s Guide To Surviving Prostate Cancer, and be prepared!
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