Perfect education syndrome: tired parents and children drowned by pressure
- The desire to have a perfect child who receives perfect education and a culture based on expectations and achievements creates problems of stress, anxiety and attitude, and is an extended phenomenon. This is what new research says.
They say it is a trend that has multiplied in these years: as if their children were a personal project, parents want education to be perfect, with the best pedagogical books, with the best teachers and the best extra-school coaches and coaches, so that the child gives the best results as soon as possible without wasting time, because the culture of achievement is living us.
However, in homes where the performance and lack of time in the imprint of the perfect plan becomes obsession, you risk eliminating childhood because the child needs to explore, discover, experiment, understand, develop at its pace… rather than aspiring. And in addition, the dream of a thousand towers and castles that have been built often collapses in adolescence, when the young man who has felt that the happiness of his parents depended on his achievements, drowned by pressure, begins to have rupturistic attitudes and suddenly abandons football and dance classes.
It is curious, moreover, that fathers and mothers who seek the excellence of their son in many areas may tend to overprotect their sons and daughters in other basic areas for the development of autonomy.
A young man who feels that the happiness of his parents depended on his accomplishments, drowned by pressure, begins to have disruptive attitudes during adolescence.
Ways of living paternity
La Vanguardia has taken up these reflections from a study published by the American University of Ohio. The research affirms that the ideas of perfect education are exhausted by many parents, and that this tiredness is related to internal and external expectations, to ways of living paternity, to demands and to feeling judged. “The desire to be a perfect mother or father causes stress, anxiety, disappointment and feeling of guilt, and stifles the desires to have a perfect child,” experts say.
"How do you seek balance with expectations? We have to know how to really see what skills and what improvement gaps they have, and accept them because what they need from us is to recognize them."
After all, our children will internalize what we transmit to them, as Esther Martínez explained in ARGIA: “How we see them, they have a huge influence on them. When we talk to children, we see that when expectations are very high, for example, they push themselves to reach the expectation, and it's related to the labels: if I put a label on my child, it's very quick and saliva, and if he doesn't look like that, it will influence self-esteem. Even if the expectation is not positive: if I repeat it is vague, it will have a vague behavior, because for her the most important thing is for me to see it. How do we seek balance with expectations? Accepting what they are, we have to know how to really see what their skills are and what their needs for improvement are and accept them because accepting what they are is what they need from us.”
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