Cleaning Starred Items again

JacciM is another one that often makes it to my starred items list in my Google Reader. I was particularly challenge by her post "Encouraging Excellence Without Making Little Perfectionists". I used to be a perfectionist and in my attemept to avoid my children carrying the burden of being perfectionists I went too far and failed to encourage them in excellence. I wish I had read Jacci's post many, many years ago.

Here are some quotes from her posts that outline the main points of her post. I post them here as a reminder to me. Be sure the check out her whole post to really get all that she says about this - it's well worth the read.

"How, then, can we communicate high goals to our children without setting them (and ourselves) up to be completely high-strung perfectionists? I think a great deal of the success lies in understanding at least four things."

"Firstly, it's important to understand that we are completely fallible creatures with finite resources and abilities. In other words, we can't do it all as perfectly as it can be done, we can only do it as perfectly as we can do it. We can't do more than we can do."

"The second helpful thing to understand is that when we react negatively to doing something imperfectly, it is usually stemming from a heart of pride."

"Thirdly, I would think that a great deal of perfectionism in children is directly linked to their parent's emotional reactions to imperfection...You can effectively encourage a child to do better without pressuring him to do so. It requires patience, time, and restraint, but it can be done."

"Lastly, (and this one is especially pertinent to our relationships with our children) we need to see our actions as separate from our intrinsic worth...Children must, from the first, learn that our love for them is because of who they are as our children, not because of what they do...When they produce faulty or careless work, they must know that we are dissatisfied with the work, not with them. And we must leave them with the hope that they can do that work better."