Kids Pushing Too Hard for Perfection

Sept. 20 -- The world applauds perfection. Everywhere we look, we're told perfection's the goal. But can't you have too much of a good thing?

Carly Minder is an example of the pitfalls of perfectionism. She is driven to be perfect.

"You have to look perfect, you have to be thin. … You have to write perfect, you have to do everything perfect. Everything neat, everything nice."

Carly's perfectionism seemed to work for her — for a while. She did so well in school that after kindergarten, she was moved into a program for gifted kids.

Now, 10-year-old Carly reads and writes at a 14-year-old's level. Good for her. But lately, Carly's perfectionism has come to hurt her.

At home, her room no longer looks like a little girl's room. "Why I have nothing on my walls or shelves is because that I cannot handle the imperfection of everyday life," she explained. She took out everything that made it "messy" and put it in a storage closet. Yet she's still not satisfied with her room.

"There's scratches on my stuff. There's dust that I can never seem to get away. My cat — I love Juliet to death but she sheds, and [fur] gets on my clothes and I can't stand it," Carly said.

Needing everything to be perfect means Carly is tough on people around her. She's lost most of her friends.

"I think that they were too imperfect," said Carly.

She was pretty tough on me, too. I asked her to tell me what's imperfect about me. "Just the way your, your hair is and your eyebrows," she said. So am I annoying to be with? I asked. Carly said, "It annoys me."

Kids Fearing Failure

I first reported on perfectionism 10 years ago, when 20/20 asked psychologist Sylvia Rimm, who works with gifted kids, to show us tests she uses to identify unhealthy perfectionism.

In one of those tests, Rimm asked the kids to complete a puzzle that was missing a piece. Some kids just kept trying to complete it. Others got frustrated, angry and then gave up. Rimm said that's unhealthy perfectionism.

Likewise, when Rimm asked them to draw something, some of the gifted kids were so self-critical that they erased more than they drew. One gifted little boy, Caleb, didn't like his picture. "It makes me feel really weird if I don't have it done exactly right," he said.