267. Your perfectionist parenting style may be detrimental to your child

Your perfectionist parenting style may be detrimental to your child By Ariana Eunjung Cha Even if you were horrified at the idea of hovering over your child as Amy Chua did in her polarizing 2011 bestseller "The Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother," I'm betting there was a part of you that looked at her perfect children with at least a tinge of envy. As portrayed in the book, Chua's magic formula of no playdates, no TV and always being No. 1 in everything (except for gym and drama, of course) ended up producing two girls who were straight-A students and who also were wildly talented in music. Oh, and they both ended up going to Harvard University. Critics predicted that daughters Sophia and Lulu would end up being "mentally ill, friendless robots," according to a recent "where are they now" profile in the Telegraph. Instead, they ended up being "polite, modest and thoughtful" as well as successful, the article says, and they remember their childhood as tough — but happy. But are the sisters the norm or exception to this type of parenting? A new study out of the notoriously high-pressure, high-performing Asian city-state of Singapore takes a stab at this question and comes to worrisome conclusions. The research, published in the Journal of Personality, involved 263 children in primary school who were 7 years old when it began and were followed for five years from 2010 to 2014. The work looks at the dark side of perfectionism — maladaptive perfectionism, in research parlance — and how this develops in schoolchildren. Scientists measured what they called "parental intrusiveness" in the first year of the study by asking the child to solve some puzzles while a parent — whichever one was more involved in care — was present. They told the parents that they should feel free to help the child whenever necessary and then secretly rated their behaviors. Their goal was to figure out whether the parents interfered with the child's problem-solving  and whether that help was needed. At the extreme end of the spectrum were parents with what they called highly intrusive behavior. These were the moms and dads who "took over the game to retract a move made by the child," the researchers said. Each of these attempts was logged and coded. Similar tests were repeated as the children aged — at 8, 9 and 11. The researchers then assessed aspects of the child's mental health from talking to both the child and parent. And here's the part where the study becomes alarming. The children with intrusive parents were more likely to be overly critical of themselves, and this tendency increased over the years. And that high or increased level of self-criticism was correlated to elevated levels of depression or anxiety.