Lori and I have been talking a bit lately about perfectionism in children (and let's be honest, in ourselves). She is doing a wonderful series on her blog about art with children and started with observational drawing. As an aside, if you're not reading Lori's blog, you are seriously missing out on amazing information and insight and beauty. I sat down with my kids to participate in some observational drawing and while it was very successful with Gunnar, it was less so with Annika. She was so quickly discouraged by her lack of ability to perfectly recreate what she saw that she just refused to do it and ran away crying to "draw from my imagination." 
I run into this issue a lot with Annika and I think it's because she's so used to things coming easily to her that when she runs into a skill that she has to develop, she doesn't want or even really know how to tackle the process of learning step by step. She's also so afraid of not being the best that if she can't be the best, she often doesn't even want to try. Oh, she'll pay lip service to the idea that trying your hardest is what's most important, but that quickly falls apart when her efforts don't lead to perfection. Add in a competitive streak a mile wide, and we have a lot of someone pouting under the table.
After my email conversation with Lori, where we talked about shifting goals and working on process instead of end results, and the frustration we feel in trying to get our kids past this, I sat and thought for a while. Thought about how to teach process to her. How to defuse her innate competitiveness. And I realized that this is part of the problem at school. Her teacher keeps trying to move her into the reading and math groups with the older children (she's in a multi-age class) because that's where her skills are. But she won't do it because she won't be The Best. She's bored with the kindergarten work but is afraid of doing something hard and failing at it. And that makes sense to me, because let's face it, we all are afraid of failure. We're especially afraid of it when we expect to be The Best. Schools reward The Best. Hard work is all well and good, but what really matters is success - achievement on test scores, achievement in spelling bees, achievement on the soccer field and the football field and the golf course. We don't measure the learning, we only measure the standardized expected outcome. And by doing so, we set up most of our children for some level of feeling like a failure.
So now the task ahead - not just with Annika but with all of them - is to push the idea that the process matters. The hard work matters. The learning and the understanding matter. Pushing yourself beyond your comfort zone and sometimes failing matters. If we don't fail, we don't learn from our mistakes and do it better next time. I need to come back to this myself and continue to push myself to try things that aren't easy and take pleasure in the learning process. I need to let them see me fail and then try again and do better. I need to pick up the projects that are finished to the hard part and then abandoned for something easier and more mindless.
We'll all be better people for learning to try and to push our boundaries. And I'll finally be able to wear my Tangled Yoke cardigan before it's 115 degrees outside. Because those cables aren't going to stop me any longer.
