Girls grow up wanting to be perfect. More than that: they think that they have to be perfect to be liked, admired, and successful.
The perfectly behaved young girl is an “angel.” The perfect daughter is a dream–she does what her parents ask and conforms to their wishes. The perfect student always follows her teachers instructions and is at the top of her class. She selects her activities and courses based on those she can perform perfectly, without flaws, deliberately choosing what she’s already best at doing. The perfect friend does what her friends want to do, agrees with their likes and dislikes, and does nice things for them. And underneath it all are very specific expectations about physical appearance, too. After all, the perfect girl (and later on the perfect woman) is pretty, fit, and makes an effort to look attractive.
This outward perfection–and the conformity to others’ wishes, instructions, needs, and desires about their behavior and their appearance–becomes a deep-seated obsession for girls, even at the subconscious level. Somehow girls–and women–feel they will only be loved, respected, and valued if they maintain this facade of being the perfect daughter, student, friend, and later girlfriend, wife, mother, employee, boss. (Note: The mechanism behind this “somehow” needs much more exploration in future posts.)
But while this perfectionism appears to win girls friends and fans, it is incredibly destructive in the long run. Our culture’s expectation that girls and women will behave, and look, a certain way, and that anything outside that is flawed, unwelcome, disruptive, even dangerous, creates an iron-clad box that traps them.
This is not the way to grow women with fresh ideas and plans. This is not the way to raise women leaders.
Leadership is about taking risks and putting your own ideas out there, thinking up original strategies, and–yes, dare I say it?–making mistakes. Errors. Even failing. If you try something outside the boundaries of “perfect” and compliant, rule-following behavior, you might just try something that doesn’t work. You might land face first on the pavement. You might even make enemies and people won’t like you.
What’s more, girls aren’t being encouraged to be true to their own minds and their own potential. Authenticity is rooted being unafraid to voice what you really think–not what your teachers, parents, friends, boyfriend, husband, boss, or social media followers think. It’s about creating your own style–including in your appearance.
So the “teacher’s pet” perfect girl won’t end up at the top of the class in life. Her training in the school of perfection has hampered her, enchained her. This is true behavior-wise and also in the realm of academics and career. And this is something I’ve experienced myself as I try to break away from “good girl” behaviors into taking on new, riskier challenges in my life.
How can we change this situation for girls today? It’s an urgent question to me as the mother of two daughters.
I know I’m not the only person worried about this problem. Numerous Ted talks, research studies, and books are tackling it from various points of view. I’m researching them now and hope to come up with a range of strategies, and then investigate how they are used now and how they could be expanded in the future.
I have come across an approach recently that’s worth exploring: design thinking.
The premise of design thinking is that you should just try things out. Don’t be afraid to fail the first time, because you can always try again. Most endeavors are an iterative process. You can give it a whirl, and if it doesn’t work out, tweak it, and give it another spin. This can apply to marketing products, to creating new inventions, to building an educational program, and even to how you move forward in your life and career, as the incredibly successful book and Stanford course Designing Your Life make clear.
Design thinking has started to make a difference in small ways is the ideas spread. I am eager to see how it could change education, especially for young girls. In my daughter’s third-grade class, her teacher encouraged kids to try out new ways of approaching projects and of doing group classwork. She told them, “It’s OK to try something and to make mistakes. You don’t have to do it right the first time.” The teacher informed students that she did not care if they spelled some words wrong in an essay… or if their handwriting wasn’t perfect. Keep going, keep trying, and keep working on it.
Being the imperfect human beings that we are, making a mistake doesn’t mean you are a bad person–it doesn’t mean you are a “failure.” And it certainly doesn’t mean you are anything less because you are less than perfect.
MeredithInk 