Learning Points: Pointless pursuit of perfection is consuming teens

A FAMILIAR conversation in any house with a young male today would be that of body image. While self-improvement is always a desirable pursuit, something pathological has crept into the teenage world where they have become consumed with attaining the perfect body. I hear it so often in my clinic; parents describing their children as perfectionists.

They painfully delineate the torture the child is imposing on themselves in the pursuit of that; perfect exam, perfect relationship, perfect life and now; perfect body. And perfectionism is a pursuit that will ultimately end in dejection and disappointment because there is no perfect.