How parents’ drive to perfect children can backfire

By Elissa Strauss, CNN

(CNN) — The instinct to fix things for our kids is all too human. Parents are hardwired to do our best to clear any roadblocks from their path.

This impulse served humans well for millennia when such roadblocks were much more likely to be a matter of life or death. But fast-forward to today, an age of relative safety and comfort for many, and this instinct may no longer be serving us.

Nevertheless, we just can’t stop trying to fix things.

Making matters worse is that we live in an age of so-called experts offering an ever-growing pool of advice on how to resolve any challenges children are facing. Mind you, we may never have considered these challenges as a problem in the first place. Think, for example, about our intense drive to optimize kids’ diets. Once we do consider such issues, it’s hard to sit back and do nothing.

Not too long ago, a less-than-perfect kid was just a kid. Today, those children are our projects, and find me a parent who doesn’t feel, even if they don’t act on, the pressure to perfect their kids.

In her new book “Actually, You’re Fine: A Compassionate, Practical Guide to Maximizing Your Child’s Potential in the Age of Anxiety,” clinical neuropsychologist and child development expert Katie S. Davis considers how we got here, and why parents should start seeing more of those less-than-perfect kids as, well, fine.

I spoke with Davis, who’s based in Manhattan, about the rise of physical and psychological diagnoses for children, the social and personal forces behind this increase, and how our drive to perfect children can backfire.

This interview has been condensed and edited for clarity.

CNN: I want to start with getting something important out of the way. You aren’t against psychological or physical diagnoses for kids, right? Instead, you are just trying to raise a red flag around the rise of diagnoses.

Katie S. Davis: Yes. My research and clinical work is completely focused on neurodevelopmental disorders, how they happen, why they happen, and how we support kids who have them. My entire career is based on the existence of these disorders, and I for sure think they are real.

One of my goals writing this book was to make sure that kids who really have these diagnoses are protected. When everyone in the class is claiming to have ADHD, or attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, it is harder for a child with real ADHD to have their struggles taken seriously. To succeed they require time, professional attention, money and space, and there is a problem when those resources are spread too thin.

CNN: You say there has been a rise in diagnoses for children. How common have they become?

Davis: The number of people with diagnoses of learning disorders, ADHD and autism spectrum disorder has just skyrocketed in the past few decades. Some of that comes from increased awareness, better identification and reduced stigma, which are all good things.

But, at the same time, the sheer numbers seem implausible. This many people can’t be below what we consider the threshold of normal behavior. And the other important thing is that the rise is driven by mild cases. It is the kids I like to think of as edge cases.

Overall, I think there has been a lot of concept creep and blurring of the line between what we consider normal and abnormal. We have become more likely to categorize unsavory but ultimately normal behaviors as disordered, when, in fact, they are not.

CNN: When is a diagnosis useful?

Davis: Diagnoses are useful, I think, as a clinician, for two major reasons. No. 1 is access to services and accommodations at school, and insurance reimbursement for therapy. It is also useful for the sake of communication, professional to professional, or layperson to professional. If we both know the diagnostic criteria for ADHD, we can communicate about a person and their struggles without making a whole list.

For many people, a diagnosis is validating. It legitimizes their experiences and helps them find a community of other people who have similar struggles. That said, I think it’s slightly problematic that we live in a world where you need to have your problems medicalized to feel that they’re real.

CNN: Tell me more about why a diagnosis can be unhelpful — to the family and to society.

Davis: I can definitely understand why people say, “If the diagnosis can help you access treatment you wouldn’t ordinarily be able to access, what is the harm in giving it?” I hear this from clinicians all the time who give a diagnosis based on seemingly normal scores, and I disagree.

No. 1: What does that label mean to that kid? Despite our best intentions, when we use a diagnostic label, we are telling the kid, there’s something wrong with you, and we need to fix it. What’s that going to mean for their sense of self, and their self-concept, and how they feel about their ability to control their destiny and meet their goals?

In some ways, it can be a growth-limiting message to send to kids, and we should be very careful.

No. 2 is what I already spoke about — the equity stuff. If everybody is disabled, then no one’s really disabled, right?

No. 3 is the opportunity costs for the child. If a child who doesn’t really need speech therapy is spending time doing it, then what aren’t they doing? Are they able to play soccer? Go to day camp, do their homework, have a playdate? Of course, those interventions often cost money that parents could spend on something else.

CNN: There are also parents who seek help not because they want their children to be perfect, but because they worry about how their children’s behavior is impacting others.

Davis: I want to start by reminding parents, especially mothers, that you really can’t win. I struggle to find a mother who is not criticized in one way or another for how they’re raising their kid.

We pathologize the disruptive kids, and we pathologize the kids who are trying to do a good job and see them as “people pleasers.”

As for the parents of disruptive kids, life would be much easier if we had so much control of how our kids behaved when they went out into the world. That’s a very deterministic view of parenting. It’s hard, but I think it is OK to let that kid face the consequences he faces from the teacher and other kids in the class and hope that your kid will learn from it. The parent just has to try hard to remember that it has nothing to do with them, and they are there to help the kid process whatever happens.

It’s also important to remember that, most often, development is a pretty resilient process. When I was in high school, I was a really diligent Type A student who worked really hard and got good grades. There were the other kids in my grade who were not, like, degenerates, but didn’t try hard and were disruptive.

Here we are, decades later, and we’ve all kind of ended up in the same place. There are a very small number of people who go on to do truly great things, and a very small number who go on to need support throughout their lives, and the vast majority of us are going to end up clustered in the middle. And that’s OK.

CNN: Can you dig into where this need to pathologize our children’s “abnormalities” came from?

Davis: Part of it is because of our obsession with the brain and neuroimaging, and thinking that behavior is biologically determined. This is all part of a bigger trend of what we take seriously, and how culturally we put a lot more stake in hard sciences and getting validation through science what we could clearly see through our own eyes.

CNN: You write about how if we think of these things as a matter of our mind, instead of our brains, we’d likely approach it with more nuance. Because the mind isn’t measurable. But today, people want to measure and evaluate everything, and they want a plan for whatever they find.

Davis: Yes, we trust biology, chemistry, physics and neuroscience. We don’t really trust education, psychology and sociology, which seem mushier to people. There is a lack of trust, and people delegitimize those who approach problems through those lenses.

CNN: Then there is the parenting culture that has made us all optimizing perfectionists, whether we like it or not. How is that factoring in?

Davis: This is really easy advice for me to give and more difficult for me to accept to incorporate in my own life.

Somehow fine is no longer fine, right? Either we, our kids included, are excellent, or we’re failing. It’s like there’s almost nothing in between and being fine has become unacceptable. Many of us are sucked into the college rat race and the myth that if you don’t go to the right college, then you’re not going to get a good job, and then your life is going to stink forever and ever.

It’s so absurd, and we all continue to feed it, and the internet, which has everyone performing and curating their lives all the time, doesn’t help. It makes us all so insecure.

Then the last piece of it is the rise of parenting experts, all of whom have a financial interest in making you feel like you don’t know what you’re doing. And they are all offering conflicting advice! It all breeds insecurity and self-questioning, and it’s hard to avoid thinking that if I only did things differently, I would have kids who are better than fine. I would have an excellent kid.

CNN: I love your insights about our increasing inability to hold contradictions — the notion that two things can be true, and how that relates to our optimizing parenting instincts.

Davis: My son is almost 3, and he walks with his toes pointed in. He’s an otherwise pretty athletic guy. I could intervene, which could be beneficial, and I understand the value of early physical therapy. Or I could wait to see if he grows out of it — his pediatrician says he probably will — and that makes more sense for our family right now. They’re both possible, right? And I just have to live with the discomfort of knowing that.

Maybe it will be fine. Or maybe it won’t be perfect.

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