The Pressure to Be Perfect: How Academic Expectations Are Crippling the Mental Health of Teenage Girls

Burnout doesn't look like laziness, it looks like this. When the pressure to perform never lets up, even the most driven girls eventually hit a wall.

For so many teen girls, perfectionism has become second nature. It’s a pervasive expectation we have of ourselves in everything we do. If you ask a girl how long she’s been a perfectionist, chances are she’ll say that she can’t remember a time when she wasn’t.

So many of my friends, myself included, feel like we’re never doing enough, even when we’re excelling. Because for perfectionists, it’s like nothing is ever good enough.

To investigate this, and a number of other variables known to impact teen mental health, I sent a survey out to 1,000 teenage girls across America.

Over 70% reported academic pressure as one of their top life stressors.

Survey Patterns

The girls who scored the highest in feeling academic pressure reported:

• Lower happiness scores

• Lower confidence scores

• Frequent sleep issues

• Frequent emotional burnout

• Frequent fear of failure

According to the CDC, over 60% of teens are stressed out about their academics on a daily basis, and girls are more likely to experience anxiety and depression as a direct result.

The Confusion Around “Being Perfect” and Self-Worth

Teens, and especially teen girls, have confused what they’re doing with their self-worth. It’s so easy to fall into the trap of thinking that “If I just get that A” or “If I score a few more goals in soccer, then I’ll be enough… then I’ll be happy.”

But life doesn’t work that way.

All the striving to constantly perform in an attempt to attain something that is unattainable (perfection), often leads to exhaustion and burnout.

Solutions

Girls need more mentors and adults around them who are guiding them to develop a growth mindset. This means developing the ability to learn from shortcomings and mistakes. This means choosing optimization over perfectionism - and focusing on making little bits of progress, and actually celebrating that progress! 

Parents also play a big role here. Just as Carol Dweck teaches in Mindset: The New Psychology of Success, praising your daughter's effort is much more beneficial to her mental health and growth mindset than praising her for her results. And when parents teach their girls that their self-worth is untouchable, and she’s always valuable - no matter what results she gets in school or sports - this is how we begin to end the perfectionism epidemic that’s crippling our girls.