Let Your Kids Be Bad at Things
Sometimes it feels dangerous to expose your child to the full force of your love. You allow yourself to want something small for them, and it’s like a gateway drug: Suddenly you want more and more for them. In my experience, that’s often when perfectionism wanders in and wrecks everything.
After years of self-restraint, my compulsive overachieving core as a parent first appeared in response to an elementary-school talent show. My older daughter and her friends in the third grade decided they wanted to perform “It’s the Hard-Knock Life” from Annie. We met the girls and their mothers at a park one Saturday afternoon, and everyone tried to come up with choreography together. As a former chorus geek, I had a lot of very strong opinions, but I held back. I had learned to bite my tongue in order to fit in with the other suburban parents. By the end of the afternoon, though, we’d gotten only a few verses into the song. Everyone was worried we wouldn’t have enough time to finish before auditions a week later.
My husband, Bill, was out of town, so I went home that night and stayed up late choreographing the performance by myself. I made charts of how the girls would transition from one formation to another. The next morning, I taught the routine to my
