15 Great Picture Books to Help Children Manage Perfectionism

Picture books have long been used as a source of both entertainment and education in the classroom. For years, teachers have been using the many colorful words and images provided to us by authors and artists to illustrate so many of the things children need to learn in school.

We use picture books for everything from helping show children how to behave properly in class (hello, Interrupting Chicken ;)) and how to treat each other with kindness to the specific content information we need to learn in our math, science, and social studies classes. Books can help children develop a sense of empathy, providing windows into the way other people live and grow in our world.  And they can act as mirrors, reflecting events, people, and feelings of the readers themselves.

Picture books are also a great way to help children solve problems they may be facing in their lives. This may be particularly true of children who are developing in any way outside the norms of what we might expect of a "typically developing" child (is there such a thing?).

I posted recently about nine ways we can help gifted children manage perfectionism and/or the fear of failure. Using books, of course, is one of the best (and easiest, I think) ways we can help give our students some strategies for dealing with perfectionist tendencies. Tackling books like the ones I'm sharing with you today is one way we can allow children to see their own reflection by showing them other children who have faced similar struggles.  The books can also give them some relatable tools for solving some of the problems that may arise when perfectionism threatens to take hold. The books in this post are suitable for elementary (K-6) school children. 

Without further ado (and in no particular order)...

Books to Help Children Manage Perfectionism and Fear of Failure

A Perfectly Messed-Up Story is a silly and interactive story about a boy who wants to tell a perfect story but keeps getting tripped up along the way by obstacles and blemishes like a smudge of jelly or coffee on the page from a reader. He gets frustrated but eventually realizes his story is great, in spite of the imperfections. 

Mistakes that Worked: 40 Familiar Inventions & How They Came to Be is an informational text that tells the stories behinds many familiar inventions that started out as mistakes. It's an inspirational and engaging book that helps show children the value in making mistakes.  

From Peter H. Reynolds, author of The Dot, the book Ish illustrates the story of Ramone, the child who loves to draw, until he was teased for one of his drawings. He spent many months trying to draw pictures that were just right, but he felt like he could never get them just so, and gave up on drawing until his little sister came along offering a new perspective. There are so many applications for this book in the classroom that perhaps you and your students can live "ishfully" ever after. 

What to Do When Mistakes Make You Quake: A Kid's Guide to Accepting Imperfection is written by two clinical psychologists.  This book uses cognitive-behavioral principles and techniques to help children begin to cope with making mistakes and put their worries aside so they can explore new places without fear.

Another book about learning to accept making mistakes, this story focuses on a frog named Stickley. With help of his grandfather, Stickley learns to say, "Oh well," when something doesn't go quite right. Stickley Makes a Mistake is authored by Brenda S. Miles, Ph.D., a pediatric neuropsychologist, and provides tips to caregivers about using the book. 






Your Fantastic Elastic Brain, Stretch It, Shape It, is a great informational text that explores what the brain is and the many wonderful things it can do, including GROWING and STRETCHING. It is a great book that focuses on the ever-popular growth mindset. It emphasizes the control and power we all have over our brain's growth, ability to overcome, and capacity to stretch and learn more and more information. 

Written with the tween (ages 9-13) in mind, What to Do When Good Enough Isn't Good Enough is a book about is a book that teaches children about perfectionism and its potential downfalls. Using realistic vignettes, the book illustrates how kids can face perfectionism and use practical strategies to move away from always feeling like everything has to be just so. The book is written by a licensed psychologist and family therapist, Thomas S. Greenspon, Ph.D.





Written by a teacher, Being Bella: Discovering How to Be Proud of Your Best is a story about a first-grade student who faces many typical problems that a first grader is likely to face on any given day. With the help and encouragement of family and friends, Bella starts to realize that everyone makes mistakes, and we can grow from those mistakes.
*Be sure to check your local libraries for this one. Looks to me like it may be out of print--it's crazy expensive!* 




The Dot is a wonderfully written and illustrated circle story by author Peter H. Reynolds that shows how a child once paralyzed by fears of imperfection overcame her fear with the help of an encouraging teacher. This is a great book to use at the beginning of the year or any time your students are struggling with getting started on an activity or project because of their fear of failure.




This is an adventurous story about a girl who gets extraordinarily frustrated when she tries something new and fails time and time again. Filled with lots of colorful vocabulary words (wrenches, fiddles, tweaks, and fashions, to name a few), The Most Magnificent Thing gives children a great example of how one child deals with frustration and recovers from a string of mistakes, eventually reaching her goal.




Sometimes mistakes can be beautiful, and this is exactly what author Barney Saltzberg shows children in this humorous interactive book. In Beautiful Oops!, Each page shows how a mistake can turn into something lovely and artistic, teaching children that in every mistake, there is an opportunity.

In Mark Pett and Gary Rubenstein's The Girl Who Never Made Mistakes Beatrice Bottomwell never made mistakes. Well, not until it was time for the school's talent show. Beatrice made a mistake. And it was a BIG one. Everyone in the audience was stunned until Beatrice began laughing. Everyone started laughing together and Beatrice realized that making mistakes can actually be fun!

In the story, Everyone Loves Cupcake, by Kelly DiPucchio, Cupcake works hard at trying to get everyone to like her. She worked extra hard at being perfect, but the pressure to be perfect wore on her over time. Eventually, she decided to share with her friends the real Cupcake, and her friends love her so much more for just being herself instead of always trying to be perfect!







In Nobody's Perfect: A Story for Children About Perfectionism, by Ellen Flanagan Burns, you'll meet Sally Sanders, a girl who is good at everything she tries. The problem is, she's always afraid that she will feel like a total failure if there's every something she's not good at. Thankfully, Sally's mom and teacher are there to help her see that she doesn't have to worry so much about always being the best.

Best for children aged five to nine, Penelope Perfect: A Tale of Perfectionism Gone Wild by Shannon Anderson is a humorous book about a young perfectionist girl whose accidental oversleeping sets off a chain of less-than-perfect events for the day. She ends up being able to laugh at her mistakes, learning that it's okay to go with the flow sometimes and that the world won't end if she's not perfect. Includes tips for parents and teachers about how to help the Penelopes in your life.


Some of these you may love, and some might seem a little contrived, but I think the biggest value in using these books in the classroom is that it helps to develop a narrative about accepting and valuing mistakes.  My hope is that children will eventually be able to incorporate these ideas as part of their own internal dialogue someday. 

Got any other recommendations? I'd love to hear them! Send me an email at jen@soaringwithsnyder.com or connect with me on Instagram or Facebook. 

2

Nine Strategies for Helping Gifted Students Manage Perfectionism

I didn't get my driver's license until I was 20 years old.

And it wasn't because I was some terrible driver who kept failing the driving exam.

It was because until I was 20, I didn't sign up for the test.

I avoided taking the test because I was afraid to fail.

Afraid of making mistakes. Not achieving my goal. Feeling embarrassed in front of the driving examiner, my family, and my friends for not passing the test. Feeling that somehow, I was some kind of loser for not being able to pass a silly test that thousands of "regular" people pass every day.

Does this sound familiar to you? If you haven't personally experienced these feelings, perhaps you've seen signs in your students. Maybe they're procrastinators, avoiding the work until the very last minute. Maybe they avoid certain tasks altogether.  Perhaps they barely try on certain assignments because trying their best and not achieving the (sometimes unrealistic) goals they've set for themselves means they like themselves less because they've associated their self-worth with their achievement and perfection. These children are, essentially, creating a layer of protection around themselves because they never started, tried their hardest, or did their best, so no one can actually judge them on their true capability. This task avoidance is a form of coping with the sometimes crippling effects of perfectionism.

So, how do we help our gifted students develop a healthy mindset about achievement while still allowing them to set high goals and strive to achieve great things?

What is perfectionism and who does it affect?

Perfectionism usually takes on one of two forms: healthy perfectionism and its (appropriately, though not creatively named) opposite, unhealthy perfectionism. Although perfectionism is well documented among the gifted population (even to the point that it is an indicator on screeners for gifted identification), it occurs at pretty much the same rate among the non-gifted population as well.

In this NAGC article, healthy perfectionism has been defined as a person's ability to do their best and then move on, the person's ability to set high personal standards while still being accepting of their imperfect themselves, and being able to manage their behaviors so that they don't interfere with daily life.

According to the same article, perfectionism reaches unhealthy levels when there is a bigger emphasis on or rewarding of performance over other aspects of life, having the perception that one's work is never good enough, feeling continuously dissatisfied about one's work (which could eventually lead to anxiety and depression), experiencing feelings of guilt if not continuously engaged in meaningful work, and having a serious compulsion or drive to achieve, so much so, that the person places their own personal value based on what they accomplish or produce.

Unhealthy perfectionism is also a way of thinking. It's the perception that there are only two options for doing things: it's perfect or it's worthless.

At extreme levels, perfectionism can lead to self-defeat, underachievement, physical pain, alcoholism, eating disorders, depression, OCD and other maladaptive symptoms or behaviors.

How can we help our students deal with perfectionism (fear of failure, and task avoidance)?

Being #totallyhonest here. Unhealthy perfectionism is a complicated beast, with many possible contributors. This list of tips could be pages and pages long, but after much research, I'm leaving nine of the ideas I thought would be most valuable from my perspective as a perfect person recovering perfectionist. 

1. Create or adopt an affective curriculum--we often assume that children pick up these "soft skills" on their own by watching how others interact and deal with things. And to some extent, that is true. But for gifted children and other differently-abled children, some of these skills require extra focus, explicit teaching, modeling, and practice. 
2. Help the child decide ahead of time when to quit--One interesting component of perfectionism is that people sometimes have a hard time deciding when enough is enough. This is definitely something I struggle with (hellooooo lengthy blog posts... 🙄😬). Whether you decide on a time limit or a certain number of sentences, a particular number of objectives, or set of sub-topics, a conference with the child focusing on what a reasonable stopping point is could help release the child from some of the perfection pressure. 
3. Work together to set realistic goals--Make sure that these aren't just any goals. Children who struggle with perfectionism benefit from realistic goals that focus on improvement and/or progress over perfection. It would be beneficial to take the goal setting one step further by helping the child map out incremental steps and set times to check in and take a peek at the progress being made. 
4. Help the child separate their self-worth from grades/products/evaluations and the gifted label--This is a complicated imperative, but we can start by being careful with how we praise perfectionistic students. Focusing on the positive parts of their performance, and focusing on their effort over their achievement are two ways to help. Further, when assignments come back with less than perfect scores, sit down with the child to compare their product with the rubric or expectations of the assignment. Put the child in charge of vocalizing what improvements they would make while teachers/parents focus on what went well. 
5. Share your mistakes with students--This seems obvious, but especially for teachers who like to maintain an aura of perfection, sometimes we really need to consciously take this step. 
6. Study the lives of eminent people-- Focus on the person's path to success, qualities that they
   
   possess that have helped enable their success, and what kind of barriers they had to overcome in order to achieve success. 
7. Change YOUR attitude about failure--Sometimes we need to work on and model our own response to making mistakes. Handling them with humor and a positive attitude goes a long way. Speaking aloud your own internal self-talk about how you can grow from the mistake provides students with a model for their own self-talk. 
8. Play a round of Worst Case Scenario--if your student is really struggling with getting started or if the fear of failure is really preventing them from doing work commensurate with their abilities and you suspect perfectionism is the culprit, sometimes sitting down to think of and write out the actual WORST thing that could happen if the child fails helps put everything into perspective. Chances are, they will see how their big worries are comparing to small potential outcomes, and be able to move on toward meeting their goals. Conferring with the child after the stressful event or assignment would be a great way to help the child start connecting the dots to see that the worst things they had imagined really didn't happen!  
9. Use books with characters who struggle and make mistakes--I'm a big believer in bibliotherapy.  I think sharing books with children that focus on perfectionism and the fear of failure can really go a long way in promoting positive ways to deal with these stresses. Keep an eye out for a future post featuring 15 books you can use with your students! 

I hope that through using these tips, you can help your students start to overcome their own perfectionism. May you have students who do not choose to wait for years to achieve something they really want!

Got other ideas? Leave me a comment or send me an email with suggestions. I'd love to hear them!


P.S. You can get a FREE copy of that infographic with the nine tips above by clicking on the picture, or clickng right here! *Just to be clear, by clicking to get this freebie (and instant access to the growing collection of free resources in my library of subscriber exclusives), you're also agreeing to be added to my email list, where I'll send occasional messages with fresh ideas, tips, and other resources straight to your inbox. You can unsubscribe at any time.*


Thanks so much for stopping by!


Information for this post was collected from the following sources: 

Burdick, Anne Marie. (2017). Gifted Students and Perfectionism. Teaching for High Potential. NAGC

Perfectionism on NAGC Website

Pyryt, Michael. (2004) Helping Gifted Students Cope with Perfectionism. Parenting for High Potential. NAGC

Rimm, Sylvia. (2000). What's Wrong with Perfect? 

Cullins, Ashley. (2017). 6 Ways to Help Your Child Overcome the Fear of Failure. Big Life Journal.

1