Be it a bombed reading quiz or a botched science experiment, at some point every student fails in school. But students with a greater fear of failure are more likely to interpret normal academic challenges as severe and have less capacity to cope with academic stress.
In the last few years, educators Jennifer Boogaart in Arkansas, Alicia Wiechert in Illinois, and Doreen Kelleher in Massachusetts have all noticed a noticed a significant rise in perfectionism among their elementary students—a “kind of a mini-pandemic,” said Boogaart, a K-5 gifted enrichment teacher at John Tyson Elementary School of Innovation in Springdale, Ark. A rising social media focus on “curating” children’s activities to focus only on success and accomplishments exacerbates the problem, they say.