Although few people who don’t know me well would believe it, truth is I am an incredibly lazy person. I am constantly astounded by the amount of effort most people around me put into everything they do. Perfection seems to drive women around me. Perfection at home, with children and at work. When something is done it has to be done right, perfectly, to the best of their ability. It never ceases to amaze me how much harder most of my friends work than I am capable of working. Yet, although I accomplish less in my day to day life than many of my friends this seem to works to my benefit in the long run, and I stress out a lot less.

I have this theory. It starts in my 2 year old classroom. When I look at projects done by my students who are 2 and 3 years old I have no way of differentiating if a certain project was done by a boy or a girl. They are both equally messy, joyful assembly of imperfection. Letters are rarely drawn perfectly, coloring is almost never done within the lines and glue spreads evenly where it is desired and where it is not. However, when I look at work done in my pre-k classroom (where our students are 4 years old) I notice a pattern. The work done by girls seems uniformly neater, handwriting just a bit cleaner. When I look at the work done in our 3 grade ELA workshops and our 4 grade ELA seminars the differences are striking. Girls work is far neater than boys, handwriting is clean and almost painstakingly perfect. The boys work often tends to be far messier. The quality of the writing itself is rarely different, both boys and girls have groups that do well on the common core English language tests, and those who do not. But it seems that when girls don’t do well they put far more effort in then the boys. To them the quality of how they put words together seems almost as important as what they actually say.

I have this theory. It starts early I think. Somewhere around the age of 4 girls learn that they are not simply expected to perform as well as the boys. They are also expected to do it in a more attractive way. By the time they are grown women they are overwhelmed. There are too many balls in the air. They have to look attractive, be neat, take care to be excellent cooks, perfect mothers of course, and don’t forget to succeed at work. If this sounds like a lot of pressure, that’s because it is. And I think there is a very logical explanation of why women earn 70 cents for every dollar a man does. It’s not that they don’t work as much. It’s that they work on wrong things. Men are allowed to be lazy when it comes to far more things than women are allowed to be lazy on. The more balls you have in the air, the harder it is to focus on just one. Aren’t there are men who are just as perfectionist as women are? Perfect homes, perfect image, everything must be done to a t? I’ve met a few, and they are some of the most tortured souls I’ve ever met.

I have this theory. That we should teach our little girls that sometimes good is good enough. That not everything has to be perfect, that nobody has unlimited resources. That you must pick your battles the way little boys do. That focusing on what’s important to you and doing everything else in a “lazy” way can get you far in life. And no, everything can’t be important. Life doesn’t allow us for perfection in every little thing we do. It doesn’t work.

I have this theory we should teach little girls to let go of perfection. And of course, those little boys who struggle with it too. Perhaps it’ll make for more productive adults.

Viktoria Altman
Mother of 2 boys,

president of Brainy Academy