The Cookie Cutter

Good Child Syndrome

I have two children: a good child and a …ahem…not so good child. They each come with their own challenges. I myself was a very good child. I did all my chores without complaining, I made my own lunch each morning, I got my piano and violin practice done each day alongside my homework, I got gold stickers and certificates and prizes in assembly. But if being good was so good as the adults in my life seemed to say to me, why didn’t I feel good inside? I felt bad. Guilty. Often. All the time?

As a teen, I felt panicked, and hurried, and never good enough. Eventually I got sick. Really quite sick. I had my first health breakdown at 16 when after 60 minutes of rigorous daily piano practice each day before school, coupled with multiple school responsibilities, after-school commitments and weekend events and commitments I found myself suffering from RSI. I couldn’t write. I had to have friends open doors for me and I could no longer play my beloved piano for the pain. I remember looking out my window around about that time whilst studying for my school science exam watching the kid next door going up and down a pump track outside his house on his mountain bike. It looked fun. It looked so simple and so easy. I knew studying was “doing the right thing” but sometimes I longed to be care and responsibility-free like him.

Good Child Syndrome

“Good” children work hard to keep their parents’ love and affection. They learn early on that “bad” behaviours such as shouting too loud, demanding their needs are met or refusing to comply with directions all earn them their parents’ disapproval. This can be a frightening feeling for a child given we are reliant on our parents to survive when we are young. So a “good” child takes all the parts of themselves that their parent disapproves of and they hide it. Parents reward this decision by giving their good child less negative attention than their more demanding siblings.

Psychologist Gordon Neufeld calls this dynamic “The Cookie Cutter”. The child cuts themselves into a shape that allows the parent to only to see the acceptable side of themselves.  Within the cookie cutter are all the behaviours and attributes we as parents approve of. All the negative or big emotions they feel they can’t express are left outside of the “cookie”.

What’s the problem?

The problem with a cookie cutter approach is that it leaves our children with the belief that our acceptance of them is conditional on their behaviour. Pioneering psychologist and researcher Carl Rogers asked the question, “What happens when a parent’s love depends on how a child behaves?” He found children who hide their unacceptable feelings end up with an internal sense of worthlessness and are at risk of poor mental health in later life.^[1]

By enjoying the convenience of a “good child” we overlook the burden it places on the child at the expense of their current and future mental health.

Some children go so far as to construct a “false self” that they operate from to please us and begin to lose track of the “real me” under all the disguise.^[2] It can take years of therapy to untangle the false identity from their true identity.

Expecting a child to be all light with no shadow is unrealistic and can breed dangerous habits in a child. The dark side of our personality has much to teach us and can help us cope with difficult traits in others, too.

One author writes, “Being properly mature involves a frank unfrightened relationship with one’s own dark sides, complexities and ambitions.”^[3] When we only affirm the aspects of the “cookie cutter child” that we approve of, without accepting their negative traits, it leaves us at risk of a strained relationship with them right into adulthood.

Put simply, our acceptance of our child must not be conditional on their behaviour.

So how can I avoid being a Cookie Cutter parent?

To keep our “good child” in good emotional health, let them know that your acceptance of them is unconditional. It’s time to start accepting them for who they are, not what they do. This means that if they have an angry outburst or refuse to comply at times, we still hold an open invitation to them to be close to us, both physically and emotionally. This doesn’t mean we can’t hold high expectations for them, it just means we accept that they might not always measure up to them.

Sometimes we need to permit and even welcome, their “bad selves” as antidote to all that “good” behaviour that might be putting a strain on their physical and mental health.

I’m not talking really bad here. More like, encourage them to make a mess for fun, to scribble out their emotions, to stomp on egg cartons or to break something together like a chipped piece of crockery. As one author put it, “Being a good child is one of the loveliest things in the world. But in order to have a genuinely good life, we may sometimes need to be – by the standards of the good child – fruitfully and bravely “bad”.”^[4]

I only wish, looking back, that I myself had played more, rested more, cut loose and been “bad” a bit more often as an antidote to all that “good-ness”. Sure it got me far in life, and got me qualifications I might not have got otherwise, but it cost me an awful lot too, the fallout of which I am still untangling to this day.

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^[1] Carl R Rogers, ‘A Theory of Personality and Interpersonal Relationships as Developed in the Client-Centered Framework.’, Psychology: A Study of Science 3 (1959): 184–286.

^[2] Susan Harter et al., ‘A Model of the Effects of Perceived Parent and Peer Support on Adolescent False Self Behavior’, Child Development 67, no. 2 (1996): 360–374.

^[3] ‘The Dangers of the Good Child’, The Book of Life, 15 March 2017, https://www.theschooloflife.com/thebookoflife/the-dangers-of-the-good-child/.

^[4] ‘The Dangers of the Good Child’.