Who would have thought that having a “perfect parent” would be a liability? And, if you doubt that there is such a thing as a perfect parent, so did I until I met her! In the group practice where I worked as an early career child psychologist, we had a weekly team meeting where we discussed new referrals. I was assigned a teen girl whose presenting problem was that her mother was “too perfect.” There was raucous laughter in this usually dour meeting where major mental illness, depression, and trauma were the regular fare. “What’s the real problem?” My colleagues asked. They suspected we would uncover something truly awful upon…