Modeling picking: Is skin picking a learnt behavior?

I am often asked by clients, especially women, whether their children will inherit a tendency to skin-pick. Before answering this question—which is not a simple one—let’s talk about the context first.

Who are The Parents Who Care?

The clients who ask this tend to share some common characteristics: their children are toddlers or still quite young, but at a developmental stage when they begin to copy many of their parents’ behaviors, and to increasingly recognize other people’s internal states—sadness, pain, happiness, worry, anger, and so on. This is extremely important for understanding how children learn responses to stress and emotion, including behaviors that may later become coping strategies.

Another important characteristic these clients share is simple, yet often overlooked: they care deeply about their children and want them to have a good life- one shaped by the same struggles they themselves experience with skin picking. This wish is common to most parents: I want my children to have an easier, fuller life than I did.

The third shared trait is that parenting matters to them so much that they are willing to face something difficult and uncomfortable—such as seeking therapy for skin picking. They do this not because they feel they’ve failed, but because they value their role as parents and want to show up as well as they can.Taken together, these qualities describe a parent who is thoughtfully and genuinely concerned about their child's future- not a perfect, but a good-enough one, acting out of care, responsibility, and love..

Doing the Work: What do Children Learn from Their Parents’ Therapy?

Often, especially at the very beginning of therapy, I try to point this out to my clients—how lucky their children are to have parents who care about them in this way!

At the start of therapy, skin picking usually feels like some mysterious behavior that appeared out of nowhere and began to take over the client’s life l. It is precisely this sense of mystery—why is this happening to me, why am I too weak to stop—that gives skin picking its power. It allows the behaviour to shape clients’ lives, and the lives of their families, in ways that feel too big, and too overwhelming to be stopped or prevented.

As therapy begins and we start to understand urges and unpack their meaning, clients often discover there is much more logic in skin picking than it first appeared. In my experience, this understanding gives clients power—not only to work toward change, but also to relate to the habit in a more compassionate and grounded way if they notice it in others. For example, in their children.

The Myth of a Perfect Parent

Since most human behaviors, including skin picking, have a hereditary component, this perspective—learning to interpret and understand skin picking in a way that makes sense within one’s own experience—becomes a powerful tool for long-term change, both for the individual and for those around them.

Now, pause here and imagine the perfect parent. What are they like? What do they have? What don’t they have? If someone who struggles with panic attacks were reading this text, the answer would probably be that a perfect parent does not have panic attacks. Right?

But what if the perfect parent doesn’t exist? What if this image is something we continually reach for, only to fall short again and again, leaving us disappointed with ourselves.

This cycle closely resembles many skin-picking patterns I’ve seen in my work: striving for perfection, followed by deep disappointment when it isn’t achieved, and the sense of having tried everything- yet feeling that nothing truly works.

The Good-Enough Parent

So, what if I told you that a good-enough parent is precisely the one who recognizes these patterns, takes responsibility for the distress they cause, seeks help, and begins to work on them? How do you imagine the children of a parent who says, “This isn’t okay for me or for the people around me, and I’m going to seek help because I don’t know how to deal with this on my own” feel? 

What do you imagine those little eyes see and learn about themselves and about life when someone who is so important to them dares to be “imperfect”? And more than that, dares to ask for help when things are hard?

From my experience, it seems to me that this is where the answer to the question from the beginning starts to take shape. What if children learn, through modeling, that what matters is not what we inherit, but what we do with that inheritance? What if, by working through a difficulty, we teach our children that it is okay to have a problem, and that problems do not last forever, and that when we cannot manage on our own, it is both possible and acceptable to seek help?

What’s In Your Power?

If you’ve worried about the impact of your skin picking on your child, you’re not alone. Many caring parents ask these questions—and at SkinPick, we’re here to offer understanding, support, and reassurance along the way.