Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums Age or Ability Specific Forums Pre-school Anxiety and Perfectionism

DD4 is a perfectionist. We’ve always noticed that she tends to overthink, overanalyze simple things and becomes too hesitant to act upon something if she’s not absolutely sure of succeeding.

She also gets anxious at several times. She hates unpredictability and needs structure towards every activity. And we need to prepare her for any expected deviation from structure, before the deviation occurs. Otherwise, there could be a meltdown.

The latest expression of this is in her reading. While unprompted and on her own accord, she tends to randomly reads several words, road signs or sometimes simple sentences, often, much to our surprise. But she still claims she doesn’t know to read them. While we are reading a book for her, if we randomly ask her to read a word or two – she just says “I don’t know”. Occasionally, she agrees and reads one word correctly and quickly says “That’s it, no more words for today. You read the rest.”

Would this be because she’s anxious about getting something wrong and chooses the comfort of ignorance instead of a probability of getting it wrong?

As she’s not revealing much, we don’t really get to know to what extent she can actually read by herself.

Does her anxiety and perfectionism have a role to play here? How could we help her?

Have you tried to separate "reading to her" from "reading"?

Way back when I refused to learn how to read before starting 1st grade. One of the reasons was that I did *not* want my grandfather to stop reading books to me, an activity I treasured. When my children started learning how to read I completely separated our daily evening reading sessions from their school reading practices -- made easier by the fact that our home and school languages are different.

Maybe try telling your daughter that you love reading books to her and will never stop, and have her show off/practice her skills at a different time?

My DD did something similar up to early age 5, wherein we knew she could read from all these other interactions, but she refused to read aloud to us. No pressure - she was still in pre-K at the time, so there was no necessity. In my school we didn't do reading groups until 1st grade, so she had two full years before this could even be considered an issue.

Looking to motivate her, I praised her for all the ways she was ahead of me at that same age, except one - because I had begun reading aloud to my mother at age 4. DD read a book she had never seen before aloud to her mother the next week. Before long, her pre-K teacher had turned story time over to DD.

We chalked it up to anxiety and perfectionism. She was afraid to try it because she might stumble or get some things wrong.

Probably the most important and useful thing you could do right now is to stop worrying about it. If you're pressing her on this, it could feed into her anxiety.

Sia's point is also cogent. Apart from telling her that you'll keep reading to her until she doesn't want it anymore, you could also segue into independent reading by making it mutually-participatory... take turns. This could be done at first by assigning your DD some of the dialog voices, which can be a lot of fun.

Humour could tackle that. I saw that behaviour around 3-4 in my DS, and I would bait him by intentionally mis-reading stories. It would start with a word substitution or two, and I'd ratchet it up into tangents from the main story arc.

A few reactions are possible:

1. She gets annoyed and intercedes to correct you.
2. She intercedes out of pride in her abilities.
3. She is amused and joins in.

To this day, DS6 and I still do goofy reading. (Hat tip to Dude--we still alternate for read-alouds--and I hope that tradition continues. Depending on the pacing of the book and our moods, that could be alternating chapters or two page spreads.)

One of his favourite games is to make word substitutions in a story using frequently occurring words. Great game, good for a challenge to working memory, and potentially even more fun when you mess up!

Another favourite is to insert a random word every X words. You can ratchet up the complexity by making rules about parts of speech, starting letters, or a theme.

Voicing and using accents is another fun way we shake up reading. You choose certain "trigger" words that cause a shift into a particular accent. So, for us, it might look something like this:
- "When": triggers posh London accent
- "Right": triggers Scottish brogue
- "No": triggers pirate accent...etc.

These might sound like ridiculous games, but they're a ton of fun and they serve to take the child's mind off functional reading performance. If your hypothesis that perfectionism is the root cause is correct, your DD will devote most of her processing speed to the game, with the bulk of the actual decoding and comprehension happening naturally.

Enjoy, and welcome to the forum!

I'll second the suggestion to reassure her (and continue to) keep reading aloud to her and not turn that time into a time when you ask her to read. There's also a good chance she's just not feeling like reading out loud yet, or reading at all yet. When our oldest was the same age, we'd been able to tell for several years from his verbal conversation that he was a really bright kid, and I think that in our society, one of the touchstones of development that is often focused on is how old a child was when they started reading. The thing is, the age kids start reading is really individual from child-to-child and has (from what I can tell... but I'm not a professional)... no correlation to IQ or future potential re level of reading and comprehension. Each of my kids ultimately acted about the same way your dd is acting at around the same age. My oldest went on to learn how to read completely on his own and didn't share that information with either of his parents - we found out by mistake half-way through kindergarten when one of his relatives remarked on how well he was reading to us. Once his cover was blown, he was ok with reading with us, but he never really did enjoy reading out loud to us - when he was with us (parents) he wanted us to read to him. His focus during those times wasn't on learning how to read, he wanted to be able to relax and enjoy the stories hearing them told by us. That didn't halt his learning-to-read progress in any way - he was reading college text books by the time he left first grade, and he basically picked up reading on his own. The only thing we really did re reading development at home was simply to have a lot of books on hand in subjects he was interested in.

My middle dd, otoh, hesitated when reading out loud for a reason that neither of us parents realized until she was in 3rd grade - she couldn't see well (she had 20/20 eyesight but her eyes didn't track together). I only mention this because... in spite of the delays in reading progress caused by severely challenging vision issues, once the vision issues were resolved she caught up in her reading ability and surpassed grade level within just a few weeks (and she's *not* an extremely high IQ kid).

My youngest dd, otoh, appeared to be reading when she was very young, but her progress stalled in early elementary and we later found out she has a challenge that impacts reading ability so she ultimately had to go through several years of tutoring to catch up in reading. I don't think there's any reason to suspect your dd has any kind of reading challenge, I only mention that to point out that at 4, the behaviors you've noted surrounding reading, could mean several different things, but most likely are just typical early reader behaviors. Just my perspective, but from my experience, there's really no reason to rush the reading at this point. If your dd doesn't want to practice reading or demonstrate what she can read to you, just let it drop for awhile and focus on having fun spending time with her doing other activities that she enjoys, and where she can focus on thinking creatively rather than practicing. Hope that makes sense!

Best wishes,

polarbear

DS4 loves Mo Willems "Elephant and Piggie" books. He always reads the Piggie Parts and I read the Elephant parts. Maybe she would enjoy books that have this kind of back and forth dialogue?