-He is also a huge perfectionist that gets frustrated easily if something doesn't just 'come to him'.
This was my daughter at 6. She's better now (9). She learns at the speed of light, but at 6 if it was something just a little above her level, then she would be instantly angry. She had intense perfectionism - her grade 2 teacher commented several times that you could see it physically manifesting itself in the way she gripped her pencil and hunched over her desk... she'd take 15 minutes to do something that the other kids would scrawl out in 5, and it was because she kept erasing it and doing it again....
Both my kids have an extreme intolerance to repetition. Once they've mastered something, they can only do it 2 or 3 times before they become stressed with boredom.
Here's a boredom story: my daughter, then 8, had just started grade 4 and had homework. It was to print the good copy of a one page story she'd written at school. All she had to do was copy a neater version of her draft. It was JUST COPYING. It took about 3 hours, complete with crying, shouting (all her, lol) and much chair and table kicking. I was desperate to figure out why she was so upset: "do your hands hurt? are you ok?" "here, put a ruler under each line so that it's easy to follow." etc etc. I finally got it out of her: "mommy it's SO BORING!! I just can't do it!!" (OMG). I finally had to walk her through it word by word: "this word! GO! print it! Excellent! Next word! Just do it! Awesome! Next word!" etc etc etc.
It's interesting because if I look back over the year (she just finished grade 4), she's no longer plagued by perfectionism but her work is much sloppier. She's very "all or nothing." It's either perfect with angst or sloppy and substandard with a smile. It's like there's an on/off switch. So in reality, she hasn't really learned to cope with perfectionism - she's simply stopped caring. Ah, the underachiever...
