ljoy, my DD has lived all her life with a similarly-- er-- objective, punitive medical condition that basically REQUIRES perfection (or something close to it) and punishes failure in pretty dramatic fashion.
It's a hard thing to encourage that kind of perfectionism in ONE area, but discourage it in others. Even when it really is necessary in that one area-- obviously control of a chronic/brittle/unforgiving/life-threatening medical condition is something where perfectionism is necessary and pretty much NO amount of obsessive care is truly "excessive" care.
Of course, in my DD's case, her condition is one of pretty binary "not fail" and "epic fail" so that may well contribute to this world view. There is no "reward" for managing well. Other than preventing intubation or worse, I suppose. There are very definitely "punishments" aplenty for NOT doing so. She has experienced some of those punishements, by the way-- and often they aren't related to her efforts but are of the "crap happens" type, mostly. Perfect management doesn't lead to rewards-- just the avoidance of punishment-- and "perfect" here is truly not humanly possible. (Frankly, I've struggled with how not humanly possible it is, too, over the years. I'm good... but not always good ENOUGH, as experience has showed to spectacular effect on occasion.)
Hmm. Actually, this is incredibly helpful. We'd always assumed that the two things were quite distinct from one another and that her academic perfectionism was linked to something else... but maybe not as much as we'd thought. That parallel is fairly striking now that I state it in those terms.
