My DD (now 11) has a severe case of perfectionism. When she was three, the other parents could tell which sidewalk chalk drawing was hers because she insisted on drawing rainbows in ROYGBIV order every time, no exceptions. She refused to talk until she was three and could speak in complete sentences with a vocabulary she felt sufficient to express her thoughts. Before that, all she would do was use hand gestures. She began wanting to write from the time she could hold a pencil. Then she quit writing and drawing for over a year and would only scribble. She finally started drawing again and writing in cursive (she went to a Montessori pre-school) when she felt she could do it well enough.
She isn’t stubbornly resisting authority like some of your DCs. She is happy to show what she knows, but only if she’s absolutely certain it’s correct. She is anxiety ridden about doing everything perfectly, and she just shuts down if she can’t. Last year, she shut down in the middle of a math test because she was faced with a difficult problem that she didn’t immediately know the answer to. As a result, she didn’t finish the test, and earned a C. I told her in the future to just skip the problem and come back to it if she had time. What did she do on the next test? The same thing. She felt like she had to do the problems in order, skipping one felt like defeat to her. It took earning two Cs in a row before she changed her test taking strategy. Of course, I know that this was motivated in large part by her perfectionism too because she wanted the A and had to learn the hard way her strategy wasn’t getting it for her.
It’s a constant battle with us because I insist on challenging her. I keep explaining that if all she does is show what she already knows, she isn’t learning. I tell her she has to be exposed to concepts she doesn’t already understand and try problems that she doesn’t already know how to solve. This often means often failing on the first few attempts, but that what she needs to really learn. Even so, just this morning at math team practice, she sat teary eyed staring at the third problem because she couldn’t solve it. It didn’t matter that the eighth grade boys who are three years older than her couldn’t solve it; it didn’t matter that her math teacher couldn’t solve it. She refused to move on to the next problem. It’s déjà vu all over again.
