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?
