Lack of challenge definitely encourages perfectionism in the teacher-pleasers, and not in a good way! I say that from personal experience...
Hmmm, could you expound on that? You are hinting at something I see in DD14!
Oh, sure. Sorry to seem vague!
When you have nothing constructive to focus on, you obsess about the details. A 99% isn't good enough for you if you knew the whole lesson before it began. Dumb mistakes mean to you that you're dumb. And when you hit something that is actually a challenge for you, you feel like a complete idiot because you have never learned to overcome challenge.
In my case, I got to advanced math my junior year of high school, got my first B+ on my report card EVER, and considered suicide. (And I am not otherwise a depressed, suicidal person.)
Not being perfect shook my definition of who I was. If I wasn't a straight-A student who didn't make mistakes, then who was I? Did I have any worth as a person?
Obviously not healthy!
It wasn't until I was in my late 30s that I really began to overcome this problem. (Though grad school helped...) I'm still much more of a perfectionist than I would like to be, but I am now more willing to take risks, to make mistakes, to let go of the little things and not feel like my mistakes mean that I lack value as a human being.
I wish I had had the opportunity to fight this fear earlier in my life...
