My son Kai recently turned 4. He is perfectionistic and has a "don't tell me unless I ask" kind of attitude, which I try to respect where appropriate. However, we are currently experiencing a mini-crisis and I'm not sure how best to help him...

He's being extremely hard on himself (slapping his head/crying/saying he must be SO stupid etc) because he can't read/spell a word or his letter forms aren't right. This behavior and attitude is not modeled at home - we've tried very hard on every level not to exacerbate the perfectionism, and he'd made great progress til now. As for his sudden desire to "know" how to do it correctly (presumably without practice?) - I can only speculate that he's reached the point where his sight words/guessing/intuition maybe aren't cutting it, due to the increasing complexity of his interests.

Bottom line is, Kai's so secretive about this we have little idea where to begin helping and he's so adamant about no intervention - What do we do? I'm hopeful this post has made some sense and that perhaps someone will have some suggestions for us. BTW - whilst this is my first foray into the forum as a user, consider me a thankful, long time visitor to this wonderful site!

-Kory