Thanks, Grinity! (I got here because I spotted someone having clicked through that link, by the way)
Hm. Perfectionism is, fundamentally, an anxiety thing. It's anxiety that what you do won't be good enough or won't be seen as good enough and that either this will mean that you're an awful / incompetent / pathetic person and/or that other people will think you are and will hate / despise / punish / ignore / reject you for it.
What I generally see with anxious perfectionistic gifted kids is that they tend to constrict the space within which they will allow themselves to work -- they will typically *avoid* the enrichment work or become really clingy/dependent while working on it. Things that are too easy are still too easy, but things that are too hard become terrifying, because they're about to be proof that you really are as awful as you think you are. So all tasks become divided into "trivial" and "impossible," with little-to-no working space in between. That tends to make it hard to provide enrichment or other challenging work, because the kid will look like they're fighting as hard as they can to not participate in it. So in that sense, I think we need to consider that as an aspect of the problem.
I think it's not atypical for school folk to say, "Okay, no academic challenge until we've gotten this perfectionism under control," because they're all so afraid of the whole academic challenge thing anyhow and tend to seize on any perceived weakness. It plays right into the "pushy parent needs to back off" model that they like to believe. Plus, it's quite typical for school folk to prioritize "social emotional" issues over "academic" issues, as if the two were the two ends of a see-saw (I should write a blog post on that!), when in fact, they're intertwined.
And I agree that it kind of misses the point. We can give a gifted kid strategies for dealing with anxiety, and that's a good start. But fundamentally, if they know inside that the tasks they are doing are still easy, then they're not getting a chance to expose themselves to the feared situation (doing work that might actually be difficult!) and seeing that nothing actually bad happens. That's a basic principle of almost every form of therapy for almost every form of anxiety disorder, regardless of your theoretical orientation -- you have to experience the feared thing, slowly and in a manageable way, and learn both to tolerate the uncertainty and to experience the fact that you *aren't* awful and that you *can* make mistakes without being punished or rejected for it.
So the goal should not be "cure perfectionism before we provide academic challenge." It should be, "treat general anxiety so that we can include provision of academic challenge as part of the ongoing plan to treat perfectionism so that we can provide more academic challenge when perfectionism is less severe." Not this-then-that, but this-and-that-and-then-more-of-that.
