Comments on: Impatience, Perfectionism, Fear of Failure

By: Roen

Roen — Wed, 20 Jul 2022 16:54:38 +0000

In reply to katie. Yes please more on the 5-6 age! I feel like after around 4 we are supposed to ‘have this’ but my 5 year old has really strong feelings and I am struggling to connect with this age the same as the 3-4 age, especially after they have been to school for a year and had much more peer influence.

By: katie

katie — Tue, 19 Jul 2022 03:54:35 +0000

yes please more episodes on 6 and 7+ year olds! I felt like we did well with ages 2-4 and then age 5 got a bit shakey and age 6 is like … a whole other world to me. a loud, intense, verbal, physically difficult world (they weigh a ton and have strength now). But this episode was great, I really appreciated it! My only question would be is there a mantra or something we can commit to memory when our children are screaming blooooody murder? When i’m worrying about neighbours, tenants, the whole block hearing her literally scream her lungs out? The whole block must think we are out of our minds. it’s a long story but let’s just say new baby in the house, screaming is her new thing to upset everyone in the room.

By: Dallas

Dallas — Tue, 19 Jul 2022 01:29:06 +0000

My son is so much like this, he has been literally since he was an infant. I used to try to rescue him or coach and as he got older he literally started saying “Dont help me! I want to do it myself!” He though he was so frustrated and feeling anxious. My main problem is other people, usually other parents trying to step in when it happens around other people. I’ll tell them just give him space, he likes to calm himself down or solve the issue himself and they’ll still try to help, which ends up escalating him until he yells “Leave me alone” or runs away and hides. Then they think he’s being a brat…plus in the area we boys are expecting not to have big emotions or be sensitive. We don’t subscribe to that but that but it makes it harder and luckily my husband has always had big emotions and understands our son well. Any suggestions on what to say to other parents? We didn’t have near as many issues with other parents with our daughter even though she too was very sensitive. It gets frustrating.

By: Erica Reed

Erica Reed — Mon, 29 Oct 2018 07:13:05 +0000

I need all the help I can get. My 5 year old son is a major perfectionist, something he has unfortunately inherited from me. I clearly remember joking as a kid that a 98% on a test was a 2% failure.
I always thought of it as a joke until I see the same behavior in my son. 🙁 Unfortunately he is to the point that if he fails once, he utterly refuses to try again. If we are playing a board game and he loses, he refuses to ever play the game again. He simply shuts down and says he has no desire to try whatever it is again… I’m really scared about what’s going to happen when he gets to school and we can’t just shrug things off and say “okay, when you’re ready to try again let me know”…

By: Jenny

Jenny — Mon, 01 Oct 2018 18:50:49 +0000

Hi Janet, thanks so much for addressing this topic of failure and frustration. I also have a 6 year old perfectionist! He also gets so mad in the struggle-e.g. he is having a hard time with monkey bars and will say “I’m so bad at this, I’ll never be able to do it.” It breaks my heart that he’s so tough on himself and I also get frustrated when he starts spiraling and can’t move on. If I don’t continue to verbally comfort him he seems to get more upset that “I don’t care.” Any other tips on how to help this age group – how to validate their feelings without getting stuck there, and how to help them let these big feelings pass? Thanks for all you do!

By: Julie

Julie — Thu, 16 Aug 2018 19:22:33 +0000

I really needed to read this today. Thanks again, Janet for your wisdom. This parent is describing my 6 year old boy to a ‘T’. We home school and just started doing 1st grade work. I’m quickly noticing my boy is quite the perfectionist. If he doesn’t understand something right away he gets frustrated. Then I get irritated or frustrated with him for his behavior. It’s a bad cycle and I’m seeing now that I just need to accept his feelings and not try to “fix” them for him. New things are also very uncomfortable for him. Today we did some math where numbers were described in a slightly different way (to help with visualizing differently) and he was very uncomfortable about it. I kept telling him “It’s ok, you’ve got this. It’s just today that looks a bit different”, but this wasn’t helping him and I see now how I likely made it worse for him. I think a better thing for me to say would be “Yeah, this is different isn’t it?” This is just one example. I hope it’s not too late for him and that I haven’t caused too much “damage” to his ability to express his feelings and feel safe doing it. Ugh. Anyways, thanks for this post again.