Perfectionism?

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I think my son is beginning to show signs of a perfectionist streak.
He jumps over cracks in the path (but only one particular path so far)
He rejects certain items of food eg one piece of an apple, for no obvious reason (he didn't do this two months ago)
He refuses to even pick up a pen, pencil, paint brush, piece of chalk, in case the mark it makes isn't 'right' (his word) (again only a recent issue)

His OT says many 4 year old boys aren't interested in writing/scribbling. I know she's right, but I am joining the dots to see perfectionism and she is not. What do you think?

So far it only bothers me in relation to the pen, because he is never going to improve if he won't even try.
What is the current thinking re perfectionism - if you work hard at it early can you stop it getting too problematic? How do you counteract it? I've tried talking about how we all have to practice things lots to get them right, but he isn't taking any notice.

The more you feed into it, the more concrete it will get in his head. You'll have to teach him to be flexible and make sure you reward and praise him when he writes with a pen the doesn't "look right" or steps on cracks, etc. It may not be anything, but teaching flexibility is always helpful.

We have struggled with this for years, and finally had success with treatment of things my son was most anxious about (social skills, pragmatic speech) and also using the book "What to Do When Your Brain Gets Stuck" which is a book for kids with OCD. (If you have him read the book when he's ready, you might want to let him know that, while some kids do have OCD, other kids can benefit from the book, too, unless you actually get that diagnosis. Otherwise, I'd read the book and borrow the language and techniques.)

I don't think my son was truly OCD (he did have obsessions and compulsions, but they were largely unrelated) but by the time he was in 3rd grade, the "floor crack" thing had progressed to the point that he could barely walk across the floor and kids were making fun of him. He would erase holes in the paper, or spend all his time blacking out a mistake rather than crossing it out and moving on. We were super-lucky, just as we were starting this therapy, we found out one of his girlfriends, a lovely young woman, was actually OCD and they were able to talk about it, about how they were similar and different, which I think helped him a lot. Feeling "weird" and isolated made things even worse for him.

Things are much better now. The book helped a lot (I think you can preview it on Amazon) but I think many, many things went into the fact that this problem has mostly gone away (of course, we're right around the corner from puberty, so I expect a resurgence.) We did a LOT of therapy around winning/losing games, which he was totally unable to play; he didn't want anything to do with anything that had an unpredictable outcome, and he'd get violent if he lost.

Perfectionism in kids on the spectrum is related to rigidity: we used to say our son was a "binary" kid, everything was either "right" or "wrong." It is no easy task teaching a rigid kid to be flexible, and you have to approach it on all kinds of different fronts. Here's a good thread on the subject: http://www.wrongplanet.net/postt176250.html

One thing we try to do is model making mistakes and being OK with making mistakes. "Look I just spelled that word wrong when I was writing out the grocery list. It's OK, I can cross it out and write it again." Talk about how everyone has a hard time with new things the first time they try them. "Boy, I remember when I first tried to throw a baseball, it was really hard. It to me a few months to learn how to do it well." Our DS seems to really relate when we tell him stories about our own experiences when we we "little". I think they observe adults doing things "right" all the time and don't realize that we all did things "wrong", sometimes A LOT, before we were able to do them well. Try to take advantage of every teachable moment that you can whether that is catching yourself making a mistake and pointing it out to him or catching him taking a risk at trying something that is uncomfortable for him.

This is a great idea!

Modeling is great. Adults don't accept their own "failures" with enough humour and grace.

Some great tips here, thank you everyone. Bombaloo, I must remember your teachable moments, I think that is a great example of modeling. I neglected to mention my son is HFA, no sign of OCD yet, and he is not particularly rigid in most areas of his life (he copes well with changes in routine and so on, doesn't have any rituals or anything, but I am aware that might be something that develops as he gets older). Time will tell I guess!

I bought him some dry wipe pens and tracing books with numbers and letters, he does like that we can rub it straight off if it isnt right. Trouble is he can't get over expecting things to look perfect. Hell go right through doing every page if I hold my hand over his on the pen, but won't even pick up the pen on his own. I must make lots more wobbly letters in front of him I guess!

A thought just occurred to me: this might be something else. When DS was very little, he would delay and delay almost right up to whatever milestone (this is after crawling and talking, where he was early) and then he'd get it seemingly all at once.

I finally realized (without realizing what it meant) that he processed everything cognitively, and I started to explain things to him. We would go up to the ladder on the slide, and I would say "first you put your hand here, then you put your foot here, then your other hand here, then your other foot. Now move this hand here, and this foot here..." I could almost SEE the gears whirling. After a time, he'd be able to follow the instructions and would master the task.

I realized that in my concern that he might not meet milestones, I was not honoring his need to watch and learn and process things in his head before he tried them out.

I don't know if this is what is going on here, but felt it was worth mentioning.

This was me in a paragraph as a child. Everything was slow and just wouldn't sink in until the day it 'clicked'. My transgressions were so severe I went from the lowest to highest reading group within the space of a week when aged 9. I also remember struggling with Pythagoras theory (which is a big part of high school maths in 1st and 2nd year) until a different teacher explained it a different way, and then I understood it instantly.

I feel the easiest way to explain it is it's harder to wire memories in, but once it's finally found a path that works it becomes super-efficient. As he matures he should find his own way of learning and keeping it in. Repetition can help but sometimes just approaching the subject from a different angle can cause the light bulb to flash. I care for my younger (and much more severe) autistic brother, and sometimes it can take months until somebody says it right.

Maturity will always be behind a couple of years, but should balance out by the time they reach 16/20 period. I’ve seen working examples of this in both myself and my peers.
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LOL - my son did the same at about the same age. It wasn't actually the reading, it was that he didn't understand how to communicate that he'd understood what he'd read, so he went from books with one or two words on a page to chapter books in a very, very short time.