Alex, my 12 yr old, just left this morning for a week away at scout camp. Before he left he need to do 2 things...pack (obviously) and take care of prerequisites for his merit badges that he is going to earn this week. I have been telling him that he needs to work on the prereqs since school ended, almost 4 weeks ago. "I have plenty of time" and "I'm doing something else", were 2 statements I heard a lot of the past few weeks. When did he start to pack? Yesterday at about 5:30 pm. When did he finish his prereqs? He didn't. He was working on them furiously for the past 2 days, and getting totally stressed out and being a total brat about it.
My husband and I kept trying to tell him that he was probably doing 5 times the amount of work than any of the other scouts were for the same badge. He would not cut corners. He will see when he gets there and will hopefully learn from this experience and not leave everything for the last minute. All it ever does is stress him out and tick me off. I have a very short fuse (thanks, Dad), I keep trying to let things go but I guess that is where he gets it from...me. All day yesterday I kept telling him that it won't be that big of a deal if he doesn't finish it before he goes, he can always finish it later, and still earn his badge.
Being a perfectionist and a procrastinator at the same time does NOT work very well. He will need to learn where he can "cut corners" without loosing any points on his projects.
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