Is this normal...?

[missmoopy]

My dd is almost 6 and likes to do well at school. We are never critical or chastising when she gets things wrong etc, nor do we encourage her to be over competetive.

Tonight she has had the mother of all meltdowns about a picture of her face she did at school which she is hugely upset about as it is, in her words, "rubbish". Her teacher said it was good, but she is utterly convinced its awful. She cried for an hour and I had to sit with her while she went to sleep to keep her calm.

She has had a tiring exciting week and had a friend round for tea earlier just to add to the excitement! Could it just be tiredness/over excitement? Surely she is too young to become self critical yet???

New term blues - they just get knackered the first few weeks back. Don't worry, it'll pass :)

i would say it's just one of those things and def related to tiredness etc

i think it's important tho to realise that she is allowed to think it's rubbish.
we don't always have to build them up.

it might be worth saying things like "oh, what don't you like about it?" or "what went wrong with it?" and acknowledging that she felt it was rubbish

by saying things like "no, it's not it's a lovely picture" you're basically telling her that she is wrong, which is bound to make her even more cross.

We talked about what was wrong with it and she is going to ask her teacher tomorrow if she can rub out the chin and do it again!
We talk to her about it being okay not to be great at everything, and getting things is how we learn.

well that's good! she sounds a lot like my ds1 and he likes to have a "plan of action" as it were when he gets upset about something

i reckon the extreme reaction is probably just a result of over-excitedness and tiredness

'getting things wrong is how we learn' is what I mean, doh! How ironic!