Fear of the Unknown

Several years ago, I got video footage of my then almost 3 year old child laying on the floor crying and yelling, "I don't want to be a big boy!" He was upset with me for putting training pants on him and insisted that he didn't want to "go poopy in the potty". Fast forward 14 yrs to last night. We had a talk with him about getting a job, he will be 17 in April ya know, and he seems to show no interest in filling out any job applications. He got very upset with us for putting the pressure on, and although he didn't lay on the floor and scream, he did punch a couch pillow a few times. He is afraid, but I'm not sure what he is afraid of...failure? He has always been a perfectionist, so much so that he dropped his AP Literature class this year after staying up until the wee hours of the morning several times to perfect his writings about the literature he had read. He was complimented by the teacher on his writing, but his other classes were suffering. Toward the end of our conversation with our son last night, he brought up the video taped incident and its similarity to last night's incident. He laughed a little bit that here he was, doing the same thing many years later. I'm glad he realized the silliness of it. Anyway, he will be filling out some job applications very soon, and I think he will find that working isn't so bad after all. :)