Ok, so he’s my nephew so technically it’s my sister’s problem. But it breaks my heart to see this and I don’t know what’s the best way to handle it when I’m looking after him. My nephew is now six and he’s been doing this since he was four. Every failure, whether it’s playing a game, trying to learn a new task or performing any action that requires an age-appropriate level of skill, all precipitate the same behavior: furious tantrums, tears and protests of “I can’t!” and “it’s too hard!”. This goes way, way beyond the usual sour grapes; it’s closer to abject dispair. After each latest disappointment, he’ll sulk for hours. Once he’s decided he can’t do something, that’s it: he refuses to try it ever again. My sister and her husband wave this all off as a “stage”, but I’m seriously worried about the kid.
How much time do you spend with him? If it’s been going on this long and he really sulks for hours at minor disappointments, and his parents just call it a “stage,” the root of the problem may really be the parents.
But back to what you can do (or encourage his parents to do)… Find small things that you know he can be successful at (either alone or with a little help), and let him know you saw him accomplish it, and give him a lot of praise for how wonderfully he’s done. If there’s something in particular that he thinks he’s failing at, maybe you can give him a few instructions that would help him feel more competent. For example, my son was very dejected because he didn’t think he could draw. So we sat down together and would draw stories together, and we’d hang them up on the wall.
Also, is it possible that someone is teasing him, maybe at daycare or somewhere? Try to gently find out about that.
And when he does “fail” at something, make sure he knows that it’s just the task that had the problem, but that he as a person is really wonderful and great, and that the main thing is to try and make the effort.
This is a hard one. Kids like this tend not to grow out of it until adolescence, in my experience. They tend to a lot of homework problems in middle school, because they won’t turn anything in unless they feel it’s perfect, and of course it never is. Really - my son would do his homework, which took hours and hours, because every little mistake meant tears and do-overs, and then not turn it in to his teacher, because he still wasn’t happy with it.
Mostly what I tried to do was let him see me make mistakes and then fix them - or not fix them, if they weren’t that important. For example, I’d “forget” to buy hamburger buns, and so we’d have hamburgers on bread instead, or I’d “mistakenly” not wash the shirt I wanted to wear, and loudly pick something else in its place.
As the uncle, depending on the kid, you might have a little bit of freedom to laugh at/with him and give him a more realistic sense of his abilities and limitations. “Well, of COURSE you can’t do it! You only tried it once! Do you think Tiger Woods hit a hole in one his first day on the course? Do you think John Bonham was able to click two sticks together when he was three? Do you think the Titanic was able to cross the Atlantic Ocean the first time it tried?”
When you think about it, kids are surrounded by frighteningly capable people (or so they think). Especially if they’re only children or the youngest child in the family, it’s no wonder they get down on themselves for being the clumsiest and the most ignorant and the worst at everything - usually, they sort of are. They need reassurance that Mom didn’t always know how to fix cars and Dad once made donuts that broke the tile when dropped on the floor.
And then, of course, the flip side - catch him doing cool stuff, and make it known. But make it sincere. No six year old wants to hear cheering because he tied his own shoes, it’s insulting. But maybe he has a real eye for color while painting, or he knows where the desert forks go in the table setting or something.
A friend’s son had a habit of doing that as well. He wouldn’t (or couldn’t) swing by himself but needed someone to push him. He wouldn’t or couldn’t tie his shoes. He wouldn’t or couldn’t hold a pen and try to write. I found myself extremely irritated with the child because he seemed so cowardly and lazy to me. I kept my thoughts to myself, because no child needs to hear that kind of condemnation, but I’m sure it came out a little as I interacted with him, especially when I got impatient.
Come to find out that the boy has Sensory Dis-Integration Disorder and some fine motor issues. The child literally could not process more than a simple sentence at a time, so giving him instructions MUST be slowed down and broken up into even smaller steps than you would normally give a child. He gets uncomfortable with strange textures, loud noises, or anything out of the ordinary, and retreats when it gets overwhelming. Hence, the giving up. Also, it took him much longer to master fine motor tasks than other kids, so he would get discouraged and act out.
His parents actively sought help early on, and he’s been seeing a physical therapist for the past year. He’s made amazing progress. I wouldn’t count on the school catching it, because my friends had to fight the school to get it recognized when his teacher punished him for acting out when he couldn’t escape the overwhelming sensory input of the classroom.
There are some good books out there. A search on Amazon will bring up the titles.
The anti-self-esteem crowd are going to swoop down about now, I imagine, but it sounds as though this youngster doesn’t have permission to fail. Is he being treated as a good kid who’s just screwed up a bit? Or is he being punished or affection withheld every time he does something poorly?
I too grew up with “can’t” as my daily companion, probably because I was forgiven much more by my parents than my teachers or schoolmates were prepared to do, and left to work out the reasons on my own. I grew up with a dread of an adult world where there was no room for error, where failure was total and absolute. I’m still recovering from that, and I’d hate to see that happen to another living soul.
There’s some great advise in this thread, but I had to chuckle at this twice. First, because it makes sense; Titanic didn’t make it the first time. But I had to laugh again realizing that she didn’t exactly make any further attempts at the venture. 
My first thought was to wonder if your sister and her husband are perfectionists. Maybe the kid feels that not being perfect the first time is not acceptable? I know my father believed we either should be perfect at an activity (playing the piano, for example) or should just not do it at all. I was afraid to make a mistake in front of my parents as a result.
Also, one of my sisters is just naturally an anxious person. She was always terrified of public embarrassment. It took her until she was an adult to get over it. She had to have it demonstrated many, many times over that looking like a doofus in public is not the end of the world.
I agree with the observations and theories offered by others.
Could you try goofing off with him? Have backwards clothes day, or switch pants with shirts - or try to eat with your toes. Something silly and ridiculous where you can both “fail” together. There’s a fun party game where you blindfold a person and ask them to spoon cotton balls into a bowl. Or maybe do something where there is no “correct” way of proceeding, like a craft project with few instructions and a very loose goal. PlayDoh is good for that, no fair using pictures to guide you though.
IME, words have very little impact. Experiences are what teach us. “Show, don’t tell.”
My partner’s kids used to be like this until I got into the picture. He has/had the habit of letting the kids give up and doing things for them and I put a stop to it. The 8 year old boy was really bad with this. He gave up when things were only slightly daunting. I bought a Game Cube for the family and he got stuck in places and just tried handing the controller off to us to have complete the level. He was shocked when I refused and seemed a bit confused and hurt actually. Tears would come down and pleas for help would ensue. I replaced help with some encouragement as well as some coy ultimatums (maybe it’s best if we take away the GameCube if it’s causing you this much grief). He developed a stick-with-it attitude and it’s carrying through other aspects of life.
Wow, I really like this, fessie; very nice – and I agree 100% with your last sentence.
I don’t know anything about raising kids, but I suspect I too may suffer from ‘‘I can’t!’’ syndrome. Let me know when you figure out a solution. 
Exactly! And what could a 6 year old fail at as spectacularly as that? He’s gonna have to try a lot harder to mess up that badly!
Like I said, it depends on the kid and his relationship to his uncle - sometimes uncles have the luxury of being goofy or (like stpauler), more insistent or even a bit gently hard on the kid without suffering the parental fatigue or therapy bills that go with one more battle.
Wait, it’s possible to grow out of it? …I don’t think I can do that.
Seriously, though, I think it is especially an only child/youngest child thing, although the kind of parents you have go a long way. At some point I made my motto, “If it’s worth doing, it’s worth doing badly”–but I still forget sometimes.
My son seemed to snap out of it, for the most part, in eighth grade. This year as a freshman, he’s doing really well. I don’t know if it’s because he’s got a little sister now, or if I finally got through, or if it’s the new school or just a different wash of hormones at the moment. But yes, knockonwood, it seems like he’s “grown out of it”, at least for now.
I use that technique sometimes to ground myself. When I realize I’ve screwed something up, I think “At least I’m not a former executive at Enron.” And even Tiger Woods has missed some short putts.
It’s okay to fail. What did Thomas Edison say about inventing the light bulb? It took him 100 tries, but he said he didn’t fail 99 times, he learned 99 ways how not to make a light bulb.
With failure comes experience. When he says, “I can’t” say, “All right, you can’t do it this way. What’s another way to do it?”
I just recently read several articles on exactly this subject. I’m not sure exactly how I had linked to them. I’ll see if I can track back and dig them up.
In the meantime, here is the key feature, one that was discovered through several serious scientific studies: Children do better (and stop thinking, “I can’t” all the time) when they are praised not for their accomplishments, but for their efforts. The best kind of compliments are not things like, “Wow, you are really smart,” or “Your room looks spotless,” but instead things like, “I’m so proud of how much effort you put into trying to learn about that subject,” and “You really worked hard to pick up your toys.” Children who receive the latter types of praise tend to want to try hard because they’re being rewarded for trying regardless of the ultimate outcome.
One study I read about (and this is from memory, so I may get some details wrong), gave the same test to two different groups of students. After the test, one group was praised for how well they did. The other group was praised for the effort that they put in. The students were then asked to take another test, but given a choice of taking a test at the same difficulty as the first test, or a harder test. The first group almost all went for the test at the same difficulty, wanting to do as well as they had done previously. The second group almost all chose the more difficult test, reasoning that a more difficult test would require more effort, and therefore earn them more praise. Some were even specifically quoted saying things like, “I really like to try to do the hard problems.”
It might be worthwhile for you to take/suggest this approach. Praise for doing small simple things can actually backfire because it can make children afraid to try anything harder if they don’t know that they can succeed. Praise for effort makes a virtue of trying.
And one more thing – the articles that I read clearly recognized this as a phase that many children go through. So while you may be able to help ease your nephew through it, it’s not at all uncommon and he may grow out of it on his own.
I remember a poster that was the first thing I saw when I walked in the door every day of my second grade classroom. It was arranged something like this:
100% - I Did
90% - I Will
70% - I’ll Try
10% - I Can’t
0% - I Won’t
I don’t remember, but you get the idea. Perhaps a chart like that with stickers would help?
There’s a similar story about an art class. The ceramics teacher gave two separate assignments - one group was graded based purely on the number of pots they threw. The other class had the whole semester to make just ONE pot.
Looking at the products side-by-side, the students who concentrated on quantity did far better work.
I found the article I was remembering. It’s from New York Magazine.
That is a fascinating article, and a lot of what they said in there resonated with me very strongly. I was “the smart kid”, and they’re right - I divided the world into two categories, things I can do (writing, theater, geometry) and things I can’t (sports, art). The idea that I had to work hard to LEARN to do something I just didn’t naturally get is one that, even today, I have a hard time accepting. I glided through elementary, high school and about three years of college before I found something challenging, and had no idea at all how to “study”. In every other topic in every other year, I just listened to the teacher and maybe read the book and that was all I needed to do to get decent grades and understand the material. Then I hit junior year of college and stuff just wasn’t going into my head by itself like before and I had (have) no idea how to make it go there. I never learned how to learn, 'cause I was “smart” enough not to have to. (I dropped out of college.)
I wasn’t really praised for trying hard, because I never really did - I didn’t have to. Velly interestink…
ETA: Oh, right, my point. So perhaps my own struggles with this were inadvertently passed on to my son, and he’s just finally figured things out despite me. And so maybe the OP’s nephew’s problem stems from his parents’ experiences as children, not only his own.