Pushy parents risk children's mental health, new study finds
Pushy parents are putting their children's mental health at risk, warns a new study – and the problem is getting worse.
Parental pressures have increased over the last 30 years, according to the findings, and are linked to an increase in "perfectionism" among students – which can have "damaging" mental health consequences such as a greater chance of self-harm and eating disorders.
Researchers analysed data from more than 20,000 British, American and Canadian college students.
They found that young people’s perceptions of their parents’ expectations and criticism have increased over the past 32 years and are linked to an increase in their perfectionism.
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Lead researcher Doctor Thomas Curran, an Assistant Professor of psychological and behavioural science at the London School of Economics and Political Science, said: “Perfectionism contributes to many psychological conditions, including depression, anxiety, self-harm and eating disorders."
Study co-author Professor Andrew Hill, of York St John University, added: “The pressure to conform to perfect ideals has never been greater and could be the basis for an impending public health issue.”
The researchers explained that perfectionism often becomes a "lifelong" trait and earlier research has shown that perfectionists become more neurotic and less conscientious as they get older.
Prof Hill said perfectionism can also perpetuate through generations, with perfectionist parents raising perfectionist children.
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Dr Curran and Prof Hill previously found that three types of perfectionism were increasing among young people in the UK, USA and Canada.
They suspected that one cause might be that parents are becoming more anxious and controlling, so they analysed the findings of other published studies for the latest piece of research, published online in the journal Psychological Bulletin.
The first analysis included 21 studies with figures from more than 7,000 college students.
Parental expectations and criticism had "moderate" associations with self-oriented and other-oriented perfectionism and a "large" association with socially prescribed perfectionism.
Self-oriented perfectionism involves perfectionist standards about the self. Other-oriented perfectionism is perfectionism turned outward, where someone expects others to be perfectionist.
Socially prescribed perfectionism is the perception that other people and society require perfection.
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The researchers said that the three types of perfectionism overlap and can exacerbate the effects of each other in negative ways.
Parental expectations had a larger impact than parental criticism on self-oriented and other-oriented perfectionism, according to the findings, so parental expectations may be more damaging than parental criticism.
"Parental expectations have a high cost when they’re perceived as excessive," said Dr Curran.
“Young people internalise those expectations and depend on them for their self-esteem.
"And when they fail to meet them, as they invariably will, they’ll be critical of themselves for not matching up. To compensate, they strive to be perfect.”
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He said that self-oriented perfectionism was higher for American college students than for Canadian or British students, possibly because of more intense academic competition in the US.
“These trends may help explain increasing mental health issues in young people and suggest this problem will only worsen in the future," commented Prof Hill.
“It’s normal for parents to be anxious about their children, but increasingly this anxiety is being interpreted as pressure to be perfect.”
The second analysis incorporated 84 studies conducted between 1989 and 2021 involving more than 23,000 students.
Parental expectations, criticism and their combined parental pressure increased during those 32 years, with parental expectations increasing at the fastest rate by far.
“The rate of increase in young people’s perceptions of their parents’ expectations is remarkable, up an average 40% compared with 1989," Dr Curran continued.
The research said the study was correlational, so it can’t prove that rising parental expectations or criticism caused an increase in perfectionism among college students, only that there is a link between them.
However, they said the findings suggest some "troublesome" changes over time.
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“Parents are not to blame because they’re reacting anxiously to a hyper-competitive world with ferocious academic pressures, runaway inequality and technological innovations like social media that propagate unrealistic ideals of how we should appear and perform," explained Dr Curran.
“Parents are placing excessive expectations on their children because they think, correctly, that society demands it or their children will fall down the social ladder.
“It’s ultimately not about parents recalibrating their expectations. It’s about society – our economy, education system and supposed meritocracy – recognising that the pressures we’re putting on young people and their families are unnecessarily overwhelming.”
Dr Curran says parents can help their children navigate societal pressures in a healthy way by teaching them that failure, or imperfection, is a normal and natural part of life.
He added: “Focusing on learning and development, not test scores or social media, helps children develop healthy self-esteem, which doesn’t depend on others’ validation or external metrics."
Additional reporting by SWNS
