According to a recent study, increased parental expectations and criticism are linked to detrimental mental health consequences among college students. The results of the research were published in the journal ‘Physiological Bulletin’. The researchers analyzed data from more than 20,000 American, Canadian and British college students.
They found that young people’s perceptions of their parents’ expectations and criticisms have increased over the last 32 years and are linked to an increase in their perfectionism. “Perfectionism contributes to many psychological conditions, including depression, anxiety, self-harm and eating disorders,” said lead researcher Thomas Curran, PhD, an assistant professor of psychological and behavioral sciences in the School of Economics and Political Science at London.
Study co-author Andrew P. Hill, PhD, professor of sport and exercise psychology at York St John University, added that “the pressure to conform to perfect ideals has never been greater and could be the foundation of a imminent public health problem. Perfectionism often becomes a lifelong trait, and previous research has shown that perfectionists become more neurotic and less conscientious as they age. Perfectionism can also be perpetuated across generations, with perfectionist parents raising perfectionist children.
Curran and Hill previously found that three types of perfectionism were on the rise among young people in the US, Canada and the UK. They suspected that one cause might be that the parents were becoming more anxious and controlling. The first meta-analysis has included 21 studies with data from more than 7,000 university students. Parental expectations and criticisms had moderate associations with self-oriented and other-oriented perfectionism and a strong association with socially prescribed perfectionism. Self-oriented perfectionism implies perfectionistic standards about oneself.
Other-oriented perfectionism is outward-turned perfectionism, in which someone expects others to be perfectionists. Socially prescribed perfectionism is the perception that other people and society require perfection. The three types of perfectionism overlap and can exacerbate the effects of each other in negative ways. Parental expectations had a greater impact than parental criticism on self- and other-oriented perfectionism, so parental expectations may be more damaging than parental criticism.
“Parental expectations come at a high cost when they are perceived as excessive,” Curran said.
“Young people internalize those expectations and depend on them for their self-esteem. And when they don’t, as they invariably will, they will criticize themselves for falling short. To compensate, they strive to be perfect,” he added. Self-oriented perfectionism was higher for US college students than for Canadian or British students, possibly due to more intense academic competition in the US.
“These trends may help explain the rise in mental health problems in young people and suggest that this problem will only get worse in the future,” Hill said. “It’s normal for parents to be anxious about their children, but more and more this anxiety is being interpreted as pressure to be perfect,” she added.
The second meta-analysis has included 84 studies conducted between 1989 and 2021 with a total of 23,975 university students. Parental expectations, criticism, and parental pressure combined increased during those 32 years, and parental expectations increased at the fastest rate by far.
“The rate of increase in young people’s perceptions of their parents’ expectations is remarkable,” an average of 40 percent compared to 1989, Curran said. The studies were conducted in the US, Canada, and the UK, so the findings may not generalize to other cultures. The research is correlational, so it cannot prove that increased expectations or parental criticism caused increased perfectionism among college students, only that there is a link between them.
However, the research suggests problematic changes over time, according to the researchers. “So what are parents supposed to do? Parents are not to blame because they react anxiously to a hypercompetitive world with fierce academic pressures, rampant inequality, and technological innovations like social media that propagate unrealistic ideals of how we should appear and perform,” Curran said.
“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,” Curran added.
“Ultimately, it’s not about parents recalibrating their expectations. It is about society, our economy, the educational system and the so-called meritocracy, recognizing that the pressures we are putting on young people and their families are unnecessarily overwhelming,” he added.
Parents can help their children overcome social pressures in a healthy way by teaching them that failure or imperfection is a normal and natural part of life, Curran said. “Focusing on learning and development, not test scores or social media, helps children develop healthy self-esteem that is not dependent on validation from others or external metrics,” she concluded.
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