Your daughter cried over an A-minus. You said all the right things about effort. Then you heard yourself, an hour later, asking why the room was not finished.
**The short answer: the research points to two parenting behaviours, not to parents as such. In meta-analyses of studies on college students, perceived parental expectations and parental criticism had small-to-moderate correlations with children's self-oriented and other-oriented perfectionism and large correlations with socially prescribed perfectionism, the belief that others demand perfection of you, which is the dimension most tied to depression, anxiety and suicidal thinking. Both behaviours, as young people perceive them, rose steadily from 1989 to 2019. The useful reading is not guilt. It is that the two levers are specific, visible and yours to move.**¹ ² ³
What the studies measured
The 2022 Psychological Bulletin paper ran two meta-analyses. The first found that excessive parental expectations and harsh parental criticism correlated with all three perfectionism dimensions in college students, with the largest effects on socially prescribed perfectionism. The second found that college students' reports of parental expectations and criticism increased linearly between 1989 and 2019, and the authors called that rise "the most plausible explanation for rising perfectionism to date."¹ The dimension those behaviours feed most, socially prescribed perfectionism, is the one that predicted increases in suicidal thinking over time in a separate meta-analysis of 45 studies, alongside parental criticism and parental expectations themselves.²
Two cautions. These are correlations reported by young adults about their parents, not observations of parenting; and children bring temperament to the exchange. Neither caution changes which levers exist.
Four checks, for one ordinary week
- What do you comment on first: the result or the process? "You got a 94" versus "You kept going when the second section was hard." Count, for a week.
- What happens when your child fails at something you care about? A question, a plan, or a face they have learned to read. Children detect criticism that is never spoken.
- Whose standard is it? If your child could not say what "good enough" means for a given task, the standard is unbounded, and unbounded standards are the ones that move after every success.
- Do they see you fail? A parent who never makes a visible mistake teaches that mistakes are hidden, not that they do not happen.
Three changes that move the two levers
- Name the standard out loud, with an end. "For this project, done means the three parts are there and it is handed in on time." A bounded standard can be met; an unbounded one cannot, and the child learns which kind of world they live in.
- Separate the feedback from the worth. Criticism of the work, when needed, arrives without adjectives about the child. The research lever is harsh criticism; the practical version is criticism that spreads from the task to the person.
- Let them watch you be wrong. Say what you got wrong today, what it cost, and what you did next. It costs nothing, and it costs a parent more than it costs a child.
If your own perfectionism is running the household, the treatment for it exists and works on exactly these behaviours. The four-question test and what treats it → · The cost ledger, printable →
When it is more than parenting
A child or teenager who cannot start work because it might not be perfect, who tears up assignments, who is losing sleep or food over grades, or who has said anything about not wanting to be here, needs a clinician, not a parenting adjustment. Perfectionism travels with depression, anxiety and eating disorders across the research literature, and the treatment is different from a parenting change.³ Can my teen see a therapist? → · Teen support → Call or text 988 with them if the sentence about not being here has been said.
Q&A
Q: Is high expectation itself the problem? A: The lever is expectation your child perceives as excessive and criticism they perceive as harsh.¹ Expecting effort, with a bounded standard and warmth when it is missed, is not what the studies measured.
Q: My child is a perfectionist and I am not. Where did it come from? A: Temperament, school and peer culture, and a society the 2022 paper describes as increasingly competitive all contribute; parenting is one lever among several.¹ The four checks still tell you which of your behaviours help or hurt.
Q: Should my child see a therapist for perfectionism? A: If the pattern is costing sleep, food, friendships or the willingness to try, yes. CBT built for perfectionism has its trial evidence mostly in adults; ask a prospective therapist how they treat perfectionism specifically and how they adapt it for a young person. Choosing a therapist for a teen →
Ready to find a therapist, for your child or for the perfectionism you recognize in yourself? Filter by approach, ages seen and payment route →
Sources
- Curran T, Hill AP, "Young people's perceptions of their parents' expectations and criticism are increasing over time: Implications for perfectionism," Psychological Bulletin 148(1–2), 2022 — doi.org.
- Smith MM, Sherry SB, Chen S, et al., "The perniciousness of perfectionism: A meta-analytic review of the perfectionism–suicide relationship," Journal of Personality 86(3), 2018 — doi.org.
- Limburg K, Watson HJ, Hagger MS, Egan SJ, "The Relationship Between Perfectionism and Psychopathology: A Meta-Analysis," Journal of Clinical Psychology 73(10), 2017 — doi.org.
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