BC Council for Families

by Ruby Banga
Program Coordinator

All parents want to do the best job they can, but when parents feel they're expected to be perfect, the result is decreased confidence in their own abilities and increased stress.  Those are the findings of a new study out of Ohio State University's Couples and Kids Lab, where researchers are studying the transition to parenthood.

The findings, the latest in a series of longitudinal studies examining the relationship between new parents and between first time parents and their children, revealed that parents of newborns show poorer adjustment to their new role if they believe society expects them to be "perfect."   The results are some of the first to show how the quest for perfectionism affects first-time parents, said Meghan Lee, lead author of the study.

"Trying to be the perfect parent is a mixed bag," Lee said. "If you think you have to be perfect because of outside pressure, it really hurts adjustment."

Researchers found that mothers and fathers were affected differently by pressure to be perfect. Mothers who had higher levels of societal-oriented perfectionism tended to have lower confidence in their ability to perform their tasks as mothers. For fathers, societal-oriented perfectionism was associated with higher levels of parenting stress.

This study is part of a larger, long-term "New Parents Project" at the Couples and Kids Lab focused on studying how dual-earner couples adjust to becoming parents for the first time.  The results of the study appear online in the journal Personality and Individual Differences.