Relationship Between Child Perfectionism and Psychological Disorders

Abstract

Objective: Perfectionism is one of the variables related to the correct emotional development or with the appearance of clinical symptomatology in childhood. A study has been designed to evaluate the differential effect that each dimension of perfectionism (external pressure, self-exigency, and negative self-evaluation) has in a Spanish children sample of general population for each of the following clinical aspects: irritability, worthlessness feelings, thinking problems, and psychophysiological symptoms.Method: By a random cluster sampling, a total of 2,636 children from 8 to 12 years (M = 9.9, SD = 1.2; 51.3% boys) took part in this research. A serial multiple mediators model was used to check the relation between external pressure over the clinical symptoms through self-exigency and negative-self-evaluation.Results: The results have shown a predictive effect of external pressure over a great variety of clinical symptomatology (irritability, worthlessness, thinking problems, and psychophysiological symptoms), a relation mediated by self-exigency and negative self-evaluation. These relations suggest that external pressure and negative self-evaluation are maladaptive dimensions as they predict the appearance of symptomatology, being the level of self-exigency a protective dimension and favoring the child’s positive development.Conclusions: In consequence, these results point to the importance of the study of these variables that can generate difficulties in childhood in order to improve children’s quality of life and their correct development.

How Does Perfectionism Influence the Development of Psychological Strengths and Difficulties in Children?

“…As expected, the presence of elevated levels of perfectionism was associated with psychological difficulties in children [7,11,14]. Specifically, these children were more likely to suffer from emotional and behavioral problems and adjustment difficulties than children with low perfectionism.…”

“…Based on the previous literature [21,[23][24][25], we hypothesize that gender differences will be found, but not by age. Furthermore, we expect children with high perfectionism to show greater psychological difficulties and lower prosocial behavior than low perfectionism children [7,14,30,35]. Lastly, we consider the SOP-Critical and SPP dimensions to be the most predictive of psychological difficulties, especially emotional symptoms and behavioral problems, respectively [7,13,27,35].…”

Not all Perfectionists Are as They Are Assessed: An Investigation of the Psychometric Properties of the Perfectionism Inventory in the Teaching Profession

“…In the present research study, we investigated the internal validity of the PI (Hill et al, 2004 ) in an occupation that encourages perfectionistic tendencies in own behavior or in students' behavior (Shim et al, 2020 ). Our focus on teacher perfectionism was motivated by the fact that previous studies reported that it is a powerful predictor for teacher efficiency and teacher burnout (Craioveanu, 2014 ; Ghorbanzadeh and Rezaie, 2016 ), and can have an impact on students' variables (Lozano et al, 2019 ). We collected data from a large sample of schoolteachers, and we analyzed the factor structure of the PI (Hill et al, 2004 ) using confirmatory factor analyses.…”

“…There are two main arguments for conducting this research. First, perfectionism is an important teacher variable that is associated with teaching efficacy and teacher burnout (Ghorbanzadeh and Rezaie, 2016 ), while teacher pressure to perform was found to be related to clinical symptoms in students (Lozano et al, 2019 ). This means that accurate assessment of teacher perfectionism can be important for understanding both teacher-related and student-related variables.…”

Functional Movement Disorders in Children

“…Different dimensions of perfectionism include excess concern over mistakes, personal standards, parental expectations, parental criticism, and doubts about actions and organization ( 26 ). It has been proposed that when a child with such personality traits make mistakes that are not accepted in their environment or when they feel incompetent to handle any demanding situation, a cognitive scheme might be activated, favoring distorted judgments of reality, leading to self-perceptions of worthlessness and incompetence, irritability and therefore increasing the thinking problems as well as the corresponding physiological symptoms ( 27 ).…”