Beyond Fear of Failure: Exploring the Relationships between Parental Overprotection, Parental Criticism, Children’s/Adolescents’ Self-Compassion and their Performance Anxiety

Abstract

In recent years, there has been a noticeable increase in performance-related concerns and a heightened fear of failure among children and adolescents across various settings, such as academics and sports. Despite this trend, research specifically addressing performance anxiety remains limited, with most studies focusing on the broader category of social anxiety. This study addresses this gap by investigating how perceived parental criticism and self-compassion among children/adolescents mediate the relationship between parental overprotection and performance anxiety during childhood and adolescence. The sample comprises 428 dyads of children/adolescents (M = 10y 9 m, SD = 1y 8 m; range = 6–15 years) and their respective educational guardian (85.6% female), recruited from school settings. A sequential mediation model was estimated to analyze the direct and indirect effects of parental overprotection on children’s/adolescents’ performance anxiety, through their perception of parental criticism and levels of self-compassion. Higher levels of parental overprotection were linked to higher levels of performance anxiety through the children’s/adolescents’ perception of parental criticism and the sequence of the two mediators under study. This study underscores the need for parental interventions to reduce parental overprotection and criticism and suggests that compassion-based interventions could be particularly effective in helping children/adolescents lower their levels of performance anxiety.