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Young adults today are more perfectionist and report more pressure from their parents than previous generations

Five takeaways:

1. New research shows that young adults are showing a higher propensity for perfectionism as they deal with increases in critical parenting and higher parental expectation.
2. The study’s authors noted that society increasingly encourages competition and individualism, which might push parents to place greater pressure on their children’s success. A perfectionist mindset would be a logical next step for a child seeking parental validation.
3. The study differentiates between “self-oriented perfectionism” and “socially prescribed perfectionism,” which is more common and more powerful– it arises from social cues like parental or peer pressure and is correlated to societal/cultural trends.
4. One of the study’s authors noted that “Parents are not to blame,” as the pressure they are putting on their children is more so an anxious reaction to “a hyper-competitive world with ferocious academic pressures, runaway inequality, and technological innovations like social media that propagate unrealistic ideals of how we should appear and perform.”
5. Various market/financial factors are contributing to another fact that will weigh upon young and early-career workers: that young people will need to work far harder than their parents, and earn much more, just to attain the same standard of living. This adds to the mental health burden.

From Beth Ellwood for PsyPost
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