According to recent research entitled “Pursuing virtual perfection: Preoccupation with failure mediates the association between internalized parental criticism and gaming disorder,” published in the scholarly journal “Computers in Human Behavior,” perfectionist parents may lead their kids to react in maladaptive responses when they fail, which may increase the likelihood of their engagement in obsessive gaming activities.
The study emphasizes the importance of considering parental factors when figuring out how gaming disorders emerge.
According to the study’s authors, previous research has provided evidence that perfectionistic parental attitudes can lead to increased sensitivity to failure, less effective coping, higher stress, and anxiety in challenging situations.
Individuals subjected to critical parental attitudes towards performance are also more prone to internalize high parental standards and seek unachievable ambitions in employment or education.
Following an extensive study of behavioral patterns on the part of parents and kids, the study found a correlation between higher degrees of self-oriented perfectionism and higher parental expectations and criticism. It has been suggested that children adopt critical attitudes from their parents because of the link between parental criticism and perfectionism.
The study’s findings also revealed that self-critical perfectionism and parental criticism were linked to maladaptive responses to failure when gaming, adding that over-engagement was a mediating factor in an indirect relationship between self-critical perfectionism and gaming disorder.
These results imply that critical parenting styles and an excessive focus on failure can foster the development of compulsive gaming behaviors in children, although these findings do not necessarily prove that one causes the other.
“These findings highlight the importance of targeting parental influences in gaming practices and facilitating the development of adaptive coping strategies in perfectionist gamers to deal with failure, both of which could possibly decrease the risk of gaming disorder,” concluded the study.