Within-person Relations among Paternal and Maternal Child-oriented Perfectionism, Harsh Parenting, and Child Social Anxiety: A Five-wave Prospective Study.

While extant research has well established multiple familial risk factors for child social anxiety, scarce research has examined how parental child-oriented perfectionism may contribute to children’s social anxiety. This study tracked 2228 Chinese adolescents (baseline Mage = 12.95 ± 0.79 years, 46.3% girls) with five measurements over three years. Using the Random Intercept Cross-Lagged Panel Model (RI-CLPM), results indicated that harsh fathering can predict subsequent fathers’ and mothers’ child-oriented perfectionism, but fathers’ and mothers’ child-oriented perfectionism fail to predict subsequent harsh fathering. Bidirectional predictive relationships exist between harsh mothering and both maternal and paternal child-oriented perfectionism. Additionally, both harsh fathering and harsh mothering have reciprocal associations with children’s social anxiety. Child sex played a moderating role across all four models: Girls’ social anxiety more strongly elicited harsh fathering in early adolescence, whereas boys’ social anxiety predicted harsh fathering (mothering) later. For boys (but not for girls), harsh mothering stably predicted maternal child-oriented perfectionism. These findings offered insights into how parental child-oriented perfectionism may trigger child social anxiety via harsh parenting, thus informing strategies to cope with social anxiety during adolescence.