Parental Threat Perception and Hyper-Parenting as Potential Risk Factors for Adolescents’ Test Anxiety

Parents who perceive their social environment as threatening may transmit these anxieties to their adolescents through their parenting, by shaping the skills and beliefs that adolescents adopt to interact with their own environment. The present study explores the role of hyper-parenting and two potential psychological mechanisms (i.e., youth emotional regulation and perfectionism) in the association between parental threat perception and adolescents’ test anxiety. Two styles of hyper-parenting are investigated: child-centrism, which refers to over-protective behaviors, and tiger, which describes over-involved behaviors regarding children’s achievements. The proposed theoretical model was tested among 439 dyads of parents (Mage = 44.5, SD = 5.8, 24% fathers) and adolescents (40.4% boys, 46.9% public school, 54% sixth graders). Results from path analyses showed that parental threat perception was positively associated with both styles of hyper-parenting. However, solely tiger hyper-parenting (and not child-centrism) was associated with greater adolescent test anxiety through youth perfectionism. Emotion regulation strategies did not mediate the relation between hyper-parenting and test anxiety. The proposed model was invariant across adolescent or parent gender and school type or level. Findings from this study have practical implications as they reveal that test anxiety in adolescents is not only rooted in individual factors or parental behaviors but may also reflect parental threat perception of the social environment.