Parental educational anxiety and adolescents’ academic self-handicapping: the chain mediating roles of basic psychological need frustration and fear of failure

Background In China’s highly competitive educational climate, parental educational anxiety has become a widespread family phenomenon, yet its implications for adolescents’ maladaptive academic behavior remain insufficiently understood. Purpose: Grounded in self-determination theory, this study examined whether basic psychological need frustration and fear of failure sequentially mediate the association between parental educational anxiety and adolescents’ academic self-handicapping. Methods A total of 412 parent–adolescent dyads (adolescents aged 11.5–16.0 years, M = 13.93, SD = 1.12; 53.4% boys) were recruited from four public junior high schools in Henan Province, China. Parents reported their educational anxiety; adolescents completed measures of basic psychological need frustration, fear of failure, and academic self-handicapping. A confirmatory factor analysis supported the four-factor measurement model, χ 2 (659) = 984.46, comparative fit index (CFI) = 0.962, Tucker–Lewis index (TLI) = 0.960, root mean square error of approximation (RMSEA) = 0.035. Results A serial mediation analysis with 5,000 bootstrap resamples showed that parental educational anxiety was positively associated with academic self-handicapping (total effect β = 0.253, p < 0.001). Need frustration (indirect effect = 0.110, 95% CI [0.068, 0.155]) and fear of failure (0.026, 95% CI [0.003, 0.053]) each independently mediated this association, and the sequential pathway through need frustration and then fear of failure was also significant (0.042, 95% CI [0.025, 0.062]). The three indirect paths jointly accounted for 70.0% of the total effect, and the direct effect of parental educational anxiety was non-significant once the mediators were included. Conclusion These findings suggest that parental educational anxiety reaches adolescents’ self-protective academic behavior mainly through an experiential chain in which frustrated psychological needs give rise to fear of failure. Interventions that temper parental anxiety and support adolescents’ basic psychological needs may weaken this pathway and improve the quality of the home learning environment.