To be or not to be a perfect parent? How the striving for perfect parenting harms employed parents

Abstract

More and more employees aim to be perfect parents. However, it is largely unclear what implications this striving might have. Drawing on central theoretical principles of family-work research, we studied parenting perfectionism and its possible implications for employees' own and their intimate partners' family and work lives. In detail, we investigated how employees' parenting perfectionism relates to overprotection in their role as a parent and whether this overprotection, in turn, relates to employees' own family-work conflict (i.e., spillover) as well as to their partners' family-work conflict (i.e., crossover) via co-parenting conflicts. We also examined whether parenting perfectionism indirectly relates to employees' and partners' reduced well-being, family satisfaction, and weekly working hours over time. To test our hypotheses, we analyzed multi-wave (T1, T2 = one year later, T3 = two years later) survey data of 541 employed couples with parental obligation participating in The German Family Panel pairfam. Results from structural equation modeling showed that parenting perfectionism was indirectly related to employees' family-work conflict at T2 via overprotection at T1 and, ultimately, to their reduced well-being and family satisfaction at T3. Parenting perfectionism was also indirectly related to partners' family-work conflict at T2 via overprotection at T1 and co-parenting conflicts at T2. Our results highlight perfectionism's potential impact on oneself and others. Particularly, parenting perfectionism can permeate boundaries between family and work life and can affect both employees and their intimate partners. We discuss key theoretical insights of our findings for family-work and perfectionism research as well as implications for organizational practice.