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

ABSTRACT Parents who perceive their social environment as threatening may transmit these anxieties through their parenting, by shaping the skills and beliefs that adolescents adopt to interact with their own environment. This study explores the role of hyper‐parenting and two potential psychological mechanisms (i.e., youth emotion 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‐protection and over‐investment behaviors, and tiger, which describes over‐involved behaviors specifically regarding children's achievements. The proposed theoretical model was tested among 439 dyads of parents ( M age = 44.5, SD = 5.8, 24% fathers) and adolescents (40.4% boys, 46.9% public school, 54% sixth, and 46% 11th graders). These grades were chosen because academic performance during those years is particularly determining of students’ future in Quebec province, Canada. Results from path analyses showed that parental threat perception was positively associated with both styles of hyper‐parenting. Threat perception was also indirectly associated to perfectionism through tiger hyper‐parenting only (not child‐centrism), which in turn, was linked to heightened test anxiety. 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. Practical implication of such findings includes that parental threat perception of the social environment may be indirectly linked to perfectionism in adolescence, which is associated to test anxiety. More studies are thus warranted to understand the complex relationship between individual, parental, and social factors of test anxiety.