A common thought is that children should be happy because they are children. 10% of children suffer from severe emotional disturbances that cause difficulties in their daily lives. Anxiety disorders and childhood depression are considered public and mental health issues (Center for Disease Control and Prevention, 2013). Twenty percent of anxiety cases include depression, and 82% of depression cases include anxiety (Romero et al., 2010). This comorbidity leads to an increased severity in symptomatology, a worse prognosis, a poorer response to treatment and an increased use of health services (Layne, Bernat, Victor, & Bernstein, 2009).
But, why some children develop anxiety or depression disorders and others do not? A priority in psychological research should be determining the vulnerability factors that lead to these emotional disorders in early childhood. An understanding of these factors may help detect and prevent disorders, improve children’s quality of life and enhance appropriate child development, thus lowering the risk of anxiety or depression during adolescence and adulthood (Goodwin, Fergusson, & Horwood, 2004).
A number of studies have shown that one variable closely related to these emotional disorders is perfectionism (Flett et al., 1995, Luyten et al., 2011 and Sassaroli et al., 2008). The majority of research has focused on adolescent and adult samples (Essau et al., 2008, Flett et al., 2011, Smith et al., 2014 and Stöeber, 2014), whereas there has been a lack of research examining the influence of child perfectionism on these emotional disorders (e.g., Hewit et al., 2002 and Rice et al., 2007), or cognitive variables (DiBartolo & Verner, 2012).
Child perfectionism is a multidimensional construct (DiBartolo and Varner, 2012 and Flett and Hewitt, 2002) consisting of external pressure (EP), perfectionist self-exigency (SE) and negative self-evaluation (NSE) (Lozano, García-Cueto, Martín, & Lozano, 2012). EP refers to when children perceive their immediate environment (either parents or teachers) as demanding, such that it requires perfect behavior. Children believe that individuals will be judgmental when this perfect behavior is not achieved. SE is the perfectionist attitude that children have when engaging in tasks, as they want and attempt to be the best at whatever they are doing. NSE is defined as forming negative judgments about oneself with regard to past mistakes, such as when a child’s performance is not as excellent as what they hoped for (Lozano et al., 2012).
According to Social Learning Theory (Bandura, 1986), perfectionist traits develop through interactions between a child’s characteristics and his/her social environment. Herman, Trotter, Reinke and Ialongo (2011) highlighted that a child’s environment (primarily family and school environments) exerts perfectionist pressures via social expectations of excellence and criticism when these expectations are not met (EP, according to our model). In these environments, children place high standards of excellence on themselves (SE, according to our model) due to adults’ behavioral models and the selective reinforcement that these models exert when children achieve levels of excellence (Cole, Jacquez, & Maschman, 2001). When there are discrepancies between a child’s task implementation level and his/her personal standards (Choy & McInerney, 2006) or when the family or school environment is judgmental, unpredictable or hostile (Herman & Ostrander, 2007), the child may develop NSE. Thus, perfectionism pressures of the external environment favors the appearance of other aspects of perfectionism (see Morris & Lomax, 2014).
A number of authors characterize perfectionist children as maintaining excessively high levels of SE, perceiving mistakes very negatively or as highly aversive and basing their NSE on whether they are able to reach the level of perfection required (see a review by Cook, 2012).
From the theoretical perspective that perfectionism is a multidimensional construct, Hewit et al. (2002) showed, in children between the ages of 10 to 15 years, that socially prescribed perfectionism (or EP) and self-oriented perfectionism (or SE) were associated with higher levels of anxiety and depression.
Based on the aforementioned considerations, the current study was designed to confirm the differential effect that each dimension of perfectionism exerts on the depression and anxiety symptoms of children from a Spanish population. It was hypothesized that EP, NSE and SE would predict greater depression symptoms (Hypothesis 1) and that EP would be mediated by SE and NSE when predicting depression symptoms (Hypothesis 2). Similarly, it was expected that EP, NSE and SE would predict greater anxiety symptoms (Hypothesis 3) and that EP would be mediated by NSE and SE when predicting anxiety symptoms (Hypothesis 4).
This research attempts to fill the relative gap in the literature examining the effect of perfectionism on depression and anxiety disorders in children between the ages of 8 to 12 years.
