New moms and dads shouldn’t try to be ‘perfect parent’

With the arrival of a newborn baby, many parents try to do everything perfectly, and it’s this attitude more than anything else that may actually add to their new-parent stress, according to a new U.S. study published in the journal Personality and Individual Differences.

Ohio University researchers studied 182 couples who became parents between 2008 and 2010, and found that mothers have less confidence in their parenting skills and fathers experience more stress if they worried about what other people thought of their parenting skills.

Conversely, self-oriented perfectionism, measured with statements like “I must always be a successful parent,” was actually linked to higher levels of parenting satisfaction for both mothers and fathers.

Fathers were more likely than mothers to benefit from the self-imposed perfectionism, according to the researchers, and they hypothesize these fathers were highly involved in parenting, or that fathers still don’t carry the same burden for childcare that mothers do in our society.

The study is among the first to explore the quest for perfection among new parents, and is part of a larger study called the New Parents Project. Researchers noted that the study examined parents just three months after their child was born, so it’s likely that the role of perfectionism would change over time.

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