Parents who lean hard into achievement, pushing grades, performance, and results, often frame it as motivation, a way of preparing a child to succeed in a demanding world. Two studies looking directly at what this style of parenting does to kids suggest the cost is real and specific, showing up as measurable patterns in how children relate to both success and to themselves.
The clearest evidence comes from a 2012 study by Avi Assor and Keren Tal, published in the Journal of Adolescence. The researchers surveyed 153 adolescents, measuring their perception of maternal conditional positive regard, meaning the degree to which a mother’s warmth and affection seemed to depend on the child’s academic achievement, separate from any negative or punishing behavior the mother might show. Perceived conditional positive regard predicted a specific, vacillating pattern of self-esteem: adolescents swung between self-aggrandizement after success and shame or self-devaluation after failure, rather than holding a steady sense of their own worth. This vacillating pattern, in turn, predicted what the researchers called compulsive over-investment, a rigid, anxiety-driven compulsion to keep working rather than a healthy, chosen effort. Notably, this held up even after the researchers statistically accounted for conditional negative regard and general psychological control, meaning conditional praise alone, entirely apart from punishment or control, carried its own measurable emotional cost.
A second study helps show how a parent’s own achievement-related mindset can transfer directly into a child’s felt anxiety, even without any explicit conditional message being delivered. In a 2003 study by Mohammad Ali Besharat, published in Psychological Reports, the researcher surveyed 90 secondary school students in their final two school years along with their parents, 81 mothers and 76 fathers, using self-report measures of parental perfectionism and children’s test anxiety. Maternal perfectionistic attitudes made a significant, independent contribution to children’s anxiety specifically around exams and testing, a contribution that held up as its own factor rather than being explained away by other variables in the study. Girls in the sample reported higher test anxiety overall than boys, but the core link between a mother’s perfectionism and her child’s anxiety held regardless.
Together, these two studies suggest that valuing achievement over affection doesn’t just risk feeling harsh to a child in the moment, it appears to install specific, lasting patterns in how that child relates to their own performance. Assor and Tal’s research shows that when warmth feels conditional on success, children don’t develop stable self-worth, they develop a fragile one that inflates and collapses with each result, feeding a compulsive rather than genuinely motivated relationship with effort. Besharat’s research shows that a parent doesn’t need to deliver an explicit conditional message for this transfer to happen, a parent’s own perfectionistic standards were enough, on their own, to measurably raise a child’s anxiety around performance. Between the two, an achievement-first parenting style appears to shape not just how hard a child works, but how safe or unsafe they feel while doing it.
It’s worth being honest about what these two studies don’t establish. Assor and Tal’s research relied on adolescents’ own perception of their mother’s conditional regard, which captures something real and psychologically meaningful but isn’t the same as directly observing parental behavior, and the study focused specifically on maternal relationships rather than fathers or other caregivers. Besharat’s research was conducted with a specific cultural sample and a relatively modest number of families, and it measured test anxiety specifically rather than broader measures of child wellbeing, so the pattern may look somewhat different across other cultural contexts or other forms of achievement pressure beyond academic testing.
Within those honest limits, the research offers a genuinely useful distinction for parents who want their children to succeed without those specific costs. The problem these studies point to isn’t caring about achievement itself, it’s what happens when a child’s sense of being loved seems to rise and fall with it, a pattern that both studies suggest measurably outlasts whatever short-term motivation it might produce.