Looking Good or Being Good? Parenting Goals Predict Need Satisfaction and Frustration in Mothers and Fathers

Compassionate and self-image goals, respectively, are related to various positive and negative outcomes in friendships and in romantic relationships. There is, however, little research examining these goals in parents. This brief report presents two studies that examine parenting goals in relation to the satisfaction and frustration of parents’ needs for autonomy, competence, and relatedness. Parents of incoming first-year college students completed measures of compassionate and self-image goals, psychological need satisfaction (Studies 1 and 2), and psychological need frustration (Study 2). Compassionate goals predicted greater need satisfaction and less need frustration while self-image goals predicted lower need satisfaction and greater need frustration. These findings demonstrate links between parents’ goals for their relationships with their children and their perceptions about these relationships. Implications for these findings are discussed.