“My Child Can Beat Your Child”: Toward a Measure of Parental Self-Evaluation Maintenance (PSEM)

From a self-evaluation maintenance (SEM) perspective, a parent's levels of allocentrism and collectivism were predicted to increase the parent's (a) self-protection from negative social comparison, (b) need for positive self-evaluation through "basking in reflected glory," and (c) dependency on the child's performance to achieve (a) and (b).This study also aimed to identify messages parents communicate in order to maintain a positive self-evaluation through (a) favorable social comparison of their child's performances to the performances of a close other parent's child, and through (b) basking in reflected glory. In pursuing a test of SEM in a non-experimental context, a new set of measures of many of the components of the SEM model was developed for this study. The results reveal a reliable six-factor structure of regulative and reflective SEM strategies parents endorse in response to their child's performance. The data indicate that allocentric parents tend to engage in relationship-maintaining regulative behaviors, whereas collectivistic parents tend to engage in distancing and aggressing behaviors and no longer invest in their child in response to their child's outperformance by a close other parent's child.